Halvarras

50 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

You mean like this:

 

It's painted yellow now as it's intended as  Blue Circle-liveried loco, but still unfinished (also needs couplings, glazing and some sort of cab interior.  The two biggest improvements you can make to these models are to reduce the size of the radiator grille and shorten the whole model, especially the cab.

Oi, cut it out! Never mind "stumbling across one", at this rate you'll have me going out in search of one 😀!!

You're right about the exhaust, and nothing wrong with keeping it like that. I'll probably remove it and insert a piece of brass tubing somewhere, just to be different.........er, I mean I would do that, if  I were to stumble across one I went out in search of........[I think I need therapy!]

Nice though, I like that.

The separate brake shoes and rodding on the B5 bogies of my POT stowage van (39-755) may have been a detail improvement but it arrived with damaged rodding and attempts to repair it were undone again by the packaging. I got a bit cheesed off with it and the inner shoes and rodding are now in a zip bag. I may fix it one day but one of the shoes broke so.......

5 hours ago, Darius43 said:

Decals (Railtec) placed and light weathering to finish 😀

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers

 

Darius

And I didn't believe building and finishing an MTK kit within one week was even remotely possible. Shows what I know......😬

An excellent job Sir, once again!

Had I been able to get the fake jackshaft idea to work those very shallow footsteps all round would have grated - I mean, imagine a 4mm crew member trying to climb them. So I thickened them up with 60thou then drilled and filed out all 12 openings - that kept me occupied for a couple of hours....actually I thought it would have taken far longer, but I got into the swing of it, so to speak! The steps were then backed with 10thou.

I felt that before going any further I had to check whether the Hornby chassis could be shortened to fit between the bufferbeams, and this is where the scrap chassis came into play. The thick  flexible plastic used by Hornby in years past is quite tough and difficult to saw - however it yields to the brutal use of a Stanley knife fitted with a new blade! Try that on a 'Nellie' chassis! 

I was pleased to find that, when shortened to just fit within the bufferbeams, the inside ledges at each end sit on top of the chassis frames and it looks just about right:

Overall height compared to other stock is OK; the buffers are a little too high (well it IS Tri-ang!), however the weedy tapered buffer stocks - which I believe were never fitted with buffers in clockwork form - need replacing so mounting the new buffers slightly lower down would be the easiest way to resolve this. 

So the butchery to the scrap chassis shows what I need to do to the new one - but more carefully! Sawing and filing may work better on this as the Chinese chassis appears to be made from a harder, more rigid kind of plastic, but as far as I can tell they are both products from the same tooling. I think this needs to be tackled next since, if I really can't get the chassis and especially the 90-degree-turned motor to fit, further work on the body would be futile and I have lots of other things to be getting on with instead! However last night I couldn't resist fitting the front radiator grille from a Lima Class 08/09 - it's not glued in yet and I may bring it out flush with the front. I have some spare etched brass grilles - mostly twin - left over from a couple of A1 Models Class 22 conversion kits (appropriately NBL then!) but at the moment I'm undecided about the bonnet side detail. Also coupling fitment and body-to-chassis securing need some thought......

I have an idea about its final appearance, but as it involves 'wasp stripes' it will depend on the length of the journey between now and then!

On April 11th I mentioned that I'd landed an old Tri-ang clockwork NBL 'D2907' shunter body and it was "in the queue". It was supposed to be a 'next winter' project. Yeah right, that resolve crumbled within a week.....it did a bit of leap-froggin'!

Here's the body with a next-to-scrap chassis-in-bits obtained at the same time to see how it might work. 

Other than for sizing purposes the chassis was a lost cause - motor was described as a runner, and so it was.....once I'd taken it apart to remove a coupling rod pin trapped inside the can. Then it barely ran and was clearly in the final throes of life. A couple of wheels were a bit wobbly and the quartering all over the place - I fixed the latter at least. The Johnson X908 motor on its side is too wide to fit within the shunter's narrow bonnet, but it would if it could be turned 90 degrees......

