A lot has happened since the last blog entry. In modelling terms, most of it has been a right pain in the backside. I used to think I'd got this chassis building lark sussed, but the prairie has been one tough cookie. On the plus side, my expletive vocabulary and ability to use them has increased tenfold.
At the end of the last entry, I was struggling to get the chassis to run true and I'd come to the conclusion that the rods weren't the same as the wheel centres. I'd tried to pin the wheels after quartering them but that lot ended up in the reject bin.
So I bought a Chassis Pro jig and some Gibson universal rods and started again. I was reassured that the chassis and hornblocks were perfectly square (must have done something right there) so I persevered with the Brassmasters sprung hornblocks and duly made up the rods to match. After I'd replaced my soldering iron first of course because that died the day the chassis jig arrived. Sheesh. New wheels duly arrived but could I get it to run. Could I hell. After many, many, many hours I tracked it down to quartering. All sorted. Then when cutting off the front crank pin I somehow overheated everything and the pin moved and reset itself thus no longer matching the crank pin throw of the other wheels and no longer matching the precious wheel centres. Thankfully one of the previous wheels was reclaimed and fettled. Success.
After many more hours I've finally got something that just about works. Unfortunately the connecting rods are just fouling the slide bars but I think I can sort that by off setting the slide bars half a millimetre or so. Annoying because I'd forgotten this dodge until I'd finished assembling the cylinder arrangement in the first place and wondered if I'd need it later... In P4 there are fag papers in terms of clearances anyway so every little helps.
So, the pony trucks have been fitted and everything plonked on a bit of track to see how things will look. The body work has had a few fittings added but I'll wait until I get the chassis built before I return to the body.
I will get there and it will be worth it. And I will always remember what I had to do to get a 35 year old model to run again. Thankfully I won't have to do it again.