20th July 2009

Progress on the Jinty, oh yes. Here she is as of this evening after a bit of tinkering with the chassis. Spent several hours over the last few days building up the brake gear and other chassis details which hugely improves the look of the model. She is just about complete and close to ready for the first squirt of primer. Still one or two places that need the attention of the file but all the pieces left in the box are spares now or bits I have elected not to use. The only bits yet to be fitted are the balance weights on the wheels.

Quite chuffed with the outcome I have to say. I suspect this kit would be a real doddle to build if you start with a nice new clean set of parts but that's not quite how this little adventure started. :oops:

Cheers

Dave

5th August 2009

The battered old Jinty has just emerged from its first visit to the paintshop. Here's the body sporty a ghostly livery of Halfords white primer accentuated by fetching yellow/green Milliput accesories.

The Jinty is actually sat on the box containing the next loco build project, another ebay purchase but somewhat bigger. It's a PR MRP Class 66 which I acquired at a modest fraction of it's listed retail price. There's a lot of it but the instructions are... Well let's just be generous and say this will present a few challenges.

Cheers

Dave

9th August 2009

Quite a lot of progress on the blowtorch Jinty this week. It's now largely painted apart from odd small details. Transfers added this evening. Having stripped down the chassis for painting I also took the opportunity to replace the centre axle bearings. For some reason the previous owner had reamed out these to provide slop. OK on the unpowered centre axle of a diesel bogey perhaps but having slop on the bearing of the axle taking power from the motor worm was causing all sorts of nasties. Hopefully that should sort one or two things. The cab interior has now been sorted, weathered, glazed, crew added and the roof fixed. The roof is actually clipped with a tiny spot of cyno to stop it popping off.

The numbers I've used aren't quite correct but I'm hoping that by the time the thing has been heavily weathered this won't be obvious. You can see some of the weathering work has slopped out of the cab onto the sides already! Needs a spary with Klear to seal the transfers tomorrow and then some more detail pain ting before weathering up.

Oh dear I appear to have just "won" another O gauge loco on ebay! :?

Cheers

Dave

19th September 2009

Well it's taken around 4 months to sort it out but I think I have done everything I plan to do to my bent and battered Jinty. I had a touch of hassle with getting the gearbox sorted out, even after replacing, it due to the state of the coupling rods and other chassis parts I had decided not to strip completely back to basic parts. In hindsight I should have done the same to the chassis as I did with the body, blow torched it back to the raw parts.

The loco has now had some running-in and has been weathered. Amazingly this loco spent pretty much all day last Sunday being used as the yard pilot/shunter on Abbotstone at the Woking show! If anybody had suggested to me that this loco would be usable in front of the public at an exhibition when I was staring at a box full of charred brass bits some months ago I would have said they were mad. I think it's a testament to the Connoisseur kit and the durability of brass that it's possible to recover after such a disaster. It's been a heck of a challenge and a lot of fun to rebuild but I'm not sure I will be looking for too many more similar projects. A nice shiny new kit somehow sounds quite appealing.

Here's a couple of shots of the completed(?) loco in the September sunshine.

It doesn't pay to look too closely otherwise it's origins start to show!

Now what's next on the list...

Cheers

Dave