While I confess time has been limited, I have also made some significant progress with 2811.

Assiduous followers of this blog will remember that this has not been a happy tale to date. I now have a rolling chassis - well almost. The slide bars are too long and as a result the connecting rod strikes them jamming everything up nicely. This should be cured very soon with snips and a file.

The Comet chassis 'kit' has failed to impress. I think the best way of describing it is a number of standard or generic components being passed off as sub-assemblies of the kit, but that are not actually designed as a complete kit. The result is that for every one step forward there seem to be two back.

To get the chassis in the correct position under the body (remember its designed for the Hornby china made body) massive amounts of the cylinder stretcher had to be filled away.

The motion bracket is laughable in its design - just the G shaped slide bar brackets which are soldered to the slide bars, but there are no location marks or any way of ensuring that they are in the right position and holding them them there; a perseverence motion bracket type design is clearly needed as advocated as the basic minimum for chassis kit designers by the great Iain Rice many, many years ago.

The pony truck is generic and therefore again does not sit well under the chassis - in fact its a pig to get in the right position and solder a locating washer to it unless you are prepared to keep making adjustments to the washer position, each time removing the chassis from the body and the pony truck from the chassis, unsolder the washer, move it, resolder and try again. Repeat until you lose the will to live.

The chassis frames and spacers are devoid of the normal tab and slot design making getting everything square a fun event (I used the Poppy models loco cradle in the end).

The only compensation designed in is individual sprung axles. If you want a flexichas or csb set up get your ruler, scribe, drills and piercing saws out. While you might say that csb is too much to expect, I think that the other design issues make the 'kit' inferior to say a Ron Neep/Perseverence design standard of the early 1980s.

Chris Gibbon, a 28XX chassis kit please!!! (or on second thoughts don't, I've nearly got this one done and a High Level kits version would just depress me...)

D