Picked up a bunch of Shawplan bits on Thursday night, and have spent the weekend fitting them.

First up the 47s: both 47709 and 768 are both getting fitted with the new Shawplan roof grills this afternoon, I have also found some Heljan parts to start modifying 709's underframe to have long range fuel tanks.

Finding that having tried a couple now I am really getting the hang of fitting the new grills. Certainly the method of applying glue to one half of the etch, fitting in position before applying glue to the other half and adding the top ring is working for me. One thing I have done on these 2 is make sure that the mesh alignment is not straight, having spent a lot of time looking at photos, it was very clear that they were rarely fitted with the mesh parallel to the sides as intended!

47768 has also had the top pipe added, (a case of drilling two .45mm holes and then gluing a length of .45 wire into position, again this was roughly bent to match photos but there is a lot of variation in the prototype (some go to the left of the fans, others over the top to varying degrees.)

Finally for today I finally got round to painting the tail light surrounds white, and adding a Bachmann ETH socket.

Fitting new underframe tanks to 47709 is also now finished. First the Vi Trains chassis block had to have the ballast weights chopped off at the battery box end, and the fuel tank end needed filing to the top to provide clearance to the Heljan moulding.

The Heljan moulding also needed major modification in order to fit, firstly removing the fictional box between the battery boxes, then cutting the inside edge down to provide clearance for the step in the Vi Trains chassis. Finally the centre section had to have a couple of mm width removed, before gluing it all back together and fitting to the chassis. This gives a correct battery box hight (Vi trains have added a step on the bottom of their moulding that cant be removed without modifying the block.) I think the Vi Trains tooling has a bit of fineness over the Heljan, but the latter has the correct design of battery box. Both toolings (along with the Bachmann one iirc) mould the battery boxes as one solid beam across the chassis rather than separate boxes.

The next job on 47709 is going to be finishing off the fitting of the new roof grills, and correcting the plate over the boiler port (need the rectangular version) before respraying the whole roof to get the right colour for 709.

Moving onto 67006, this has had the old shawplan nameplates removed to be refitted with their new 'Extreme Etchings' version, this is the correct size, along with being much better detailed with a better representation of the extra thin nameplates (the old ones just looked like normal plates) along with finer etching meaning that the by appointment to plaque is completely readable. These have all just been superglued into position. This pack really does make renumbering the Hornby Royal 67s a lot easier given they should now completely cover the printed names.

Old Shawplan:

New 'Extreme Etchings'

Finally 37667, this has now had the final components fitted for now with the reinforced windscreen added, along with some Heljan multiple working sockets (and the holes drilled for the pipework.) its now waiting for the new nose grills to be finished.....

The ends have now been primed, but given the wet weather today dosnt look like I will be able to spray the yellow. Fingers crossed Tuesday will be an improvement.