Teenage Confessions

[The Johnster]

Having brought this up in Hornby/Creating Locos From Hornby Parts topic, I suppose I'd better follow through.  If you did something like some of the dreadful bodges and cut'n'shuts I did in my formative years, this is the confessional, and you will feel better after you have confessed.  My excuse, which does not stand close examination, is that in those days the range of models available RTR was much more limited and if, like me, you didn't have the skill, equipment, or resources for kit or scratch building some ingenuity was required, along with a very tolerant attitude to scale...

 

To start you off:-

 

1) a 42xx consisting of a Hornby Dublo converted from 3 rail chassis, Airfix construction kit CoT boiler, and tanks, cab, bunker, and footplate from an Airfix construction kit 61xx.

 

2) Another 61xx, masquerading as a 5101 but too ashamed of itself to actually carry number plates., running on a heavily butchered Rovex Black Princess chassis and mechanism.

 

3) Static 43xx consisting of CoT top and 61xx running gear and cylinders, permanently coupled to a Kitmaster motorised vanfit and ballasted to ensure smooth running.  This had number plates for 4340 cut from CoT's transfers.

 

4) 56xx, another 61xx construction kit on a Jinty chassis.  Like the 42xx and the 5101, it was too ashamed of itself to have an identity.

 

Frankly, these were all complete pants, but I was very proud of them at the time, the late 60s when I was in my mid teens.  Luckily I took no photos to add to my embarrassment.  This unaccountable pride is what I am most ashamed of now.  Ok, I've bared my soul, let's have some of yours...

[chris p bacon]

There's always something that catches your eye when you skim read.

 

Coupled with the title of the thread I had to read it again.

 

 

 I suppose I'd better follow through.

 

 

 these were all complete pants,

 

 

 

 

Complete...as in ....full ?

[Martino]

Oh the shame......

 

A Wrenn 8F with the motion reduced and the cylinders carved off with Airfix prairie cylinders instead. An Airfix 61XX body. A flat front footplate. I thought it looked like a GW 2-8-0T. Of course the boiler was too small and all the dimensions wrong.

 

Thank heavens I kept all the Wrenn bits, so with new cylinders and valve gear the 8F survived and still does.

 

Let’s not consider the multiple Airfix pug bashes, even a sort of Fairley at one point.

 

....and then the Airfix diesel shunter bashed into various double hooded variants, even growing a pantograph at one point.

 

Oh, the stupidity!

[PatB]

Two Triang Big-Big coaches and a Lima power bogie pretending to be a generic DMU.

 

A Lima 4F chassis and some of its body, supplemented with some scrap plywood masquerading as something almost but not quite like a Midland Flatiron.

[devonseasider]

Another one here guilty of a similar Airfix City of Truro + Prairie morph into a 43xx, also 2 x Schools to an unlikely King Arthur, later motorised using a Hornby Dublo 2-6-4T chassis.

[Zomboid]

There's nothing to be embarrassed about here. Some of us were too scared to try anything like this - at least you had a go...

[jcm@gwr]

I cut up a Nellie/Polly, added an Airfix tank (Esso) and some

Triang Hall cylinders to create a fireless loco. I still have most

of the bits, it eventually fell apart due to using the wrong glue!

[bike2steam]

Teenage years ????????????? The first 5 were spent chasing the dying years of BR steam, then when it was over - motorcycles, girls, and booze, model railways didn't come 'till I'd burnt the candle from both ends by my late (ish) 20's. 

[chris p bacon]

For me it was just before teens and an Airfix Pug became 'Shannon' from the Sandy & Potton Railway.  This meant hacking off the cab and the saddle tank and substituting a boiler. To say it actually resembled Shannon would be....generous. . .  Luckily no trace of it remains and I've somewhat redeemed myself by making it* a little bit better than the first time although it has taken some 46 years !

 

*It's in my thread (below) 

[tomparryharry]

I still have Pollies & Nellies knocking about here. I've noticed some fantastic posts with the Electroen conversion to a Nellie. I think quite a few of us (me included) have dabbled in the 'black art of UHU'.

 

Cheers,

 

Ian.

[t-b-g]

I knew a chap called Bill Oldroyd who was a master at such things and used to write in the Railway Modeller sometimes.

 

He butchered around 500 locos if my memory serves.

 

Things like a Black 5 or a Jubilee from a Triang Princess or a V2 from "Flying Scotsman" stick in my mind but some were more ambitious!

 

One was, I think, a P2 from an A4 and another a Crosti 9F from a Britannia.

 

Some of them actually looked like what they were supposed to be.

 

At the time, we thought he was very clever as he had lots of locos that we didn't. It was a modelling skill that is largely gone now as all the locos are now to be had off the shelf as RTR, or have been.

 

Certainly nothing to be ashamed of!

Edited July 4, 2018 by t-b-g

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

The acute lack of choice in Doncaster round top boiler feedstock led to the B12 body taking the punishment.

