So apparently, I'm now heartless and cruel...
Listeners who are listening may have seen my cunning plan blog entry about hacking about a Tomix Annie and Clarabel into decent representations of typical UK four-wheeled coaches. I was hoping for a fairly simple job - cut/file off the noses and faces, repaint and plonk on the layout. When they arrived, they were too tall, too wide, and wouldn't negotiate my curves without falling over. I hemmed and hawed before deciding to carry out my first "proper" piece of model bodging. Cue buying a saw and filler from work, and after repainting a body shell crudely in maroon to see what it would look like (placed on a hacked-about Peco chassis) I discovered that height-wise, the bodyshell is not actually that bad. The Tomix chassis raises the body quite a bit above "correct" height. This is how it looked:
Hmmm, not bad at all. Just need to worry about the width now. CAUTION: What follows is a very detailed blow-by-blow account of how I did this - it was my first attempt as a complete beginner. With my newly-bought saw, I cut a long slit down the middle of each end (very roughly - the saw blade was very flexible (note to self: buy a better saw)) then hacked my way down the middle of the floor. A bit of tidying up of this, then I trimmed back the ends until I reached the edges of the middle panel at one end, then removed the corresponding amount from the other end with a scalpel and filing.
Once everything lined up nicely(-ish) I glued the two body halves together again with liquid poly, then carefully applied filler along the cracks. Being very careful with how it was applied, I managed to not destroy the beading detail on one end, although the other (smooth) end looked a little less neat - it was my first time dealing with filler!
A little more filing and smoothing after the filler had set (in the bathroom, on the windowsill after complaints from my flatmates (that White Putty stuff has a fearsome smell and even worse warnings on the back of the tube!) led to this before-and-after shot with a somewhat worried-looking Annie seeing her eventual fate. (This is why I am apparently heartless! )
A lick of paint (well, several light coats to cover the white-orange contrast of the filler) makes a huge difference, and I'll leave you with two views of the opposite ends of what used to be Clarabel:
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