What did I tell you?! An update that hasn't taken more than half a year to appear!!
This time I'll be tackling two kits at the same time, hence this posts title.
So, what am I building? Two FJS wagon kits by PGC Scale Models. These are/were steel bodied four wheeled wagons used to transport just about anything that could be loaded into them!
Inside we find five sprus of three different mouldings, and a bag containing wheels, decals and white metal buffers and brake cylinder.
Firstly, because I'll be using Kadee's I had to modify the ends to accept the coupler box. Three done, one to go at this point.
Next, I made four sub-assemblies of an end and a side. Once the glue set, for the first wagon, I glued the two sub-assemblies together and then added the floor. On doing this, I found I'd possibly taken too much off the sides of the floor when cleaning it up so there are some gaps between it and the sides! Lesson learned, for the second wagon, I glued the floor to one of the sub-assemblies first, before bringing both together. There's still a small gap in places on the side of the floor that was glued second but none of them will be noticeable on either wagon when in use.
Next came the two central frames. These had to be shortened to accommodate the Kadee couplers before being attached. Once these were on, I added the W iron mouldings, and at the same time, the wheels (although they can still be removed).
Time to add the outer frames. Before doing this though, the door stops were supposed to be bent into a slight 'S' shape. However, I felt the moulded on ones were too thick and could bend back to their original shape over time, so I cut them off and made my own from brass strip which were then superglued on. Top is the original moulding, one below has been modified.
With all four outer frames modded, they could now be attached to the wagons. I did have to trim the backs of some of the door hinges to allow for the extra width added by the brass strip door stops before the frames would fit properly. I also had to re-glue all of the door stops as they worked loose while the frames were being fitted. They're all stuck solid now though! The handbrake levers were next, followed by the buffers.
That's where I'm currently up to with these. I've yet to add the brakes, brake cylinder and couplers, but before completion I want to add some form of brake gear similar to the Caintode A wagon from my last blog entry. As these kits don't come with materials for this, I'm going to wait until I've built a few of the other kits I bought recently to use the left-overs from their brake gear components.
Stay tuned, next time I should be building something a little bit bigger and with more wheels!
Matt.
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