A second session on the Mac B last night saw me picking fault with things that had been done the night before. The conversion is plainly possible, but in my enthusiasm to start I had overlooked a few things and got other bits wrong.

I pulled it apart and set out to improve what I had already done. I had left the basic axleboxes alone, having stripped them of springs and surface detail, but now they looked not only very blocky but plainly too large. So I cut them off flush with the sideframe face, which left enough material to get a tophat bearing to sit in the sideframe. Fitting tophat bearings makes the wagon run more smoothly, but of course eats into the clearance for the axles. So I found a scrap of plastic sheet and glued it to the back of the sideframes to space them out a bit more to compensate.

The sideframes themselves looked very thick and chunky compared with the drawing, and then I noticed that they were about 2mm too deep. So out came the scalpel and the hacksaw, and off came a 2mm strip on each side frame. It's difficult to see on the drawing that the sideframes were fabricated from steel channel section, but reference is clearly made in the text and it's also quite obvious on a photograph on the next page.... more strips of styrene sheet were added to create the channel profile.

Once this was all done I reassembled the wagon and it looks a lot closer to the real thing. I then cut 1mm off the deck and sideframes at each of the wagon to reduce the overall length to scale.

Then I turned my attention to the bufferbeams. Now the Dapol bufferbeams have absolutely nothing in common with the GCR Mac B, but I decided I would have a go at reusing them nevertheless. Firstly I cut away the lower half of the bufferbeam, then I cut away the steel sections over the buffers themselves. I then filed down the moulding to front and rear and ended up with a sliver of plastic that was the right size, but less than 1mm thick. The drawing shows quite plainly that the Mac B had thick timber baulks for bufferbeams... I packed the slivers out with some 2mm styrene strip and then fitted the buffers supplied with the kit.

And the result? Well I think it looks rather close.

Next stage will be to change the deck to the ends, and then we're onto the smaller details.