A body with a lot of work expended on it would be deserving of better running gear, so an Ebay trawl for something fitted with a younger X908 motor turned up this mint and apparently unused survivor from very early 1977, at what I considered a reasonable price by Ebay standards these days:

To put this in some kind of perspective, the day before this model was packed I'd seen D1022 'Western Sentinel' passing Wootton Bassett Junction on what turned out to be its last-ever working out of Paddington!

So, fantastic find then......er, yes and no. Ignoring the square axles, which I could live with for 'low mileage' use, it waddles like a duck and when the motor heats up it shorts out. Oh well, having survived for 47 years this typically late '70s Hornby product will continue to live on as I've taken a shine to it for some reason. Or maybe it's pity.......

I've come to the conclusion that the Johnson X908 motor must just deteriorate with age so seeking another one is probably pointless. Plan B - obtain a new Chinese-made 0-4-0 chassis from Lendons of Cardiff for a tenner. This runs extremely well, but the can motor is wider of girth, if a bit shorter than the X908, and turning this one 90 degrees it's a very tight fit, even if the soldered motor connections are rearranged, so some interior gouging may be required - I'm wary of widening the bonnet as this would adversely impact my intentions for the cab windows. But I've decided to press on anyway with fingers crossed that this combination of silk-purse-from-sow's-ear and square-peg-into-round-hole can be made to work.

First 2-3 hours of butchery in my quest to make this thing look more 'NBL':

You'll notice that it's now shorter at both ends, which immediately changes its overall appearance. And that I've made provision for a jackshaft drive..... Yes, I'd had this idea to shorten the steam loco connecting rods, turn these around and solder them to the coupling rods to face backwards to non-existent jackshaft drives behind the cab steps. This turned out to be hopelessly optimistic because, even if I hadn't backed the steps on all four corners with 60thou plasticard, clearances would still have been too tight for comfort. At this point I decided that the model would represent a one-off prototype (that NBL somehow found the money to build, possibly in a last-ditch attempt to win export orders - that sound you can hear is a barrel bottom being scraped!) that used a similar engine/transmission arrangement to that employed by YEC on their Class 02 diesel-hydraulic. Perfect (excuse). So most of the curved bits were cut away. But why did I glue the 60thou backing on in the first place.....?

A lot of creativity going on here with a model I'd almost forgotten about! I particularly like the Lima/Hornby Class 06 cab combo, inspired and very neatly done too 👍!

I shouldn't really be looking at this as I'm currently having more than enough fun with an old Tri-ang NBL shunter. Knowing my luck I'll now stumble across one of these Lima locos in the near future and be unable to resist - after all it was (almost) numbered as an NBL shunter itself so there is a (very tenuous) link between the two. 

Perhaps not surprisingly when you consider the Western's cab windscreen design and what happens to the scooped airflow, the Class was subject to various windscreen wiper experiments to try to alleviate the problem of them lifting at speed. Most of these were applied to more than one example, but D1045 got one all to itself - the secondman's side wipers were moved from the top of the screens to a central position at the bottom - a modification it carried to the end, unlike the other test subjects. Why the secondman's side and not the driver's is a good question - perhaps the experiment was to see whether the low wiper positioning one side would reduce the pressure on the other and keep the driver's blade on the screen. While the other experiments involved additional equipment which would later be removed, D1045's arrangement probably survived because it was a simple change and only on the secondman's side, so didn't affect the driver's primary field of vision. Just educated guessing though!

I'll leave you to decide how best to cope with that on the model!

Regarding D1026's 1974 Laira repaint, I managed to photograph this at Reading on 29th June 1974, clearly just out of Laira as the exhaust soot on the roof only went one way! Only very much later would I discover that, had the loco been the other way round, I would have immediately noticed that it was missing its BR double-arrow logo! (That may not be good news either if Dapol printing is difficult to budge, but it wasn't long collecting a logo so there's an escape clause!)

