I know it's been a while but I am still plugging away at this. Often I look at the modern Hornby model and wonder why I bothered - it is pretty good. Had I been modelling in 00 it would probably have been a foregone conclusion. Similarly working with the Finecast chassis I wonder what would the whole kit given me for the ease of assembling lumps of metal rather than brass. My decision to go this route was based on the 'thin cab side sheets and tender sides' philosophy, so here we are. So far the
Having left you all a while ago while I sorted things, we now have a update. First off is the tender. My plan was to replace the flimsy sides with something more substantial. So, removal of the old sides went well, but the slots close to the edge of the floor split - so while we have the fretsaw out, cut a new floor. I included the slots I needed as they will come in handy when rebuilding it. So here we are...
Next up, the chassis mounting in the cab. Having marked out the floor th
So, we left the tender while I tried to work out how the spring shackles were supposed to be assembled. The cause of my confusion was these little things (well, there’s only one left now) that I thought were the compete shackle and suspension arm (bear with me, for I am a bear of little brain). My excuse is a lack of guidance in the instructions, but please ignore such feeble claims. I should know how to do this stuff by now...
A little head scratching and a larger Martini solved the is
Not much else to say, really. I turned to the tender while I contemplated the valve gear, never having built an outside cylinder locomotive before...now that post will be fun, some come back soon!
I have also ‘paused’ the tender, so to speak as the axleguard spring shackles in the kit bear no relation to anything around the axleboxes of a ‘Schools’ class tender. Oh, whatever happened to the days when kits were a set of parts ready for assembly (Airfix, for example)? No Maunsell axl
So by way of a brief update I have attached some images of the ‘whole’ to confirm I am doing things, illustrate that those things might be called progress and a little bit of showing off. More constructively, almost the sum of the parts now resembles a Class V ‘Schools’ and is a solid superstructure on which to begin actually building a locomotive.
So far, no great revelations, then. However, I did ‘grow’ this blog out of a bit of chatter about PDK Kits, so how does this shape up as a kit in
Well, here we are with the kit out of the box and a few steps taken to familiarise ourselves with the contents. So far, lots of brass bits and so on, plus the Ultrascale wheels (after months of waiting, of course). The plan is to build the body onto the Finecast chassis which, of course, is designed to fit an entirely different kit. Why not build the Finecast kit, then? I just like building in brass as it gives me those nice fine edges to cabs and tenders and so on.
So, initial observations?
Ok, so here we have some kind of progress...
First up, the boiler, rolled using one of George Watts contraptions. This is only my opinion, but for forming boilers, even those that profess to be pre-rolled (no doubt by the same senorita for whose thighs Bizet was obsessed), stop mucking about and buy one. Even I can make them round, so you have no excuses...
Note the ring of unpressed rivets inside the smokebox. These appeared on rebuilds some time after the period in which I am pre
In some ways I should have expected this; indeed to an extent I did but remained naiively opimistic. When trying to mate the body from one kit to the chassis of another it should be assumed it they won’t mate; the trick being to minimise the extent to which this is the case and the amount of cutting and swearing necessary to effect a solution.
So, in our case things are not so bad. I have already chopped off the front frame extensions from the finecast chassis as these are an integral part o
OK, so we’ ve cut the tender sides, but, as those who have (should have) read the words of Guy Williams, we have added a strenghthening piece to maintain the integrity of the tender sides, we have the following:
which involves soldering a piece of brass tube (spare from fabricating the exhaust vents on my Class 31 as the strenghtening piece, but anything that brings rigidity to the sides will do).
Also visible is the beading, which was a basic process of attaching some 0.010” NS to
Goodness it’s been ages since I wrote up the goings-on related to the build of ‘Rugby’.
The delay is explained largely by something of a ‘back-story’ insofar as I had much to learn before moving on. Attached is a view of the chassis as it currently stands, hopefully showing that I used the PDK cylinder block over the Finecast framework. This was because I felt the Finecast arrangement was a little less representative of the actual block. In assembling it I managed to lose one of the
