I once worked in a company where the phrase "JFDI" was occasionally fired at you.  Essentially it means "stop procrastinating and Just Do It", I'll let you workout what the 'F' stood for .

Happily, for me (and possibly them too), I no longer work for them so having this expression thrust at me has become a rather rare experience, but the other day I found myself thinking, "You can't avoid it, you're going to have to JUST DO IT", so what was I thinking about?

A bit of an embarrassing admission really, I have had this white metal kit for a number of years now that I started, badly, then stalled as at that time of life work was ... difficult.  I realised the other day that now was a good time to take it out of storage, give it a good long hard looking at, and start it again.  What is it?  It's one of South Eastern Finecast LBSCR I3 kits.  Digging the box out (it was sitting next to an untouched H2 kit I bought before the RTR versions were even an inkling of a thought of an idea), I was presented with a box of bits still wrapped in tissue paper:

.. and the standard "exploded" diagram of how to build it:

Unfortunately the chassis lurked in there and when extracted looked like this:

A little pause for mentally working out how to approach "un-building" the chassis then an hours patient application of flux and hot soldering iron resulting in a pile of detached, but messy parts:

One screw gave me particular issue as at least on this one I'd managed to solder not just the two parts together, but the thread on the screw too.  Four or five attempts later (and one or two "damn" moments with the fingers) and this part too surrendered to the inevitable (something was going to give, and it wasn't me!).

That was yesterday.  Today I reviewed the parts, thought about what was needed to make putting this together simpler, and vanished into the garage. I've made myself another block of steel with one critical dimension being the same as the distance between the two halves of the chassis.  Now I have a extra pair of hands in the same way I did with the crane, and these hands don't mind getting a little hot

Anyway, some time spent removing old solder and cleaning up the bits and pieces.  You might notice that I have also started clearing out the axle boxes to allow some compensation to be fitted on the driving wheels (the two "bone" shaped pieces between the files).

...then I started with the front bogie chassis.  Filed off some surplus tabs (EM specific) so that it was easier to jig the pieces together:

Finally drilling out some 0.8mm cross bar holes, fitting the bars and feeling satisfied with not making a mess of it:

Enough with the soldering today, so finished off by dry running the main chassis together:

I stopped short of soldering this together because I'm not sure how rigid it will be.  It must be fine, many people must have made this before, but it feels "flexible" laterally.  Is this even a problem?

Time for a drink,  more to follow.

Jeff.

[Edit] Still haven't learnt not to post last thing in the evening.  I'm definitely a morning person.