D869

Alan, Thanks for your advice. Glad to see that you can get good results with glue. You make a good point about the filler pipes - I'll need to give that some thought when I get to build a coach with a loo. So far my coach kit building has been confined to parcels vehicles plus a Mark 2 so I have managed to avoid that issue. Regards, Andy

Thanks Will (and everybody else). These buildings are from the real Penzance - as is the main station building. Modellers licence kicks in more heavily as you go further east on St Ruth.

Thanks. I've had one experimental try with it to see how well it would produce glazing bars. I followed the instructions to the letter and found that I got good results with it very quickly. This came as rather a surprise to me because usually anything new that I do involving paint tends to end in disaster at the first attempt.

As previously advertised, some pictures of the row of houses that John has recently finished behind the station. Now we just need to persuade John to write some words about them. And the real thing...

If it results in a stronger joint and doesn't obstruct the windows then I'd say go for it. The last thing you want is for the sides to fall off your coach after a year or two. Out of interest, what glue are you using?

Hi David, Thanks for your posting. Unfortunately my worries come from past bad experience with using various glues to try to make pieces of brass stay put, most often with coach kits. This is my first Ultima kit, so it's a bit different from the previous scenarios. I hope you have better luck than I've had in the past and I'm still trying for better results myself. In the hope that my past (bad) experiences might help you, the problems have been... - Fixing etched brass coach sides to transparent (polystyrene?) on a Fleetline coach kit. I built this coach a LONG time ago. From memory I've tried quick set epoxy, Super Glue and polystyrene solvent. Each one of them has stuck initially but then has come undone after a year or two. - The same scenario with a BH Enterprises DMU - I used 24 hour epoxy for this. No problems yet (4 years) with it coming unstuck, but it needs firmly holding in place while the glue sets. In my case the glue oozed onto the paintwork when I wasn't looking. - Fleetline BR GUV - same scenario again. This time I used 24 hour epoxy on one side and Formula 560 Canopy glue on the other. Both had some degree of oozing in spite of my being very careful with the quantity of glue but the Canopy glue is easier to clean up. Both are still in place but it's early days yet. - Fiddle yard modules - just to prove that there is no end to my adhesive failures... this job involved gluing brass strip to plywood using Evo Stik again it came undone after a few years. There is a film of glue on both the ply and the brass, so it seems that the Evo Stik itself failed. I now use 8BA bolts as well as Evo Stik for this job. Given so many bad experiences, I'm rather wary about suggesting how to do better, but I'll try... 1. Try to arrange as much surface area as possible when gluing. The turned up edges of the chassis etch seem like prime candidates. Could you add some packing pieces? 2. Pick your glue very carefully and follow the instructions, especially the one about avoiding greasy deposits etc. 3. Depending on how long your glue needs to set, think (beforehand!) about how to hold everything in place and how to avoid or clean up any stray glue Good luck!

Kris, I havent looked in detail at the prototype underframe yet so it would be good to have a shopping list of any extras needed. I think that the prototype has four truss rods rather than the two provided by the kit but beyond that I'm not sure.

Hi David, Thanks for the thread - I'm getting started on a full brake at the moment so it's very interesting to see your work - you're rather closer to the finish line than I am. Nice job. Regards, Andy

Yes, I'm quite happy with the quality of the parts but as I said, persuading them to stay together in the long term is a bit of a worry for me. I'm hoping that it will make up into a nice model and that my paint job won't turn out too dodgy. It was good to see you at Stafford too.

Thanks - I hadn't seen it, but was rather hoping that some 'fellow travellers' might come to light. Looks like he is making a nice job of it.

... and there was me hoping that you'd be able to tell me how to do it! It was good to see you on Saturday. Sorry we had to dash but I'm sure our paths will cross again in the not too distant future.

The class 22 is in the paint shop (scary) so something new has taken its place on the workbench - an Ultima kit for a Hawksworth full brake. These coaches survived well into the 1970s in rail blue, so this will fit neatly into my chosen period. I also happen to think that the Hawksworth coaches are some of the finest looking coaches ever built, so I don't need much of an excuse to build one. I'm planning to make life difficult for myself by painting it maroon and using my new Bob Moore lining pen - rail blue seems a bit too boring for this vehicle. This is the first Ultima kit that I've built. It consists of brass sides and floor and plastic roof and ends, so I'm a bit concerned about the strength of the finished article. I'm also rather reluctant to follow the instructions and glue everything up into a closed box because I just know that I will need access to the inside at some point in the future. The kit is not a beginner's model - for example the instructions seem to be 3 years older than the brass floor etch and suggest that the floor is made of aluminium. I'm guessing that this also explains why the moulded bumps on the back of the ends don't seem to be at the right height to match up with the floor. On the plus side, the etched sides seem pretty clean, as do the moulded roof and ends. In particular the roof is devoid of any bowing, so I'm contemplating fixing the sides and ends to the floor and making the roof removable. Interior access probably doesn't matter too much for the full brake, but if this goes OK then I am hankering after a couple more Hawksworth vehicles to make up a more mid-60s formation for St Ruth even though the passenger carrying vehicles were all withdrawn by about 1967 and therefore are just a bit too early for me. I seem to be having a bit of a coaching stock phase at the moment - I picked up a couple more Farish Mark 1s at the RMWeb members day and I also have just sent an order to Masterclass Models for some Maunsell brake coaches to form a North Cornwall style 'P' set... which doesn't fit at all with my chosen period or St Ruth's geography.

