Having come up against something of a brick wall with the work on my 1951 U stock, and not having the funds to start buying up the kits for the 1935 D stock, I've gone back to working on the K stock.

As mentioned before this includes 1928 built Parlours Lucille and Zena, kitchen Ione and the 1925 Ibis (rebuilt in '28 to a similar design).

Lucille, Zena and Ione are all converted using the Comet sides, unfortunately though their design they have left off the raised beading (so that they could include the window frames on the same etch). While this would be very easy to add onto a normal plastic side, I'm not too sure how I will add it to the etches (particularly as I only noticed this after gluing the sides onto the first 2 coaches.) at the moment I am thinking towards some thin evergreen plastic strip and superglue.

Ione is also missing the vents on the back of the kitchen (though I have no idea if these are a VSOE addition or if they were built that way.)

All of this brings me onto Ibis, to start with it has a slightly different window location to Ione (with one less oval window on one side, and I think slightly different window spacing on the other). As such it is going to require new sides etching, and this is where I come to a problem. I think I could do a better job of etching the sides than the Comet ones, with half etched sides (so as to get the beading detail) and separate window frames. However that would then mean I'd really have to go and redo the other 3 coach designs as well (which given they are fitted with the Comet sides already would be a bit of a pain). The other option is to design them to match the Comet ones, thus getting them consistent with what I have.

One idea I was thinking about was to get the beading done as a vinal sheet, so that it can be just stuck onto the etched side.

I've attached the current drawing below, though it still needs a fair bit of work tidying up the windows (and then needs to be redrawn as an etch)

The other area which needs a lot of work is the roof, again there are 2 designs here (Ibis having a lot less ribs than the other 3) but they both follow the same principle of lots of strips of rivets. Again I'm a little unsure as to the optimum approach here, debating between etching a part to overlay the roof with the rivet ribs, or buying rivet strip and gluing that on 1 rib at a time. If it is possible to buy a plastic strip with rivets on top that would be ideal, as the chopper will make short work of cutting the hundreds of identical lengths, I worry that a full etch would just be a bit too fragile making it a real pain to fit.......