Duckets! or V9 to V8
My V9 passenger brake van has been languishing on my work bench waiting for me to paint it for far too long. I applied a coat of acid etch primer at least a year ago, but since then made little progress. The main stumbling block in motivation to finish it was the fact that for my modelling period the V9 didn’t exist! I thought when I bought the kit that a coach that was originally built for broad gauge and then converted to standard gauge in the 1890s would be perfectly acceptable for circa 1905, how wrong can you be!
V9 Passenger Brake Van
Upon further reading I discovered that the V9’s were in fact converted from V8’s by the removal of the guards duckets in 1920. Apparently the duckets were prone to rot and their removal happened on a number of Passenger Brake Vans, creating the V1s from the V2s, the V4s from V5s, V6s from V7s etc. All this seems to indicate that GWR Passenger Brake Vans all had duckets in the period that I model.
As I’d more or less finished the vehicle, this was a little irritating! After a bit of mulling about the problem I decided I had three options.
1. Convince myself that it didn’t really matter and what’s 15 years here or there!
2. Finish it and sell it to someone modelling the 1920s
3. Add the missing duckets!
I knew that how ever much I tried to convince myself scenario 1 would always grate on me, so that wasn’t going to work.
If I did sell the coach I’d still have to build another more appropriate vehicle to replace it and coaches take me forever to build!
This left me with option 3, but how best to proceed took me a while to ponder about.
The break through came when I found out during a phone call to Slaters Plastikard that it was possible to purchase individual components from their 7mm coach range. I’ve already built a number off their 4 wheel and bogie clerestory coaches and remembered that the duckets for the Brake 3rds were separate components from the body sides. I ordered a pair of these and once I’d assembled them could make a start adding them to my V9.
Plucking up courage to take a saw to a more or less finished coach took a while but once the first cut was made there’s no going back!
Cut sides and Slaters Plastikard Duckets
Once the cuts were made and tidied up with files I glued some plastic card inside the coach using rapid set epoxy resin.
Plastic card inserts
The duckets were then glued in position using liquid poly and allowed to set. Milliput putty was used to fill in any gaps between the duckets and the body sides, once set this was sanded with diminishing grade sandpaper strips.
Duckets in situ
The Slaters duckets are meant for coaches with the smaller eves panels, so the moulding was sanded off and then microstrip was used to make a new raised panel line a couple of millimetres lower than the original position.
Microstrip panel moulding
The coach was then re-sprayed with primer to give a smooth finish and check that everything blended together without any obvious joins!
Coach in primer
Hopefully readers will think that that I’ve finally got an appropriate coach for Sherton and I can get on with painting the pesky thing!
Best wishes
Dave
Edited by wenlock
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