Also I note that D1001 is on your Western list, I have a question mark over this one as somewhere in my spotting notes around 1973/4 I made a remark that it was missing a number plate! I think this was in Cornwall and never seeing it like this again and with no confirmation from elsewhere I'm wondering whether the plate was only absent for that one day and was refitted upon D1001's return to Laira. A point of interest, safely ignored for your purposes (unless you happen to lose a number plate.....😜!)

1 hour ago, Darius43 said:

The right colour sequence, quick drying paint and careful masking.

 

- Cab front first: Halfords white primer followed by a couple of light coats of Halfords Mustard Yellow.  Leave for two hours.

- Mask the cab with paper barrier pieces to minimise masking tape (Tamiya) contact with the yellow.

- Airbrush the roof with thinned Humbrol Matt 106.

- Wait an hour then spray with Army Painter Matt Varnish.

- Mask the roof (previous cab masking stays in place)and the inside of the cab (to guard for overspray) then airbrush thinned Phoenix Rail Blue enamel to the sides and ends.

 

Cheers

 

Darius

Many thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule (!) to explain how you manage to achieve the seemingly impossible - it doesn't seem that impossible when explained like that! Very interesting. 

Right, I'll let you get on then......😜!

7 hours ago, Darius43 said:

Coach bodies painted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers

 

Darius

Looking really good already, although it beats me how you managed to get three different colours applied in a matter of hours. Especially since one of them is yellow......!

7 hours ago, Downendian said:

I’ve yet to fit the lifting rings which is not a job I’m looking forward to having recently done a Hymek, but I have a few of the Kernow weathered examples which have these fitted.

 

Oh no, not the dreaded Dapol lifting rings?! I finally got around to adding these to Bachmann Class 43 D865 (now D840) and Dapol Western a few months ago. With a fine wire 'tool' the Warship was fairly straightforward and I didn't need to use any of the four spares provided - they pass through the roof so I secured them from inside with Glue n Glaze PVA adhesive. Then I got D1056 Western Sultan out.......metal and tiny, they don't project into the body so no internal gluing, and no spares - seriously?!* I created another tool - a drill bit small enough to fit through the hole in the lifting ring embedded in the end of a cotton bud stem, but despite switching to superglue for speed and my best efforts it was a 'mare - one inevitably vanished after I thought I'd secured it and had to be replaced with one of the Warship's spares. I then moved on to a second Western but although I've fitted D1012 with cab vents (A1 Models Class 24 etched cab roof vents) so far I've resisted the temptation to fit those darn rings, thus avoiding another outbreak of blue air in my modelling den. (And I thought melting the etched lamp irons into the ends of Heljan Westerns with a soldering iron was dodgy!!) D1056 is 1967 and D1012 1974 so they won't be seen together, that's my excuse. By the way, I discovered that the  footsteps below the cab doors can be fitted if the bogie-fitted dangling pipework on the secondman's corners is removed - there's just enough bogie swing clearance. Depends on one's track curvature and priorities....... I also found the brake rodding can snag on the air tanks behind the bufferbeam, solved with some minor trimming.

(Since you are well versed in details I take it you are aware of D1045's peculiarity......?)

*I believe recent releases come with spare lifting rings.......?

3 hours ago, Covkid said:

As has been said D5218 never had the underframe valances but also had a much more see through underframe.  Bachmann's class 25 was a welcome breath of fresh air back then but still has issues- which Shawplan etches won't resolve.  We know the cab shape is wrong and the underframe is wrong, but Bachmann used the class 24 design cast alloy air filters in the bodysides. These were subtly different to the class 25 filters which flush framed and slightly recessed grilles. I suspect that etched hinge straps on the bodyside of the Bachmann 25 would exacerbate the discrepancy 

Agreed - although the Bachmann 25 was a revelation in some ways upon release, not least its running quality, the underframe treatment was not vastly different to the way Hornby had tackled it, which was a disappointment. Also those Class 24-style grilles are just another reason why some modellers, including those in the esteemed 'emgauge70s' group, have preferred to use Hornby bodies on Bachmann chassis. Quite an endorsement for a bodyshell tooled up a quarter of a century earlier!

