DavidK71

Those are very nice indeed. How did you do the curved rainstrips on the roof? They look really good.

After looking round, I must admit that I can't remember where I saw a picture of a Collett coach with a more centred tank. Sigh ... I did notice though that there are photographs of the roof of Collett BCK 6705 at http://www.wssrt.co.uk/the-heritage-carriages-project/pictures-of-no-6705-from-2008 that are similarly very off centre, so the one you photographed is very unlikely to be non-standard.

I like the idea of a coach without filler pipes a lot!

That looks fantastic. The filler pipes in particular are really good: my wire ones have always looked "too 3D" to me, being much bigger than the scale pipe ought to be.

On the subject of the water tanks, after looking at photos of other GWR coaches I'm pretty sure those etches were drawn to match earlier Collett coaches, which definitely have a more nearly central filler cap. Hopefully Alan can be persuaded to redraw them if/when he re-introduces his Hawksworths.

I look forward to seeing the coach all painted up! It was -2C in the area where I spray paint when I checked a few days ago, so I think it's coach construction work for me until the spring ...

They are the short spring, small step variant used for NPCS.

Oooh, those could prove useful. Is there any chance you'd be prepared to make the artwork available so anyone else could get these etched, too?

The 3 arc profile is horrible to roll.

I was afraid of that! I think I will have to give it a try, then think of something else when that doesn't work ...

That looks lovely, despite your difficulties. The problem of how to do rainstrips has been taxing me recently, as I'd like to make several LMS period 2 coaches, but nothing looks good enough. My current plan is to hope that 3d printing soon gets good enough to handle this. I also have an etch of a GWR full brake with an etched roof that I periodically look at before losing the courage to try to roll it ...

Looks good, especially the lining. Is the lining good enough that you'll be using it in preference to transfer lining in future?

Very nice indeed - I like your corridor connectors a lot.

I'm using Evostick Impact for gluing important bits together, and a slow setting superglue for small parts. This has generally worked for me in the past, though I've never built a carriage before.

Thanks for that - I have been intermittently worrying about these issues, but your comments made me realise I need to decide what to do. Some thin styrene strips are on order to pack against the edges of the floor chassis. I'm also struck that it might be a good idea to glue some pieces of 1mm plastic rod vertically to the inside of the ends, to give a much bigger surface area to glue the sides to. More experimentation needed... Oh for an infinite supply of kits to test on!

Good to see another fan of Hawksworth in 2mm . I've enjoyed reading about your class 22, so I'm looking forward to this.

By the way, I found that if I glued a length of 1mm square plastic rod underneath the locating lumps on the back of the ends then they lined up with the floor nicely. That also has the advantage of allowing them to be very firmly glued into place.

I will be interested to see how you get on with your plan for fixing the sides and ends and having the roof removable. While the ends can be firmly attached, I've found that I'm not so confident of the sides - they only end up being properly supported by the ends. One thing I want to consider for the next coach I do is to bend up the floor so that the angle is slightly more than 90 degrees, so that the lip of the bent-up floor also acts as a support for the sides, rather than sitting about 0.25mm further in. Whether this is pratical or not remains to be seen. For the current coach I've gone too far to attempt this now, so I will glue the roof to the ends and then the sides to both the ends and the roof.