At last, things seem to be happening on the new project front - it is not as if I have not been working on it but I just don't seem to have achieved much so far. One significant development though was the impulsive taking up of the BRM Black Friday deal for all the magazines and NO ADVERTS! So you might be seeing a bit more of me again and fired up with new enthusiasm here is what I got up to last night while the rest of the household were watching men kicking a ball around.

Just as a quick recap, the project is Kinver Light Railway which was a 3ft 6in tramway in Staffordshire and not too far from where I live. Absolutely everything has to be scratch in 7mm so progress has been slow. I soon came to the realisation that I wasn't going to get anywhere if I didn't smarten up my efforts so I bit the bullet, learned CAD and designed my own etches. This is the second of four etches for the Tividale car - the only class of any of the cars that I am recreating that still exist. But.... when I started this we were still in lock down so the real one at the Black Country Museum was locked away and when I did eventually visit it was still locked away as the tramway was closed while building work took place. The model, therefore is based on the Alpha Graphics card kit, known dimensions and pictures.

Contrary to popular wisdom I have found that I prefer to cut all the main components from the etch first and dress them all in one go, it seems to work for me. As there are no instructions I did make reference to the first one I built and I did make a few notes previously so this was useful as I had made a couple of little errors with the etch that needed sorting out.

First task was to bend the lowered sections for the drivers platform with the aid of my trusty bending bars which also came in handy for the buffer frame and floor support. The Resistance Soldering Unit came in handy for fixing the floor overlay.

Next up was fitting the seat supports in their half etched locations in the floor. In order to get them all vertical I use a steel set square and various magnets to keep everything in place while soldering. Once the seats are folded to fit and soldered in the floor becomes very ridged. That was enough for one session so everything had a quick bath in the ultra sonic cleaner to get rid of flux residue. So here is the result of one evenings work.