DavidK71

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.

Thanks for this, and for the advice on the filler pipes. I will experiment further with the wire, and look into microstrip too.

More progress: the coach now has a roof: As it came in the kit, the roof had a small bit of damage on one side, where it attached to the sprue. One of the first things I did on the kit was to clean this up by filling the affected part with Humbrol filler and then carefully sanding it back down. At the time this seemed like a pain but I'm glad that I did: while the area of damage on the lip of the roof can be found by looking very carefully, it's much better than it was. One eBay purchase that I'm really pleased with is the hand-held Archimedes drill I used to drill the holes for the roof vents. My initial thought on reading the instructions was "How am I going to drill holes that small?" but a fortunate search on eBay solved the problem: with the drill I can hold the roof steady with one hand while using the drill with the other. Possibly everyone else already knows about these but I was impressed 🙄 The roof was sprayed with white primer underneath (to give a passable version of the gloss white ceiling of the prototype), grey primer on top, and then Halfords light grey bumper paint over that. The colour is actually a bit lighter than it appears in the photograph, due to less than ideal photographing conditions today. One source of problems with the roof has been the etched header tank: the instruction diagram (and Kris' photos from earlier in this thread) show the header tank over the non-corridor side of the coach, as you would expect, but this leaves the filler cap in line with the roof vents, rather than the coach centreline, as it should be. Either the etch isn't quite right or I've mis-understood something - to me the filler cap should be more off-centre relative to the tank than it is in the etch. I've dealt with this by moving the header tank slightly towards the centreline, which shouldn't be too obvious. Discussion of the header tank leads to a question for you all: the instructions describe forming the tank filler pipes from the supplied wire, but has anyone done this and been happy with the result? Despite several attempts I've not produced anything that I'm happy with. The real filler pipes follow the roof and side profiles very closely and are quite unobtrusive, but my attempts with wire sit too proud of the body, and also aren't particularly symmetrical. I'm debating whether it would be better to leave them off or not. Work has now started on the last major thing: the sides. I've added a very slight tumblehome to the sides by the slightly scary process described in the instructions. It's possible I've been too chicken in doing this, but a recent inspection of the real coaches at Didcot reminded me that the tumblehome is very minor.

A little bit more progress over the weekend, resulting in the interior being finished: The seats are folded pieces of coloured paper and seem to work quite well, though possibly I should have used a darker colour on the paper. The partitions have had a piece of plastic rod glued to the base and that, along with the seats, make them much easier to get into place than just having them balance on their edge. Lots of testing and trimming with the roof was needed to get everything fitting nicely, but the result is pleasing. On the embarrassing mistake front, note that two of the partitions are a little too short - I accidentally trimmed the bottom edge rather than the side, as I had intended. D'oh ... Also, for future reference it's well worth keeping the etched sides nearby to check that the partitions are in the right place relative to the windows in the sides - I nearly had a nasty mistake there. Next up: the roof.

Yes, I was struck that your carmine looked quite a bit deeper, though it is all hugely dependent on lighting levels and so on. That is in fact what I've done: I couldn't figure out any other sensible way to try to do it. I did want to try the red over a red primer, but that makes masking a problem.

Time for a status update. I have the usual modelling condition: I've not got as much done as I intended, and I've spent longer experimenting than anything else. Sigh. Anyway, I've got the bogies painted, and I've sorted out my coupling problems, I hope: Each bogie has attached to it a cut-down Peco ELC wagon coupler, glued to a piece of plasticard to get it to stick out far enough. For now the coupler mounts are only attached with blu-tac: I want to get a second coach and see how the gap works out round corners before permanently gluing them in place. The underframe has also partially been painted, and I've been playing with the interior, figuring out how it all fits together. However, most time has gone into worrying about painting the etched sides. The plan is for carmine-and-cream livery. Precisely what colour or colours this might be is a controversial subject, judging by all the existing threads on the the topic, and I've no desire to get too involved: my plan is to find a pair of colours that I like, and go with that. I started by digging out from a cupboard the remains of an Airfix Blenheim kit (an outdated model of a rather outdated aircraft, even in its time) and have been trying different colours and finishes. The first result is that brush painting just isn't good enough: not really a huge surprise. That left me contemplating buying an airbrush, or experimenting with aerosol cans. I can see that in the long term airbrushing is the way to go, but for now, I've chosen to play with aerosols. Below is a wing sprayed with Vauxhall Gazelle Beige and Vauxhall Crimson: For comparison, the tip of the wing has been brush painted with Railmatch BR Crimson. The cream / beige doesn't look bad at all. The Vauxhall Crimson is quite nice too, but the Railmatch colour looks very "plum" to me. This bit of plastic accompanied me to Didcot Railway Centre on Saturday, where it was compared against their autocoach. The red isn't bad, but it's not quite "blood" enough. I've got some Alfa-Romeo AR530 paint on order and we'll see how that works out. If I don't like it I'll go with the Vauxhall Crimson Also worth mentioning is that this wing was my first attempt, using grey primer. Although the photograph doesn't show it well, there is a certain "greyness" to the cream that isn't quite right. A second wing piece using white primer gave a rather better colour, but there I made the mistake of holding the aerosol too far away: I got an 'orange peel' effect in the paint, presumably from it partially drying while travelling between the nozzle and the plastic. My best results come from holding the aerosol about 20cm away, initially not pointing at the part to be painted, start spraying then move over the part with a smooth back and forth action twice. More experiments to follow...

