Having nearly completed the two driving cars for the London Transport F Stock, I decided to make a start on the two trailers. Bearing in mind I am on an antibiotic and a little under the weather still, so my hands are a bit shaky and my stamina is low, I decided to just do little bits at a time,

The two trailers i have are original Harrow Model Shop white metal ones, which means there are three double doors plus four separate sections per side, two halves of the roof joined with a bridging piece (plus the vents to add later), and an underframe that has two extra end headstock pieces to stick on, it is just a little bit more complicated than the one piece resin bodies of the later kits from Radley Models. After that, both types of kit require the underframe details to be added and bogies to be assembled, and also the internal partitions to be added.

With so many separate parts to the sides, I came up with a method long ago that used Blu-tac, a steel rule, a flat, hard surface and 5-minute Araldite glue, plus a modicum of cursing and swearing.

That's jumping ahead a little. For starters, after cleaning up all the relevant bits with a file, I glued the two roof halves to their bridging piece, for each of the two trailers, and left those to set on a flat surface.

Next, I glued the headstock pieces to the ends of the two underframes, while at the same time, gluing two coach ends to each of the roofs and propping those to dry with the coach ends held vertically.

That's where I am up to now. The photo shows the two roof/ends sitting on the two underframes loosely. As you can see, the alignments are perfect.

The sides will be next, and the reason for assembling the roofs and ends is so that I have the correct lengths to work to for the side assemblies. With so many separate pieces to fit and room for small movements relative to each other, it would be quite possible to end up with sides that are too long or too short by a few millimetres.