 

A shortened B12 body on an early Princess mechanism (the very underscale wheel diameter a real aid here) made a K3. I copied the pony truck in bent brass from the H-D 8F owned by a friend.  The LNER  standard tender this required was from the Princess' Stanier tender with new sidesheets (by guesswork) from a sketch side elevation drawing that was I think from 'Ranger'.

 

An 0-6-0 of vaguely J20/J39 appearance was obtained from the B12 body on a Jinty mechanism, tender from the B12.

 

The Jinty body was shortened and massaged into some approximation of a J69 by addition of an overlay of cab and tank sides and a smooth cab roof instead of the weird 'ploughed field' look of the Triang cab roof. This ran really well because I had been given an HO 0-6-0T by Opa (Dutch grandfather) which supplied the mechanism.

 

A truly awful attempt at a Baby Deltic was made by shortening a Triang class 37 body and plonking it on a Transcontinental BoBo mechanism that I got in a swap for some Lego wheels (released on the Continent, not yet on sale in the UK, again agift from grandparents!). This did make the most incredible racket when running, so was very realistic in this one respect.

 

The Trix card Gresley coach kits were a life saver. Dirt cheap and could be cross kitted very easily to make approximations of 51' all compartment stock and end vestibule gangwayed vehicles. Nearly went cross eyed cutting out all the windows, fortunately had a good supply of scalpel blades via a family friend who was a Rothamsted researcher.These had to run on Trix Commonwealth bogies, because those were what was cheaply available too. (I only have one pair left, having sold the rest long ago and really wish I hadn't! The most free running bogies available due to the polymer used. Fitted with the MGW wheelsets which became available later they performed like nothing since. )

[The Johnster]

Oh, they're coming out of the woodwork now!  Shame on us, shame on all of us, shame!

 

I remember the Princess to Black 5 conversion in Model Railway Constructor from the mid 60s, and was tempted to have a go with one of my 3, but all were early ones without Walcheart's and I gibbed at it, that and the awkward cutting and filling needed to get rid of the splashers.  The Rovex Princess was so underscale that it actually looked not a million miles from a Black 5, from a distance without your glasses in a dark room at a glance.  This is getting uncomfortably close to justifying the conversion, and this sort of thing should be discouraged as much as possible in the interests of sanity... 

 

From about the same period in MRC, somebody cobbled a 2884 out of a Hornby Dublo Castle and the 2-8-0 chassis, which looked completely wrong as the boiler was too fat to suggest the long, low. look of the 28xx, and the cab looked very wrong, but it might have been influential to my 42xx abomination, which ran very well on it's HD ringfield chassis, incidentally.  

 

I did learn a bit about modelling from all this, mostly how not to do it, but some good experience was put under my belt.  The abominations had to be painted, lined, numbered, and the 61xx with the Princess mech was given a motor overhaul and my first experience of properly meshing gears.  I tried filling the gaps in the armature with Araldite (which is what held the abominations together by and large, acting as a filler as well) to attempt to acheive a flywheel effect; it sort of worked but, not surprisingly, put the shaft out of balance and made the motor run hot.  The project was, wisely, abandoned and the motor replaced with one from one of the other Princesses; the 3rd was 'restored' to full LMS maroon livery and given white wall tyres as a display model.  But if you learned by your mistakes, I'd be the best modeller in the world now!

 

I also fell victim at this time to 'motorisation kits' for Airfix kits; can't remember who marketed them now but you got top hat bearings to go into the Airfix chassis' axle holes, and a length of rail to act as a coupling rod, to which you were supposed to add Romford wheels, motor, and gears.  I never achieved a good runner this way, but the least stiff was the one that should have in theory been the worst, the 9F, which ran fairly well.  An Airfix Biggin Hill was another reasonable runner, but the ballast needed was not kind to the plastic running gear...

 

I am presently cobbling up a 94xx Lima/Bachmann hybrid, which I suppose has it's cultural roots in the abominations...

[Steven B]

Before the Dapol N Gauge model appeared, I attempted to make a Dogfish from a Peco grain wagon.

 

 

If you squint hard enough, and far enough away it's not too bad.....

 

 

Steven B.

[Fat Controller]

We may mock our early efforts, or cringe the photos of the results, should they exist, but at least we tried. I'm just glad that no evidence exists of my '31 to 47' conversion', where the Polyfilla I'd used to fill in the superfluous grills fell out during Llanelli's first (and probably last) model railway exhibition. I think I also managed to bury the Class 45 and 73s, built from scratch, and the H0 to 00 rebuild of a Lima Class 33.

The various Airfix conversions seem to have been inspired by a series of articles in Airfix magazine during the late 1960s; some definitely relied on a very large suspension of disbelief.

[eastglosmog]

I used to do quite bit of bashing, mainly coaches - an LMS full brake from a Triang coach was one of my better efforts.  None of it was ever good enough to waste precious film on!  However bad the results, I still had great fun doing it and am not ashamed that I tried or demolished a few perfectly good plastic models in doing it.

