Let this post be a warning to you!

It all started a few days ago while I was flitting through the various projects on the go (warning #1), and put one of the Hunslets aside on the desk thinking 'I will come back to that later'. All it needed was a power extender fitting. So, on with something else that involved soldering, a pot of Carrs Red and a lid that didn't go back on (warning #2). Of course the inevitable happened and I was aware a little later of a puddle in the bottom of the tray I was using. Soaked up what I could see with kitchen towel, but not very easy as tray pretty full of stuff. Anyway, when I came back to the Hunslet a few days later, although it was a few inches away from the spill on top of the desk, all the steel parts were vert badly rusted. Must have been the fumes from the remaining flux. I managed to fibre glass pen a lot of it off the wheels but they were very badly pitted but then found that all the crank pin bushes had expanded with the rust and it was all locked solid. This loco was one of the star performers at the last show so really wanted it for Burton this weekend. Luckily, I had enough wheels and things to replace everything so there was only one thing for it - complete strip down and replace everything. Here all the bits, luckily you can't hear me swearing!

Actually didn't take too long but getting the new power extender in was a pig of a job. Would not be too bad in a new build but all the suitable spaces were already taken up with speakers, chips or lead. Only thing for it was the cab and a big driver in the way;

One thing that did go better than expected though was replacing the chip in one of the 40hp Simplexes. The sound chip in this stopped working just before the last show so I replaced it with an ordinary TCS one. As I now have some spare Digitrax ones I wanted to get it back in sound and with a power extender. Luckily I noticed that the nine pin plug was the same on both chips so just unpluged the old one and pluged the new one back in - simple!