Both old projects, these, but they've been back on the workbench this week for various reasons.

The Castle is based around the Airfix/Dapol/Hornby body on a Comet chassis. I built the chassis in 2009, but didn't make a particularly good job of the cylinders and slidebars. There was too much slop and my soldering was a bit hit and miss, leading to some weak joints. At the recent Warley show, I decided to buy a new set of cylinder/slidebar parts and remake them. It turned out to be relatively quick job, and the resultant slidebar/crosshead relationship is a lot tighter, which is not only better mechanically, but looks better, without everything slopping around at odd angles. This time I soldered the entire cylinder assembly, including the white metal parts, which again aids rigidity.

However, one of the problems I ran into originally, and which reared its head again, is that the kit doesn't make any provision for the slidebar support brackets. Presumably this is due to the lack of space between the first and second driving wheels, because on the otherwise similar King chassis, there is a supplied support bracket. With the Castle, there's nothing to retain them at a fixed position felative to the chassis and so with handling, they can easily drift slightly out of alignment. Since the clearances between the connecting rod and the slidebars are already tight, it doesn't take much of a shift in the position to cause binding. To get around it this time, I soldered a support bar between the tops of the slidebars and the chassis - invisible from normal viewing angles - but there's still no easy way of fixing the lower section of the slidebars.

The body has been slightly reworked to get a better roof profile, more accurate centre cylinder chest and so on. When I built this model I selected a slightly too-high gear ratio for the motor, and as a consequence, it's better suited to medium fast freight duties than passenger work.

The King (LIma body, Comet chassis) has popped up on this blog many times but it's been back on the workbench for a bit of cosmetic work, as well as conversion to full DCC sound. I added wheel balance weights, one of those get-around-to-it-one-day tasks, and cylinder drain cocks. I also tidied up the loco-tender wiring, tightened the gap between loco and tender, and swapped the original decoder for an ESU one supplied by Digitrains with a King sound file. The speaker is in the tender. The sound is bloody fantastic, in my unbiassed opinion, and I've barely stopped grinning since I turned it on. Humorously, I spent hours trying to eliminate an annoying squeak that had come on since I fiddled with the model, until I realised it was on the sound file - although only at low speeds.

The King recently got a chance to run on Tony Wright's Little Bytham layout, and despite some wheel slip, it was eventually able to shift eleven MK1s, so I was well pleased with that.

cheers all.