Our Grand-daughter’s 18^th birthday party, plus a few days bed & breakfasting in North Yorkshire means less modelling than usual has been achieved in the last couple of weeks.

A few hours have been spent test-running and tweaking the K3 conversion. Two problems caused less than the quality of running I aim for.

The first is the care needed in adjusting the Bachmann scraper pick-ups to reach out to the new gauge but also run on the rear of the steel tyre of the Gibson wheels.

Bending them out to new gauge is no great problem but this has the effect of shortening their radial sweep such that the collection point falls on the plastic part of the wheel. Won’t pick up much electrikery there! Quite possible to achieve correct positioning but it does demand care, and in my view description needs a little more than the normal “…I adjusted the pick-ups..â€

The second was my own silly fault. Originally I made no effort to limit axle side-play in the pony truck. It ran without problem but when the Alex Jackson coupling was fitted to the truck, the large amount of side-play caused poor coupling performance, - the coupling wire hardly ever road along tack centre line. – Idiot!

The idiocy continued because I measured the side-play, subtracted a few thous and divided by two. I then turned up a couple of spacing washers to that measurement (0.068†if memory serves). What I missed was the fact that there are moulded spring and axle box detail on the outside faces of the truck and while the rear bush on the wheels is small enough to clear these, my new spacers were not. The result was that with the wheels correctly backed and clipped back into running position, there was too little clearance for free running. Unfortunately I did not pick-up on this, because the wheels did turn by hand, however when on the loco they sat quite steady, sledging along the rail, but only occasionally rolling. Not much use for guiding through point work!

Luckily I have collets at these sizes and the 0.068†was thick enough to allow gripping in a collet while facing off 0.016†to give me 0.052†spacers.

The loco is now performing to a good standard on my rubbish track of ‘Wheegram Sidings’ and one day next week is off to deepest Lincolnshire for a running in session on Retford.

Next is a Bachmann ‘Crab’.