I nearly did so myself when I only planned to model 5180, but a decision to add D7657 meant the two locos would have looked too different, so I relented. My 5180 is based on Bachmann's 25034 so I've had to carry out the gangway door mods, as well as remove the train heating boiler water tank (with roof mods) and create the later exhaust port (the real 5180 had this done as early as 1967) which freed up the original round port to transfer to D7657, followed by a swap of boiler grilles/blanks. I'm aware of their shortcomings but both locos now having these details corrected is why I won't be replacing them. And each only cost me £50 brand new too.....

7 hours ago, Darius43 said:

Test dolly completed - hopefully a bit better than the MTK supplied parts.

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers

 

Darius

I'm sort of glad you've partially hidden this peculiarly unsettling sight under the trailer........every time I looked at it I kept thinking  "exploded steam loco boiler" 😲! [Shudder!!]

This reminds me - and because thread drift can be fun 😁 - that Traction magazine celebrated Issue no 1 with a string of images showing Class 44  1, Class 45s 11 & 111, Class 47 1111 and Class 04 11111 (being devoid of serifs the latter almost resembled a bar code...... "What's a bar code?", says 11111's 1950s BR driver. Ah, you need an optical scanner to........oh never mind 🤭)

9 hours ago, F-UnitMad said:

Something in the dim recesses of my mind is telling me that 31 111 was nicknamed 'sticks' by Spotters back in the day? IIRC it was the only loco under TOPS that had 4 '1's in a row.

Certainly true of diesels (can't confirm or deny the nickname, not 'my' region), although when the Class 91 electrics were modified and renumbered 91 011 became 91 111. 31 111 had probably been despatched by then though (I know very little about '91s'..........and now I come to think about it I don't think I ever actually saw one!!)

Gosh, you have been busy. Again!

Several steps up from press studs, that's for sure 😃! Methinks this one is going to look spectacular.........

4 hours ago, Fredo said:

Hi, looking forward to the new upgraded Class 25’s. I know Bachmann made D5218 in BR Blue with a small yellow warning for Model Zone way in the past, do you think it may reappear with the new tooling? Fred

And D5021 also Bsyp with BR lion-and-wheel emblem using their new tooling - twin pack material 😉?! Maybe not, thinking of the £......

Regarding Model Zone's D5218, this model was a disappointment because it used the tooling for the BR Blue '25' with welded-up end gangway doors, as well as boiler compartment grille blanks (I did a straight repaint of a Hornby model years ago and it was more accurate!) Kernow's weathered two-tone green Class 24 D5072 suffered similarly with an incorrect later 'de-valanced' underframe and those blanks again. I've often wondered whether these glaring errors were done deliberately for some reason...........anyway, hopefully any future releases of these subjects would be taken more seriously.

I built an MTK Hawksworth SK kit as W1719W in blue/grey in the late 1990s (have previously posted a pic elsewhere on RMweb, probably MTK thread), I would certainly buy a Hornby one myself to accompany my Kernow blue D600 'Active'.  I've considered the possibility of repainting one but the chances of getting the glazing out without damage*, and even if I could refitting it without cracking the paint around most if not every window opening (because the glazing fits so tightly), puts me off the idea. As does 'simply' masking off all those windows - no thanks!

As a stand-in I have a Hornby maroon Hawksworth SK for the catering trolley service, as illustrated on page 33 of 'The Heyday of the Hydraulics', D604 'Cossack' at Redruth with 1V33 down 'Cornishman' on 19th August 1967 with one of these immediately behind the loco (D604 must have been just days away from its 3-month South Wales holiday).

*Many of these models exhibit 'dimpling' on the lower sides where excessive glue has softened the thin shell!

