As ever I can't help looking for a bargain. Something in me just won't let me buy something at full price. Fortunately I have managed to pick up a little gem of an O gauge kit from Ebay in the last month or so. For some reason hardly anyone placed a bid on it and it went for a song despite retailing for something like ?‚??199! The seller advertised it as a part built kit with one or two items missing and even provided a list of the bits missing. Always up for a challenge I figured I could source a few missing screws and scratchbuild some brakegear so put a silly low bid in on spec. It arrived on my doorstep shortly after.

The kit is a Tower models Class 02 diesel which is mostly whitemetal, in fact pewter, with some brass chassis bits and all wheels, gears and motor. An ideal starter kit in O gauge for a bodger like me. As it happens when I inspected the kit I couldn't find any bits missing!

The previous owner had started the assembly of the chassis and also cleaning up the castings. Sophisticated chassis? NOT! On arrival I gave it 12 volts to see if all was well and with a couple of minor adjustments to get the gears meshed nicely the wheels fairly whizzed round.

Most of the castings are actually very clean with the exception of the cab which is a single piece and has required hours of filing to get it close to good enough. The hood and cab are mounted as a unit onto the footplate with screws and here they are roughly offered up.

I assembled some pickups as per the instructions and took it up to my local model railway club for a little amble round on the O gauge layout. It worked fine and will even run quite slowly despite not having been run in. The pickups though were less than wonderful. The phosphorbronze strip provided seemed a little too thin for the job and so after consulting some experts I decided to scratchbuild something better.

Several of the O guagers at the club use scratchbuilt plunger pickups made from 1/8 inch brass tube and rod with either wire or phosphorbronze springing. I opted to try some guitar spring and having sourced some brass rod and tube from a local model shop and dug out some copperclad sleepers knocked, something up. Here's the result as yet untested on the layout so will probably require some adjustment, certainly works if you whack a couple of wires on the tyre treads.

I'm waiting on delivery of some low melt solder via the postie so I can get on and start sticking the castings together.

Cheers

Dave