Daddyman

Nice project. Nice execution.

As in the title. PM please if you have one you'd like to part with.

Info in the comments here:

I bought the early ones too, which have an additional problem: the blue won't match these new ones as Bachmann have improved it in recent years. I bought s/h Bachmann Mk1 to try to make a decent job of it, using some of @jjnewitt's bogies. Spent a while trying to hide the gashes yawning chasm where the sides meet the ends and decided it wasn't worth it - it involved removing the bufferbeams from the body and fitting them to the u/frame so that body and u/f could be separated; the ends could then be attached to the body and the chasm closed with filler, but the sides and ends just wouldn't mate up. So I binned it - the model is too long in the tooth for all that; it would still have had no window frames.

That's what I'm seeing too. But the "gashy" original releases are then going to look silly against these.

This book had quite a few (numerous?) errors in it, including for either the NBR Neilson 0-4-0 (Y9) or the Caley equivalent. I think it was revamped a few years ago, but I'm not sure how many of the errors were caught.

Interesting article here: https://www.ft.com/content/9f7f044e-1f16-11e9-b2f7-97e4dbd3580d

Probably because of this kind of thing (not a railway example, admittedly, but I'm sure figures could be found): "Since the 1990s, investment from the privatised English water companies has gone down 15%, and they've built up a debt mountain of over £60 billion [...]. Meanwhile, shareholders have received £72billion - £2 billion a year on average." From https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/water#:~:text=Since the 1990s%2C investment from,billion a year on average.

Considering this is coming from the nutjob side of the debate, it's actually quite rational. However, I don't think the motivation for any of this is contempt. Rather, it's organisations and public bodies trying to protect themselves from a lawsuit culture that grew up in (?) the late 1980s. And in my experience it's almost always the ones who complain most about health and safety law and other regulations that are the ones most ready to invoke that same law in fantasy lawsuits (the "I can sue you for that!" sorts). At the end of the day, what do the anti-H&S "brigade" (and, come to think of it, the anti-climate-action and the anti-woke "brigades") think they achieve? Is moral indolence really worth all the effort?

Rub the salt in, why don't you. 😉

Extremely disappointed to see you softening your position on this, Justin. Looks like I'm all alone now then... 😉

I can't believe intelligent people are giving this model airtime and oxygen. It's Heljan; what did you expect? Select "ignore thread" and move on!

Sorry to contradict you, but I don't bother with this - never have in nearly 20 years of building etched kits - and I think Mike Edge himself says the same: there's no need to clean etches as the flux that you apply when soldering will do it for you. Far more important is a clean bit on the soldering iron - the OP would do well to buy a suede brush for this purpose. Brass is always harder to solder than N/S, but most newer JE kits are, I believe, N/S. I was surprised a few years ago just how much harder brass is to solder when I started a JE 06 (which was and possibly still is brass) after years of working mostly in N/S. The answer is a 50W temperature adjust iron, always turned up to at least double the nominal temperature of the solder you're using (good advice I picked up at Missenden; a common error with newcomers is not getting the solder flowing, due to not getting it hot enough). (I use a 2.3mm bit for everything, which seems to be the consensus among fellow modellers in the Scalefour Society Virtual Group, and London Road Models flux, which is cheap, doesn't rot your tools or the bit of the iron, and is easy to clean off; avoid Carr's Yellow!). As for cleaning as you go along, yes, good advice, but I know myself and it's not going to happen - and for all those ten minutes you spend at the end of each session cleaning up, you might as well add them all up and clean every two weeks or when you absolutely have to. Finally, you're going to struggle with motivation, which is why I wouldn't recommend a prolonged or regular cleaning process - you're using up your energy beans. There was a chap on here a few years ago who spent two weeks (sic) detailing how he meticulously cleaned all the etches for his kit. After two weeks he lost interest, and the loco never got built. For the same reason (motivation) I wouldn't recommend a wagon or a building: build what you want to build in order to maintain motivation. There's nothing in a wagon that's inherently easier - you're only ever soldering two parts together (OK, sometimes three), whether they come from a wagon kit or a loco, so you might as well start the loco. True, there are more likely to be parts to bend on a loco, but you can practise on a piece of scrap, or get someone to help you with it.

Surely he'd have told them to rebuild elsewhere too?

More on bogies - 110 and 262, 1989