Well, it was forecast to be a wet weekend, at least on the Sunday, and with the looming return to school this week Daniel and I decided to make Sunday a modelling day. The idea was to setup on Saturday evening and then spend the entire day on Sunday making progress with our various projects.

My aims being to get my 72xx to a state in which it could be painted, to get the GT3 to the same point, the finish the interior of my Railbus and maybe to drop my 802 in boiling water and sort out the warped footplate.

Daniel on the other hand wanted to rebuild his E2 body, finish and paint the chassis for the said E2 and sort out some of the issues with the secondhand 72xx he bought as an unfinished kit.

We had varying degrees of success, the E2 chassis was taken to the point of painting, and painted. The E2 body was dropped in water and a second, more successful attempt at building the body was completed. I on the other hand got all but 1 detail fitted to me 72xx, mainly because I couldn't find the lance cock casting and painted the slide bars/cylinders assembly. I also sorted out the cab roof and fitted the wheel balance weights. I lined the tank sides with lead to stop the wheel slip I observed when it took 68 loaded wagons on the curve of Hinton Parva. My GT3 body filler was sanded, and I as about to think about painting it when the promised rain arrived and put pay to that. The rest of my day was then spent working on the slide bars and cylinders of Daniel's 72xx for him - funny how I got conned into that one. The difference between my modern 72xx kit from PDK and Daniels Cotswold kit really shows up with the motion, the PDK one went together so much easier and was a much better fit.

Here are the two 72xx's as they appear now. The piston rods on the Cotswold kit where too long, so some delicate surgery was required to shorten them and prevent the motion seizing. It's still not the smoothest runner, and work is going to be needed to ease the rods to make it run well.

The important thing however was that we both had a good day, despite the frustrations when things didn't go to plan. There are still lots of projects to go, so hopefully we will be repeating the day again soon, it is nice to still be spending time with my teenage son like this.