Wayne 37901

Hi Marc, Glad to hear that Roath Minor will be at Cardiff, I'll be sure to pop over for a chat... Have you any new pics that you could post up? It's always good to have something to look at. Cheers, Wayne... Who's finally making good progress with Dragon Steels

Hi Jim, You're probably right, however there is a method to my madness in using the Grampus body. The new reinforcememnt follows the pattern of the original Grampus albeit slighty heavier and I didnt fancy trying to figure out the locations from scratch, not having any dimensions or drawings. Also I've had some problems with scratchbuilt thin sides warping, this is one reason for my Zander project being slow going. The parkside plastic seemed to be slightly stronger so I opted for stripping the Grampus body. Also I would still require the lower parts for a scratchbuilt effort, so for me it seemed easier to just use this spare kit... It wasn't doing anything else anyway. Cheers,

Afternoon, This is a little project to model one of the ZBA Rudd variants which cannot be obtained in kit or RTR form. This started out as a Standard Parkside Grampus kit (PC72) but is being adapted to produce one of the ZB501U diagram rebuilds. This involves stripping the Grampus sides of some moulded detail and replacing this with plastic strip. Here is a link to what the prototype looks like. And here is the story with the model so far... As can be seen I'm taking things slowly so as not to damage the original body, I'll now use the first door as a guide to do the others. More as it happens.

So here we are in a new forum, so far I like the look of it. But then I've only had a quick browse... I thought I would start this blog to provide a showcase to the layout and various projects being worked on in addition to my workbench thread! I'll also post up progress on various areas of the layout depending which part I'm working on at a given time. Before I continue with showing the current progress of things, I feel a quick run down is in order for any new members to the forum. So here goes.... My Current layout Dragon Steels is a small works based in South Wales, it is one of a few that are owned by private companies. It sees block traffic but also Speedlink feeders associated with the metals business. It also has it's own Wharf to enable Import/Export to take place, access to this is gained by internal roads and ralway lines, of course these are assumed to be 'off scene' from the rest of the layout The idea behind it came from my seemingly growing collection of various steel carrying wagons, also being OO gauge it gives me somewhere to test any stock which I provide for public running days on the club layout as well as providing a better background for photographing WIP (Work In Progress) models. Various forms of metals traffic can be seen here, I won't go into details but variety will be the aim of the game... For now I'll keep it short and sweet. Here is a link to the old Dragon Steels thread should you wish to see the story from the begining.