Hello to one and all!

Well to anyone who has picked up on my other blog. You might no of my complete hatred of poor motors. I can quite happily cope with a few dimensional compromises and the odd little omission of certain details. But what really turns me off a model is the performance of it's motor. If it proceeds along the track sounding like a cake mixer committing Hari-Kiri, then I don't really care how faithful the representation to the original, it has to go.

I've wanted a decent class 92 for some time. actually I've wanted a decent pair of 92's. There was a couple;e of years ago a write up in model rail on both the Class 92's themselves and some detailing mods to make the somewhat, train set looking loco, look a little less........ train set. Now I could appreciate the visual improvement and the work required wasn't particularly difficult, unless of course you went the Brecknell-Wills pantograph route which is a tad fiddly. But the article didn't show a way of improving that God awful mechanism. So my hopes waited on the shelf.

Hornby bought out their well regarded Class 60 and obviously here was a potential route to improving a 92. However being the latest must have model on the streets, finding a decent priced second hand one wasn't going to be easy. So still my hopes waited.

Eventually I tracked down at the wonderfull "Modellers Mecca" a Class 60 in "Loadhaul" livery. Drove home with mind racing of how to go about butchering the 60 into a 92 and so forth. Took it out of it's box and realised that it was far to nice a model to hack up so bought a couple of missing buffers for it and put it into the fleet with the other three 60's that I had at that time bought!

However not so long ago back in that venerable store, there lurking on the second hand shelf was another 60 which I think someone had had maybe a similar idea to myself with plans for a conversion, but on starting thought better off it. Here was my golden opportunity, so with some spare capacity in the flexible friend, it was bought.

Like most projects it hit the back of the shelf immediately. Only to be resurrected many months later, on the realisation that the number of kits and part builts was pretty much equaling stock that was ready to go. Time to make a dent in the pile.

FIRST STEP

On taking the body of the 60 the first obvious thing is that it's quite full and sadly the rather nice electronics board that Hornby fit is of no use. The 92's body looses a lot of space due to the panto's and roof detail. So theres no room for the board!!! Stripping the plastic motor and fan detailing out is fairly straight forward and you have some interesting bits that might come in useful elsewhere. I had hoped that I might have been able to do some thing with the 60's cab detail and light clusters, but on comparrison with the 92 bodies front end, it was just going to take too much fettling and bodging to be honest and adding lights to the 92 using LED's and fibre optic's looked a lot easier and less time consuming.

So essentially what I was going to end up with was the cast chassis, a motor and two bogies.

The previous owner had stripped all of the additional plastic chassis detail below the sole bar. Left behind where various bit of metal casting to represent chassis mounts etc. I decided to keep two of the castings as they gave the body something to rest on. Now I know these aren't prototypical on the 92, but i could live with it as there were not a huge amount of options with how to support the body squarely. A carefully wielded Dremmel and cutting disk soon despatched the unwanted nobbles and castings. till I ended up with something similar to what you see in the picture.

In the picture there is a smaller thin casting next to the right hand bogie, that has to go too. At the time of taking the picture I thought I might get away with keeping it.

As far as the 92 body is concerned. The only cutting done was to remove the two lugs coming down from the roof that the fixing screws drive into... "Nurse!!! the Dremmel if you please". Make sure the lugs are taken down flush to the roof. As mentioned above there isn't a whole lot of room to play with in there.

Placing the body on the chassis highlighted the next problem. The 60 Chassis is just very slightly to long for the 92 body. OK at this point you P4 aficionado's will be switching off ... LOL, but for those of us who carry much lower standards read on. Essentially it's time to get the files out. With some carefully applied abrasion to both ends the body will sit pretty much just right. Unfortunately I haven't got a piccie but lets be honest do you need one?

Behold below body and chassis in unison!!!

The eagle eyed will notice that in the picture i have modified the bogies too!. At first I thought I'd leave the original 60 bogies on, but on inspection realised that although the general profile was the same, there where certain key details that would have just annoyed me. So much to my reluctance I looked out how to use the bogie side frames from the Hornby 92 but fit them (and in a way so I stood a chance of getting them off) onto the class 60 bogies.

In a nutshell. I removed the old 92 side frames and cut out the various bits of plastic webbing and the end with the tension hook on to provide a cleaned up 'U' shape. The class 60 side frames just pulled off. I then added a 4 blocks of plastic (I use old hotel room key cards cut into strips etc etc.... well their free!!!) to the sides off the bogies to make up the width so that I could glue the 92 side frames on. Having only used a spot of super glue on each block. It's enough to make the side frames durable, but with a little careful effort they can be prised off if needs be........... and they needed to be after the first attempt.

The fly in the ointment is that the axel centres of the 60 bogie do not line up with the axel boxes of the 92 side frame Boooooooooooooooooooooooo !!! My own personal choice was to lign up on the centre axel box and live with the slight but equal discrepancy to the two outer wheels.

The next major chassis job is transferring the chassis mouldings from the Hornby chassis onto the 60. No rocket science involved, just some carefull pairing of the detail from the 92 chassis and carefully gluing it in the correct location on the new chassis. Be warned the 60 chassis is not completely flat, so take you time with it and start off with the mouldings plus the original chassis (if you know what I mean) rather than just cut from the old chassis. As said much tea and patience is required for this. There is nothing more difficult than some patient filling and rubbing with emery cloth.

Thats sort of as far as i have got for the moment. next job is to fabricate a front shield thingy for each end. I'm retaining the Hornby coupling at one end and the other will be modelled as the prototype. So a bit more from some Hotel key card may well come into play again.

I've pictured the modified chassis and a Hornby 92 together (sorry it didn't come out as well as I had hoped). Test running has already proved the exercise worthwhile and with the addition of Mr Shawplans excellent etches. I shall finally have a class 92 that I am happy to run.

Will try to update this when I get closer to finishing off the detailing etc. Until then hope it provides somebody with a little modelling inspiration.