I've now added the last few etched parts to my rake of Chaldrons.

I started with the door catches, these comprise of two small etched plates that are attached to the waggon frames on the opposite side to the brakes. The instructions tell you to just simply glue these in place. As I have 5 of these waggons all of the door catches need to be in the same place on all of the waggons otherwise they will look frankly silly! So I made up a small jig out of a piece of scrap etch...

...which could be used to drill 2 small holes. Short lengths of wire could then be glued in place, to represent the pins that the catches locate on. Then the catches were glued in place, note that they did not always hang vertically;

The bottom holes in the catches were for the crude iron hinges to locate in, I used some .33mm dia. wire with a looped end to represent the hinge;

Totally unnecessary of course, a minor detail really.

The etch contains 5 horse hooks, only 4 are needed but I do like it when spares are included! I bent the hook around a piece of plasticard with one edge rounded off. As luck would have it the piece I picked up was corrugated and the half-etched bolt detail located perfectly into the corrugations leaving the correct amount of tail, meaning that it was easy to form 20 identical horse hooks;

Fitted (apologies for poor photo);

And the finished waggon, prior to painting;

These are now ready to be cleaned and painted, which may take a while.

I hope that these blog entries have been of interest, although I suspect that I may have gone into too much detail about the build!

Coming soon, a somewhat different type of hopper wagon...

Paul.