Thanks - painting will be an interesting challenge, and one I will do a post on when I've got a bit further. I recently read your posts on the TPM full brake conversion and thought you got a nice finish on the sides on that. I was worried that using aerosols would give too thick a paint layer, but your results have encouraged me to try some experiments, and after a few practice runs on spare bits of old plastic model kits I've found that I can get a very thin primer layer with a Hycote car paint aerosol. Further experiments this week, with a bit of luck 😀

Thanks Michael. I'd like to have a look at this, but I couldn't find it on eBay: do you have an auction number for them? I tried searching in the "Railway Models" section of eBay for "Howarth" but got no hits.

Thank you to everyone who has made suggestions or provided encouragement. Building this is proving quite challenging but is also a lot of fun: if anyone out there like me is wondering if they've got the skills to do this, you should give it a go! Thank you for those, they're very helpful: most of the photographs I've found on the Internet are from further away, so it's good to see the sides and underframe up close. I'm also pleased to see I got the shell vents on the right way round 🙄. I shall look into that. For the moment I've separated the Peco ELC coupler mounts I've been using from the bogie, and have re-attached them on the outside of the bogie. So far this is looking promising. Yes, you could well be right there. I wasn't brave enough to try drilling out the holes for the bearings on my first bogie attempt, but in retrospect it is worth giving it a go. I think that when I get round to doing another of these coaches I'll order an extra set of bogies to have a go with and see what happens. The weight is a concern, and Bernard's comment makes me think I might get away without seats. I'm also considering simply printing a suitable pattern on a sheet of stiff A4 paper, from which I could cut out and fold simple seat shapes. Lots of experimentation ahead ...

Thank you for the kind comment. Also, yes please to the photographs, that would be very helpful.

I've recently embarked on my first N gauge coach kit, having previously only tackled simple wagon kits. The chosen model is an Ultima kit of a GWR Hawksworth corridor brake third, intended to be finished in carmine and cream. The eventual idea is to produce a whole rake of Hawksworth coaches, though I suspect that this will take me as long as Swindon took to build the real things. As I've never tackled such a project before I looked around on the Internet for advice or details of anyone attempting anything similar, but I didn't find very much. This thread is my attempt to detail what I found out by working on this: what follows might be of use to another beginner, but is not going to surprise any of the kit experts round here. With that out of the way, where have I got to? First up were the bogies, done from Ultima's GWR 9ft GWR coach bogie etch. These were made by gluing the axleboxes onto the etched bogies while they were still flat, turning the bogies over, drilling out the axle holes a little, then folding up the bogies into the final shape. The result: I left out the top hat bearings as being too fiddly to get into place, and this doesn't seem to have caused any problems: the bogies run very smoothly just in the holes in the axle boxes. Lesson one for the future: I should have drilled out the axle boxes a little more: in order to get the wheels to run free, the sides of the bogie are not quite vertical (which is more noticeable on the right hand bogie). The couplers are Peco ELC wagon couplings, with the mounts filed down to fit inside the bogies. I was very pleased with myself for getting that to work, but we'll come back to that in a moment ... All in all the bogies aren't perfect, but I'm happy with them as a first attempt. The next stage was to fold up the floor, attach the underframe details, the ends and the bogie mounts to give a rolling frame. The V hangars on the brake end didn't seem to be in the right place, as compared with both the Comet 4mm kit and a photograph of the real thing, so this were carefully removed from the etch of the truss rods and moved to approximately the right place. Lesson two for the future: be careful when attaching the dynamo to the underframe, as it can foul the bogie if it's too close to the end. The dynamo in the above is now slightly bent to provide enough clearance, though fortunately this isn't visible unless you turn the coach upside down. As a quick test, the sides and roof where put in place with blu-tac to check alignment (and with the roof the wrong way round, sigh 😠 Taking this photo I was feeling pretty pleased with how it was going, when it suddenly dawned on me that there's a rather obvious error. When fitting the couplers inside the bogie I'd tested with the floor resting on top of the bogies to check that the coupler protruded beyond the floor, but I'd failed to take into account the additional width of the ends, buffers and corridor connectors. As can be seen from the above photograph, there's no way two such coaches could be coupled together: the coupler is tucked far too much under the frame. Sound of palm hitting forehead ... So, lesson three for the future: make sure that the coupler sticks out far enough. If I can remove the glued on coupler mount I will try a scheme of gluing the mount on the outside of the bogie, rather than the inside, which should give sufficient clearance: if that fails it may be necessary to carve up an old Farish bogie or similar for its spring-loaded mount and glue that on. Aside from bogie woes, the next challenge will be to paint the underframe and build an interior. Are seats necessary? The coach won't be lit, so I'm not sure, though I see that P&D Marsh sell some white metal compartment seats which sound useful. I think that I'll assemble the interior and see how much is visible with the sides on first. Beyond that we get into painting the roof and sides, for which I suspect I shall need to invest in an airbrush. Gulp.