This week Honley Tank had a day’s visit of two of the ‘Bodgers Brow’ group, Arnold and Arthur, who had a good long shunting session on ‘Wheegram Sidings’ and happily for me, it performed better than I expected, even though that red button problem on the mimic (see an earlier post), did cause one or two hiccups!

I think the “S4†and the DCC perhaps frightened them away from ‘Birch Vale’ and from ‘Bowton’s Yard’ because neither had a shunt on those two.

After their visit I decided to leave weighting of the K3 for a while, and indeed also the fitting of brake gear, because I have a Bachmann ‘Crab’ to convert and I reasoned that the similarity of this model’s design to that of the K3 would allow me to look at adding weight via lead cosmetic frames, and I also had some ideas to try on modifying the Bachmann keeper plate which also carries the brakes and the pick-ups. As the K3 and the ‘crab’ share the same design of this unit, then if I made it work for the ‘crab, then I could do the same retrospectively for the K3.

Another decision was to look at the possibility of modifying Bachmann drivers rather than purchasing new wheels for these conversions. I had been able to re-use the Bachmann pony and tender wheels on the K3 so simply thinning the Bachmann wheels to the EMGS recommended thickness of 0.090†has been proven to work on three different EM gauge layouts. I had an idea how the drivers could be easily machined, without having to make a suitable split-chuck to hold them. Ideas are all very well but attempting to put them into practice very often proves them to be unworkable.

So this week’s work in ‘The Tank’ has been very experimental; but at this moment the ideas all seem to be very workable. All the ‘crab’s’ Bachmann wheels have been EM’d, and the keeper plate has also been successfully modified. Trial running stage has yet to be reached so at this stage I will not enlighten you all about those ideas. More, with photos in a few days time.

May your modelling produce much pleasure,

Dave