Having spent yesterday demonstrating with DEMU at Expo EM I have got on with a few projects:

Firstly I picked up some more South East Finecast embossed brick, so I can now get on with with designing and building the next bridge for the layout. The intention here is two fold, firstly to break down the brick bridge which is currently on Blackcombe, from this I will remove the main girder spans for reuse. This bridge will then be replaced with a new version which is more typical in design to its South West setting. Having spotting a rather nice embossed stone plasticard on SE Finecast's stand (sadly didnt have the cash left to buy any), it looks spot on for the style of the local stone work.

The Wills girder spans from the Blackcombe bridge will be cleaned up and then rebuilt into a new brick structure for use on the new project. Once the girders are sorted out, will then be able to start calculating the size of the span required and mocking up the walls.

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Moving on, my only other purchase at the weekend was an S Kits ex VDA Sea Urchin kit. Looks like it requires a hell of a lot of cleaning up on the castings, particularly on the top of the < on the sides, however most important (and unlike the forthcoming plastic kit from Chilvers) it has the proper T profile to the side ribs (and its very crisply done.)

Will get on and finish building this over the next week, then it will get added to the growing pile of engineers wagons which require painting in dutch.

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The final area I have been working on was rewheeling a Vi Trains 47 with a set of Maygibs.

This hasnt been without its problems, mostly as a result of wheels not perfectly parallel with the axles (a problem I will come to in a sec). The process used a set of maygibs removed from one of my surplus Heljan 47s using the usual method reusing the Vi Trains gears. Unfortunately most axles were running slightly off true when tested (one of which very badly which turned out to be missing half the plastic bush)

I think the main cause of this variance in the angle between wheel and axle has to be a direct result of the removal and refitting of the wheel (and it not being pushed on completely square with the axle.

More research is needed here to find a better method I think, but this does seem to give a good reason as to why my Ultrascale fitted locos significantly outperform my non Ultrascale locos.