VikingSpirit

Thank you for your kind words Tony, without wishing to derail your thread too much, I have managed to source a cheap Hornby J15 chassis which I hope will go under the N7 with some surgery. The wheelbase, balance weights, number of spokes and wheel diameter are all correct for the N7 so it should be a fair improvement on the old triang-Hornby one. I have also sourced a comet chassis to try my hand at for the Wills 2251, although this will mean carving the body up to move the front splashers back for the correct wheelbase. I am afraid I'm not the world's fastest modeller as I spend most of my days mending the real thing for Bressingham steam museum. Today I was under this beauty repacking the cylinder and valve chest glands.

Hello Tony I hope you don't mind me adding to your thread, and I appreciate I am very late to the party, but I just wanted to thank you and congratulate you on the excellent BRM right track series. Your superb insights into loco kit construction spurred me to have a go myself during the lockdown in 2020, I have enjoyed model railways for many years but always felt that loco kit building was beyond my abilities. Your patient and in-depth tutorials I felt completely demystified the process, so I was inspired to try my hand on some cheap white metal kits which I was able to purchase on eBay. They were less than £15 for each loco, but were all poorly glued and painted as received. I have found that "Oven pride" oven gel cleaner does a grand job of stripping paint and glue and turning poor models back into a clean kit of parts again (it will also take the paint off Hornby loco bodies without melting the plastic) I appreciate that these models are still far behind the highly detailed and researched specimens that yourself and others are building, but as practice mules I wanted to share them to illustrate that your generous wisdom has taught this kit-building newbie how to properly solder a white metal kit neatly and squarely (hopefully!) My sincere thanks Theo