This is the first time I've ever posted a blog, so please treat me gently!

For various reasons I haven't done any serious modelling for 7 or 8 years, but I've recently got back to modelling and wanted to build something a little different.

I looked throguh my pile of kits and discovered, squirreled away at the bottom, some Comet sides and ends for a Thompson 6 wheel passenger brake van.However, it's not a complete kit for the coach, just a set of body components.

In a masochisitc moment, I decided this would be fun (!) to build so started looking around for bits such as axle guards, roof, underfame details etc.

One of the first things I did was find photographs. For this, the Paul Bartlett site http://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/paulbartlettsrailwaywagons was a great help, and I found a few other pictures using Google. I also bought an Isinglass drawing so I had an idea what I was dealing with.

I then started hunting down bits and pieces and working out how to make the chassis so the coach would go round curves!

I'm sure that most people reading this will realise of course, that my major problem would be getting a 6 wheel vehicle to go round a model railway curve. Modelling in EM as I do, the minimum radius of any layout the coach runs on SHOULD be 3 feet, but that's still a lot tighter when scaled up to prototype dimensions than the standard minimum radius the real vehicles would go round.

To get round this, I bought a Brassmasters kit for a Cleminson chassis. This pivots the end axles and connects them to the axle carrier for the middle axle in such a way that the middle axle slides to the outside of the curve. I hope that makes sense!

In the further hunt for components, I discovered a Comet alloy roof moulding at John Dutfield. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was actually avery close match to the profile of the roof in the drawing, but as the ends were not to the same profile it meant I would have to do some filling between the end and the roof - not something too difficult to overcome!

So, to the start! I decided to make the chassis out of double sided copper clad paxolin and cut a piece that seemed to be about the right size from the sheet I had. I am very lucky to have bought many years ago a Minicraft drill and pillar drill mount - I laid these on their back, put a slitting disc in the drill and with some pieces of wood glued and screwed to roughly the right height, I had a sort of circular saw table that allowed me to cut the paxolin relatively easily. This is a tool that I am going to refine further - it helps to make life easy and safe at the same time!

Once I'd cut the paxolin, I marked both middle lines on the chassis base so I would know exactly where to line up the baseplate for the Cleminson chassis.

The next step was to make up the Cleminson chassis kit. Fortunately, the Brassmaster kit is so well thought out - it makes up easily to a whole variety of wheelbases and as far as I can tell, will work for any 6 wheel vehicle model produced. Certainly I will be buying another in the future and trying the chassis on a 6 wheel milk tanker.

Having followed the instructions with the kit, the chassis went together very easily and once soldered to the paxoling, gave me a free running chassis. I was very happy!

The next stage was to build the body. I am very lucky to work in a school that has a very good DT department, so I asked the technician to make me a piece of ply with 2 sides raised up that were exactly 90 degrees - I pinned one side and one end to this jig and soldered them together, I then did the same for the other side and end, then soldered the 2 components together and ended up with a square body. I had already decided that I was going to fix the chassis at low level to the body, so I then glued the roof on using Devcon plastic steel - this also acted as a filler for the gaps between ends and roof. I put this to one side and left it for a few days so the plastic steel could set hard.

The next step was to solder some L shaped stretchers to the ends - these stretchers have nuts soldered to them for fixing the chassis. I then drilled holes in the chassis that screws could go through to fix the chassis to the body.

Somewhere along the line my measuring had obviously gone wrong - the body didn't sit correctly on the chassis - it was skew whiff longitudinally. I pondered for a while how to fix this. I cut some small pieces of brass from spare etch, drilled holes in these, then drilled the holes in the chasis over size (which gave me flexibility to align the chassis correctly within the body). I then put the brass piece on the bolt, the bolt through the chassis in to the body fixing nut, made sure the chassis was aligned correctly and soldered the small piece of brass to the chassis. I now had a chassis correctly aligned to thew body, and it started to look like a coach!

The next thing to sort out was solebars - I found some brass channel in my stock, and also some fine section T shape brass - I used this to make the running step in the solebar.

Having got the body this far, the next part was the detailing. The Comet sides, fortunately, had holes marked for the door stops, hinges and handles and handrails, so I marked these out and soldered short lengths of 0.7mm wire for the door stops and lengths of 0.33mm wire for the handles and hand rails. I wondered about how to make the hinges - then had the bright idea of using the Comet etch of T door handles - these look like hinges as you can tell from the attached photo that shows the side with the hinges done (they're not

all put on yet!)

One of the characteristic things of these carriages are the plate style W irons that the axle boxes slide in - Comet very thoughtfully include these in the etches, and I'm soldering them to the insides of the solebars, although they're not in the final position just at the moment as something else has gone awry with my measuring!

I've attached a couple of photos that show the coach at this stage - since taking the pictures I've added the chassis underfarme details using Comet components. The things still to do are:

Finish the hinges

Jumper wires on the ends

Lamp irons on the ends

Torpedo vents on the roof

Rain strip on the roof

Coupling hole plates on the buffer beans.

There are 2 strengthening gussets at each end on the real thing that locate the body to the chassis - I'm not going to replicate those on the model (call me lazy - you're right!)

Once I've done these, I'm going to bath the coach in something (either dilute milk of magnesia or soda crystals) to neutralise any residue phosphoric acid flux, then I'll paint it in unlined maroon livery.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this so far - it's been fun for me and has really started my modelling juices flowing - I'll post some more details and pics in a little while.

Phil