It's been a while since anything of the D&E persuasion got worked on here, so it makes a change to pop up a rather long-term resident of my workbench. Rather intended to assist NickL2008, I've decided that an entry covering the remechanising of one of my Lima 87s was worth doing.

Some years ago, I obtained a Swallow liveried 87 at a reasonable cost. Having grown up with all liveries from banger blue right through to the current day, my favourite was always IC Swallow. There is a matching set of mk3s on the go, but they're a much more longer-term project.

Here's now things have got to since the last working session on it.

I've tidied the front ends up and have been ready to add the MW blanking plates for some time now. All light mouldings have been drilled through to allow clear optic to be inserted with a view to giving it fully DCC controlled lighting. None of this over-bright stuff of course...

On the recommendation of Jim Smith-Wright, a Bachmann 'Warship' chassis was cut into various sections and installed in a much-modified chassis moulding. Two-part epoxy was used to give a really secure joint and left for 24 hours to fully harden, before cleaning up the excess adhesive.

The bogie frames are spare Hornby class 90 parts and need to be shortened to 42mm wheelbase. Strictly speaking, they should be 43mm, but the Warship chassis is a scale 10' 6" instead of the 10' 9" common to 81/85-90. It's a darn sight better than the 40mm of the originals though! In order to give the correct ride height, around 1.5mm of the bottoms of the Flexicoil springs were removed, using the underframe of a Hornby 86 as a guide. I have a feeling Lima did this to allow the model to travel round trainset curves. The sideframes are fixed to the metal bogies with superglue, with accelerant to give a slightly stronger joint.

There's barely any room to swing a cat in the model once the new chassis parts are inside, so I was faced with a bit of an issue as to how to DCC it, not least with being able to control the lights effectively. I settled on a length of verroboard along the "grille" side and installing the decoder in the least visible place underneath. The replacement battery box comes from a Hornby 90 underframe moulding, obtained ridiculously cheap off eBay. Precise position for it was gained from photographs, thankfully before Fotopic went belly-up.

Performance is pretty good and can manage a scale top speed of just around 120mph, thanks to the higher-torque motor from the Warship. The same motor is found in the Voyager and other small-wheeled central drive models, so adding 14.5mm wheels does give it a fair turn of speed.

Hopefully having posted this lot up, I might actually get the model finished off. Things yet to do are replacement Brecknell-Willis pantograph (I have a soldering jig on loan from a fellow modeller) and various other minor detailing. Once the fronts have had their blanking plates etc added, I shall give them a coat of WP yellow.

That's all for now!