While awaiting paint drying and vinyls settling on the second Bachmann class 450 conversion (to be described in a future blog entry), I was giving one of my oldest class 73 models a run, and noticed how crappy my painting of the roof grilles for the electrical compartments was. I had weathered them early on, but never tidied it up, so the grilles were indistinct and just a grey-black blur.

Now the Lima class 73 body mouldings have some of the finest moulded grilles you'll find anywhere. So fine that, with careful painting, they can actually look better than etched see-through grilles, such as those on the much newer Dapol class 73, or Heljans newer class 33/0 efforts. All I needed to do in E6002's case was to dry brush some roof grey over the grille mesh and surrounds to tidy them up to my satisfaction.

I also noted that E6002 actually needs to be renumbered to one of E6004 to E 6006, or else I need to replace the buffers with oval ones, as sported by E6001 to E6003 when new. I think the round buffers were fitted at the same time as the first three went into BR blue.

E6002 started life as a Lima model of 73 005 in BR large logo blue livery. Unfortunately, while all the livery elements were nicely done, the blue had a surface finish like fairly coarse sandpaper. I repainted the loco into green with grey roof and skirts. Much more recently, E6002 was the first of my Lima models to receive a Hornby DCC-ready chassis, from one of Hatton's bargain-priced class 73 models in Dutch livery (I bought several more of the Dutch model to re-chassis some other Lima 73s as well, over a period of months).

Next, it received Howes' class 73 sounds on a LokSound v 3.5 decoder, fitted with a large, bass reflex speaker and a standard 23mm round speaker in parallel.

When taking the photos, I realised that the replacement Hornby chassis still had black buffer beams, so they have had a coat of red in the last photo only.

Having mentioned the wrong buffers for the locomotive number, I decided it would be easier to swap the buffers than to renumber E6002. I had some rather nice brass oval buffers in my bits boxes, so removed the Hornby round buffers (they were a good force fit only) and glued the replacements in, then painted them. The paint is still wet in the second pic.

Looking at the close-ups, it is obvious that these models would benefit greatly in appearance from the fitting of separate handrails, but that is a job for another time ... I only have 12 of the Hornby or Lima bodies to deal with! I have already fitted the extra jumper cables to both of my class 73/0s. E6002 received some noce white metal cables, while 73 004 got the 'discarded' cables from E6002 to supplement the existing ones.