I am starting this blog at somewhat of a halfway stage to give a warning to anyone starting to mess about with a Bachmann A3 chassis!

Having had a cast white metal A4 body lying around for some time I came up with a novel idea to get this on a chassis from a Bachmann A3 that I picked up for £365, whilst saving the body and tender of the A3 to form the basis of a P1 2-8-2 (Gresleys freight Mikado version of the A1/A3 pacifics)

Later on I shall show progress on both these engines where for an outlay of around £700 I can make both a P1 2-8-2 and an A4 4-6-2, but for this posting I shall pass on my experiences with the A3 chassis for the A4.

Taking the basic Bachmann A3 chassis, I thought that I could improve the valve gear and replace the coupling rods and eccentric etc.

Having taken the rods off I found that I couldn't re-attach the pins as it was not possible to get the pins relocated on the wheels without taking the force fit wheels off their axles and ruining the quartering and probably ending up with wobbly loose wheels.

So now what? I had a set of Slaters driving wheels acquired with some issues of the 'Build the Flying Scotsman' partwork ( I wonder how many odd sets of these partworks are still lying about!) and looking at the axles on the Bachmann A3 thought that it would be a simple job to replace the wheels - HOW WRONG I WAS !!

The nicely sprung axleboxes that I thought had an axle approximating to a Slaters axle passing thorough them had in fact got a reduced diameter axle at the ends to which not only the wheels a force fitted but also concealed in that nice sprung axlebox was a ball bearing race! - I can hear comments of 'he should have checked this first...more money than sense...etc etc'.

As can be seen from the photos I was now in a real mess, nothing of the Slaters axles fits this lot!

So I felt the only way to rescue this was to fit plain bearings into the axleboxes by boring out the axle hole and aralditing in the plain bearings - I am a terrible bodger but managed to achieve an acceptable result, only to find out that some company makes roller bearings that fit Slaters axles I think.

The motor/gearbox was much more of a problem as I couldn't force off the ball race and so had to saw this axle up to release the gear cog to put on the Slaters axle and had to get a friend to turn up a spacer to accommodate the plain bearing in the gearbox otherwise it would have meant throwing the whole motor/gearbox away and buying my preferred ABC items, but I was determined to save a bit of money!

So please look at the photos attached and probably the best advice is NOT to touch the wheels of these early Bachmann A3's at all but just tidy up the radius link and die block on the valve gear some other way!!

Having said that I am pleased with the improvement to the appearance of the wheels and I can now fit proper valvegear and the quartering will never be a problem!