4 hours ago, Darius43 said:

Coach end joints filled and blended into the bodywork.

 

 

 

 

 

Roof ribbing scribed in place.

 

 

Cheers

 

Darius

Already?!

Reminds me that maybe 35 years ago now somebody handed me a pair of thick plastic Derby Lightweight bodyshells (presumably Kirdon....??) with a request to see if I could create this Ultrasonic Test Unit on Hornby Class 110 chassis. The mission was accomplished, despite having few photos to work from - consequently the wheelskate thingy was basic but it looked the part as a layout model. I finished it in blue full yellow livery but can't recall much else about it now, especially how I tackled the transfers, other than I somehow managed with what was available at the time.

I often wonder whether the multitude of models I completed during the 1970s and 1980s, either for myself and subsequently passed on, or following requests like this one, are still out there somewhere. One of the reasons I kept an eye on Hattons pre-owned listings, just in case. Needless to say it never happened......!

30 minutes ago, zr2498 said:

Might get a 6 To 4 while I'm waiting for a 25.

Clue: Chicago

Ta-daaaaa!

I saw these vans working up through Cornwall quite often in the early 1970s, always at the head of the 6B59 Ponsandane to Tavistock Junction freight service. The topic @Downendian links to above suggests that these were in use for National Carriers Ltd (NCL) traffic. I took very few photos which included them but here are a couple dated 21st & 23rd May 1975 when 25306 was in charge on both days - first approaching Saveock, the summit between Chacewater and Truro, and then passing 47247 on the down 1B45 ('CRE' I believe) at Truro.

The first shot appears to be a Diagram 800 followed by two 801s......

......and this one has two 801s followed by two 800s. I think!

Another lovely job, and a change from the usual BR green and blue (one door excepted!)

May I enquire as to your reasoning for completing the two vehicles separately in this way? Back in 1997/8 I converted two Hornby Class 29s into Class 22s using A1 Models conversion kits but I deviated considerably from the instructions (including using chassis from Lima South African overhead electrics) - I knew 'doing it my way' was going to create a lot of extra work and that if I did them one at a time the second one may never get finished as I couldn't face doing all that again, so they were worked on side-by-side. This had the advantage of batch-producing the Plastruct and Plasticard parts (which you may have done here of course) so although they took around 9 months to finish I felt doing them 'in parallel' rather than 'in series', as it were, was both quicker and easier overall. In my case one was finished in green and the other in blue, so it didn't matter too much if the surface finishes differed slightly, but with a 2-car unit using the method you've employed with this project I'd be concerned that the surface finishes may not match - due to slightly different paint/varnish thinning, different atmospheric conditions, etc.

You do seem to achieve a consistent finish with your MTK output so I'm sure it will be fine, but I'm still still curious about your 'one then the other' approach to this build - personally I may have found my motivation for Round 2 somewhat lacking 😊!

45 minutes ago, Southernman46 said:

Wasn't there a 31 with no headcode box at just one end ?

31215 - took 'skinhead' Class 31 to a whole new level.....!

(Flickr pic)

31111 donated a cab to 31444 which had started out as 5555.

Just thought I'd drop that mind-boggling piece of information in here 🤪!

3 hours ago, brushman47544 said:

 

 

That looks like the previous Heljan model, not the new one.

Plastic cab door handrails = early release too. Ex-47059?

Some more Tri-ang and Hornby Dublo chassis and parts up for grabs at Elaine's emporium this morning:

https://elaines-trains.co.uk/index.php?pg=new

Keeping an eye on Elaine's Trains website has become my new 'addiction' following the loss of Hattons, because you never know what's going to appear.......such as that Tri-ang clockwork NBL shunter body I mentioned last Thursday. Probably the wrong course of action then for somebody desperately trying to avoid adding new projects to The Pile..........🤭 

However from time to time parts come up which could assist with completing projects already in that Pile and push them along the path to completion - that's my excuse anyway!