B Set bodging
So your passengers have become a little hacked off from travelling in a DMU one to many times, moaning about the whining of the engine and the uncomfortable seats. What do you do? Ignore them, they are only plastic after all!, or panda to their whims???
Now lets leave my little fantasy land for reality (it's not as nice here). At the 2mm expo I tried a quick and dirty conversion on a pair of Dapol "B Set" coaches replacing the wheel sets to increase the stock that I had to use. On the whole this was not very successful. The wheel sets that I really needed to do the job don't exist, so I bodged using some wagon wheels. This allowed for some running but overall was not a satisfactory solution. Realising this at the time I picked up a pair of plate bogie etches. The first pair of these flew together today and is now attached to one of the coaches.
I choose to use 9ft wheel base etches, mainly as these were available to purchase. The difference that these make to the model is reasonable (having the correct sized wheels in also helps ).
Left hand - new bogies Right hand - Existing bogies
Now I have sorted the bogies on the first coach I now need to get round to doing the second one. Once these are done then I might think about filling in the window that should not be there and changing the outer buffers to longer ones.
Changing the bogies also means that I need to consider the coupling mechanism. Now the real things used screwlink couplings. Could I make these work in 2mm? With their Hymek, Dapol supply various pipes and couplings including a pair of dummy screwlinks. I have been playing about with these and a CCT amazingly they work, when being hauled. When being pushed though the coupling slips off. There appears to be some potential here I feel. A small tiny bit of sprung wire over the top of the hook might solver this issue. If this is the case then this may well provide a suitable method of coupling especially if I go down the 3 link route for freight.
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