Hello All,
Last time I said that some of the pictures taken while I progressed through modifying the Lima wheels still needed uploading to my hard disc; well here's some of 'em:

Sometime ago I painted the interior section in an attempt to get upholstery and walls etc approaching the colours as originally introduced. Also there's no point in a passenger service without passengers so a few Prieser people have been randomly accommodated. Luckily, being able to see inside the coach when on the layout is near impossible, so the fact that the passengers are of the wrong scale (3.5mm/foot) and the colours are guesstimated-mixed is of little consequence.

When I came to fit the modified wheels to the new 2.5mm silver-steel axles they were not a sufficiently tight fit! The likely reasons are that they had originally been on splined, steel axles, possibly causing the axle hole to be over-large after removal; and/or when I miked up the new axles the diameter proved to be minutely less than 2.5mm. To get round this, I flooded the axle holes with solder, and using the Boley lathe and a step chuck, re-drilled them to 3/32". In order to have maximum truth this drilling was in steps of: centre-drill; drill through 1/16" and open to 3/32". To aid axle entry, the hole was counter sunk with a 2.5mm drill on the wheel rear face.

This is one of the trailing bogie axles, prior to cleaning but ready for fitting in place, The red paint on one bush is colour coding for the insulated side. The back-ground is a flame proof mat that will easily cope with the blow torch flame. It is, of course, important that the wheel is raised to a temperature which will melt the solder and to not melt the solder with the heat source.

These two, one of which appeared last time, are for comparison; an original Lima wheel-set and a converted wheel-set; spot the difference?

That's all for now; TTFN

Good modelling to you,
Dave