[giz]

First off was a Baby Deltic from a Triang Transcontinental diesel. Plastic wood as filler and the metal mesh that you used to use with Plastic Padding to repair rust on cars for the grills. The later one I built from a class 37 on Lima US bogies was finescale in comparison.

 

A Triang mk1 CK also became a Cravens dmu DTC, I never got around to the matching MBS as my Triang BSK became a class 123 vehicle instead. Two Triang Thompson BSKs then got spliced together to form a BG and an SK.

 

I still have the Thompson BG and the second Baby Deltic but the rest went years ago.

[Bill_J]

An attempt at a railmotor in n using a minitrix mk1 coach, and an adjusted fleischmann bo-bo diesel chassis. With 3 link couplings. I never managed to make anything resembling motion that would actually move.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

...I am presently cobbling up a 94xx Lima/Bachmann hybrid, which I suppose has it's cultural roots in the abominations...

Same here, having got the bug early, the vastly improved resources from current RTR and kit options make much more possible and with superior results

[jonny777]

Yes I did the Triang Princess into a Black 5 'conversion', but my botch job was not particularly convincing. 

[The Johnster]

More recently, and in my adult modelling career when I was, at least in principle, above such bodgery, I made a Collett full 3rd out of 2 Hornby composites, the early ones with the mk1 bogies, and a BG out of the remains.  I did replace the bogies, but they still sat too high, so I replaced the wheels with wagon wheels (which of course disintegrated into crumbs and chocolate) (sorry) to try and get them to match my other stock.  They were in lined BR maroon, and the BG, based on no particular prototype and branded 'EXPRESS PARCELS', attracted all sorts of favourable comments at exhibitions, and enquiries as to which kit is was.

 

A little better was a pair of Airfix construction kit Booth Rodley 35ton cranes converted to WR PD department mobile cranes, one for myself and one for a friend.  These were simply the kit with the bogies discarded and Hornby LNER pacific tender chassis substituted; they fit as if they were designed for the job.  My friends crane appeared on an exhibition layout in Cardiff earlier this year, and mine is still in a box somewhere.

Edited July 5, 2018 by The Johnster

[Classsix T]

As if Lima Deltic wheels weren't small enough already, I decided using a track rubber to clean the crud off a particularly mucky set would be a fruitless task, especially in the shoulder between wheel and flange. Dad's got a metal file in the toolbox, who needs "round" wheels?!

 

Missing traction tyres on your Airfix Cl.31 power bogie? Polystyrene cement as filler, natch!

 

Arrgh! My Hornby 47 needs a Stratford stylee grey roof, slap the paint on thick enough first time, no need for primer or faffing about waiting for multiple coats to dry. You weren't bothered about moulding detail were you? (I subsequently used Model Strip on that Duff, halved its weight, width and height I reckon.)

 

C6T.

[Talltim]

a good supply of scalpel blades via a family friend who was a Rothamsted researcher.

Are you from Harpenden?

[Northmoor]

My efforts weren't in the cut-n-shut category but painting, most definitely in the you-need-to-use-a-smaller-brush category.

 

I repainted a Lima Plymouth in red as a generic industrial, changed my mind about the colour then stripped it using Nitromors.  I forgot about it for about 45 minutes.....

 

I also went through a spell of repainting 1980s BR diesels and coaches in some futuristic private sector liveries.  I have (not using Nitromors this time) stripped the 33 that was in Red with grey cabs but still have the Mk2D FO in some weird cream/green/red stripe livery.  Terrible (but still better than South Western Railway's new creation, which looks like an accident on a Powerpoint training course).

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

First off was a Baby Deltic from a Triang Transcontinental diesel...

So now we only need 8 more and that's the full class number by this method. I was contemplating a better effort from carved Lima 37 body on modified Bach 20 mechanism, but then the Danes pulled off a surprise move, and scored, big time. The only diesel bashes still running are a modified Hornby NBL type 2 body and frame parts shrouding a lightly filed Bach Derby type 2 mech, and of course old Airfix Brush type 2 bodies on cheaply iobtained current Hornby mechs with mazak rotted ends.

Before the Dapol N Gauge model appeared, I attempted to make a Dogfish from a Peco grain wagon...

 Now that example of trimming down reminds me that I still operate quite a number of the Airfix GMR origin '9 plank' twin side door 21T coal wagons, modified to better resemble the LNER design loco coal wagons. The top plank is sawn off, and a number have had the side drop doors replaced with cupboard doors. These could be scooped up cheaply s/h once upon a day; just what we want for the hacking and slashing.

 

Are you from Harpenden?

A little further East, WGC. The joy of ECML rather than the dreary filth of the Midland. It was hard to believe that the same BR operation ran both outfits, somewhat like today's 'postcode lottery'. I have mentioned this before, as a small boy I really thought the grey brown of LMR locos was a livery. 'Ours' were recognisably black or green. (I was too young to be about late enough to see the awful truth of what ran the freight hauls.)

Edited July 5, 2018 by 34theletterbetweenB&D