So, having put together the basic chassis and body, time has come to unite them to make sure they are 'as one'. However, in doing so, those of you with a Gibson kit on your bench at this point will notice the huge void inside the cab - alas, the kit has no provision for much more than a rudimentary floor. Having its origins in the days of 'motor in the cab' (I suspect - please correct me) this is disappointing, but should not deter you from buying an otherwise nice kit.

Anyway, to the point. Well, I had to fabricate a cab, but before that, I replaced the etched coal bars with actual bars on the rear windows:

Then the floor and bunker front, to which I need to add sandboxes, coal delivery doors and destination board hangers, disc hangers and that mysterious cupboard between the windows (its purpose, apart from stashing coffee and sandwiches, perhaps??). A post-1944 loco would also need folding seats:

Turning now to the front of the cab I fabricated the splasher/seat assembly for each side:

The cab front and rear etches in the kit are rather thin, so I sweated them to some 0.010" n/s to add strength. The rest of the fabrication is also 0.010" n/s, which makes wielding a soldering iron around in close proximity to other joints much easier. So, there we have the basic cab. The backhead is a London Road product and is sitting there for now. I normally epoxy them in last of all as the mass of metal can be a rather uncontrollable heat sink otherwise.

Turning now to the underside of the cab we can see how the frames and splashers interact. Because we have built the chassis to be a little narrower to enable curves to be travelled, the frames do not sit inside the splashers. The solution, in this case is simply to file down the top of the frames (in the light of this experience, perhaps we should change the drawings to accommodate this, but not this week.) so the cab floor sits on top. This is fine for the P4 version we are building, but what of the EM version? Thinking about it (as I have not built one) my solution would be to 'tweak the illusion' somewhat. As we are only looking to narrow the clearance for the wheels by a millimeter or so and fabricating a cab anyway, making the overall splasher some 0.5mm wider and the actual wheel splasher another 1mm wider on each side would not spoil things too much, I feel. Have a go and let me know!

That is as far as we have got right now; inside detail needs to be added, then onwards with the tank tops...

Best,
Marcus