Its been a while since I've done any modelling, a combination of starting work, the amount of sport on tv and starting studying again has eaten up free time, coupled with loosing motivation on the projects I had ongoing. This is all compounded by being not able to get back down to Devon any time soon to pick up new things to work on.

Having spent much of the last week spending work thinking that I'd like to get on with some modelling, I've finally done some.

I have decided that for the time being I am not going to bother fitting the new con rods to Clan Line and will for the sake of getting it running fit the Hornby ones. So today I set to work with the soldering iron adding washers into the holes on the rods to reduce the diameter to match that of the Gibson crank pins. Once that was done I fitted the con rods and did a little testing, unfortunatly this was complicated by only having a 9volt battery and a couple of wires + a yard of track to test on (I dont want to risk a decoder in it until I am sure all is ok, and the powercab cant handle DC locos...

This was a bit suspect with very jerky running, however given that the wheels/track havnet been cleaned and the supply was a bit iffy that was to be expected. In the end I decided to just unscrew the motor and test by hand to make sure the rods were moving freely.

Now that I am fairly certain the rods are ok, the next job will be blackening the areas where I have cleaned up after soldering. The problem here is that I only have blackening fluid intended for Steel not brass and I'm not sure if there will be an adverse affect here.........

What I really want to do now is cut back the lead axle's crank pin so that I can get on with adding the next bit of the motion, however this cant really be done until a) the rods are painted/blackened and b ) I have fixed the nut in position.

I would have just locktighted this in place, however im a bit worried that would risk locking the rod as well, but also at some point I want to be able to remove the rods when I get round to fitting the replacement parts. Not really sure what to apply here......

I have also ended up buying a set of Ultrascale Class 50 wheels (along with some more Branchlines 14mm wheels) off Ebay, The intention here is to use them to replace the wheels in one of my Gibson fitted 50s (hopefully allowing me to cobble together enough working wheels from the gibsons to fit the rest of my fleet where the Gibson wheelsets fitted have failed.) The alternative is that they will be fitted to my untouched model of Superb that I failed to sell last year, my thinking here is that with Shawplan starting to release their Class 50 detailing parts it would be worth starting to think about how to upgrade my 50 fleet. Detailing and respraying Superb would also give a set of OO wheels to fit to one of my weathered pair (allowing that to be more easily sold on) and intern freeing up a set of Branchlines wheels to start replacing the Gibson fitted locos (Elgar, Hood and Defiant) again hopefuly getting enough working Gibson wheels from Defiant to fit to Elgar and Hood.

The other thing I want to consider is going to be whether or not I have to repaint the whole fleet while I go though these upgrades. While some (early NSE for example) the base models paint is rubbish anyway, I dont really fancy respraying Elgar and Defiant for example.... The work on Superb should show just how much damage is caused to the paintwork, particularly when it comes to the ends and sides.