I don't really like having to re-visit work I've already completed, and when things on exisiting 'operational' layouts need fixing, I tend to grit my teeth and resign myself to getting the repair done asap, even if it's something quite small.

Last weekend, we took Bleakhouse Road to Blackburn and had a super show, thanks to the hospitality of the Blackburn & East Lancs club. Unfortunately when removing the (very lightweight) dust covers on Sunday morning (at least, that's when Captain 'Clouseau' Kernow thinks it was done), the cover snagged on the bracket signal next to the signalbox and the finial on the main doll - that carrying the signal arm - got broken off (albeit we didn't notice until much later).

The signals on BHR are made from Model Signal Engineering (MSE) components representing Stevens signals. The finials are lovely, delicate whitemetal castings like this:

The signal prior to the damage looked like this on the Saturday (I've taken the liberty of copying one of Worsdell Forever's excellent photos):

The original casting was firmly epoxied into the etched lattice doll, so I didn't fancy trying to remove it, as this would probably have caused even more damage, so I elected to make and glue a replacement finial on top of the original finial. The break had occurred where the top white bit meets the four red curved sections...

I drilled a 0.3mm hole in the top of the remaining casting, to take the new finial.

The new finial was made up of a piece of 0.3mm N/S wire, around which some epoxy had been 'blobbed' and allowed to set hard:

This was then turned down in a pin chuck mounted in an electric drill (haven't got my lathe yet!), and then glued into the hole in the existing casting and painted:

And so that's it, the signal was replaced onto the layout and tested OK. It's not quite as delicate as the original casting, but that was so slim that I couldn't have drilled it's base even 0.3mm to take a spigot, hence adopting this solution instead.

Why not just shrug it off and pretend that the real thing had gotten broken sometime in it's life - that would have been much easier and it did happen. Somehow, though, I couldn't just leave it, and I'm glad it's all done now. I also took the opportunity to do a couple of other minor repairs to the scenery and the layout should now be ready for High Wycombe in a couple of weeks time.