Looks like you've decided on your design now, but I think I recall an article in the 2mm mag ages ago on this subject. I think it was by Pete Wright but I'm not 100%sure. His approach involved using thin shim to make the stools. The shim was placed on a block of lead and attacked with a specially shaped punch tool to make the stool.

If somebody wants to bring one along, we'll be happy to run it. I have been thinking about acquiring one myself (and was admiring one in the model shop display cabinet just yesterday), but I'd probably go for the original blue/grey/yellow livery rather than FGW. I'd also need to dust off the class 50 and do something to try to turn it into a more convincing model, get more Mk 2 coaches... oh well, maybe not quite yet.

Good question. I've just emailed the webmaster, so hopefully it will get linked in

Yes, I asked Gordon to just turn the treads. Naturally this leaves the wheels very fat, but I thought it better to keep the moulded detail. I think I needed to push the brake detail mouldings out a little too, but the pins are long enough so that worked OK.

I finally got round to putting some finescale wheels on the Yorkshire Voyager (Dapol) that's been languishing in its box for a few years now and took it along to this week's group meeting to try out. Actually, it isn't 100% what it seems - only two cars have finescale wheels right now because I didn't get the trailer wheels turned down. Instead I fitted 2mm Association disc wagon wheels. These have 1mm axles compared to the 1.2mm Dapol ones. Because it's an experiment, they also still have their pinpoint ends, so perhaps 'Ben Hur Voyager' would be a more suitable name. You certainly need to be careful when packing it back into its box. The good news is that this dodge seems to work pretty well, so I will probably do the rest of the set this way (but remove the pinpoints). I really like this model - the colour scheme and detail look great. Cheque book modelling can sometimes be satisfying. What I should also have done was take some photos of the row of shops behind the station that John has just completed. He has made a really excellent job, so now we need to persuade him to do a write-up here.

I didn't know that. I guess mine's really from China... via New Jersey, so quite well travelled already

Nice job. I always find those big blank areas in the goods yard pretty intimidating. Somehow the prototype manages to do empty space far more convincingly than most of us modellers. I probably spend an unhealthy amount of time staring at ground surfaces to see how traffic, weed growth and neglect combine in various ways in the hope of being able to create something convincing when needed. Yours looks good. What's your grass done with BTW?

It’s been a while since my last posting in which I was having a fairly trying time persuading the Atlas chassis to look like a model of something that has been made in Glasgow rather than the U.S. The news is rather better now, I’ve been gradually ticking things off my list of jobs and the loco is now stripped down and ready to go to the paint shop. A few more details… The Bogies You may remember from my previous posting that I hadn’t been able to get hold of the Worsley Works bogie overlays so I was modifying the Atlas ones to look like the class 22 bogies. I used a burr, files and scrapers to delete the American detail that I didn’t want – the brake cylinders, brake shoes, brake linkages and the ‘U’ shaped hanger around the leaf springs. The leaf springs were reduced from four springs in width to two and the top edge of the bogie filed to the much simpler profile of the NBL bogie. The ends of the bogies were extended with lumps of 30 thou plastikard. I eventually found that Super Glu gel seems to form a reasonable bond with the plastic of the bogie frames and could also be used to fill the small ‘V’ shaped recesses that were left over in the top edge of the bogie after the brake cylinders had been filed away. I stuck with the 30 thou plastikard overlays Super Glued to the bogie inner frames and ends. To this I attached a crossmember made from thin black plastikard with the inside filled with a big lump of 80 thou plastikard. I found it quite difficult to align these accurately when attaching them to the bogies and they looked a real mess when the loco was assembled. I wound up slicing them off again, reassembling the bogies, putting them onto the track and then using a piece of 60 thou plastikard as a gauge underneath the crossmember to get the height consistent. Last time I also mentioned some problems with access to the body securing screws. This was quite easily solved. Once the crossmembers were fully dry and the coupling ‘tongues’ attached on top, I drilled and filed a big hole through the lot to allow the screw to pass through. The trickiest part of all proved to be the two coil springs and I tried four different ways to do this before finding a way that looked right, didn’t interfere with the working of the bogie and would actually stay attached when subjected to normal handling. The big problem here is that there is very little room available because the pinpoint pickup bar is in contact with the rear of the sideframe. One (bad) idea that I tried was to solder the springs to the pickup bar. This would have worked really well except that it made the bogie impossible to assemble. The solution I eventually found involves a specially shaped piece of 20 thou black plastikard that sits on the centre stretcher of the bogie and has two ‘ears’ that stick out under the sideframes to represent the pad at the bottom of the spring. The springs are coils of 5 amp fuse wire stuck on top of this with another piece of fuse wire up the middle to represent the spring spindle. Finally the outer ends of the bogies were detailed with the addition of some 5 thou strips to represent the top and bottom of the channel sections and some plastikard rod to represent the cylinders on the ends of the bogies. The bogies should really have the same detail at the inner ends too but there doesn’t seem to be enough room for this between the bogies and the tanks, so I had to leave this detail off. I’m not quite sure why this clearance disappeared – the bogie wheelbase and centres are about right, the tanks are right and I don’t think the bogies are too long, but there isn’t room for this detail. Naturally enough, once I’d finished the bogies the etched sideframes arrived from Worsley Works. I won’t now be using these, but I may build another class 22 one day so will save the sideframes for that. For anyone contemplating the same kit, I’ve included a photo of the sideframes so that you can see what you get. Water Tanks As I said last time, I filed the inner (metal) tanks from the Atlas chassis to form the shape of the class 22 water tanks. I also drilled the top corner to take a piece of brass wire to represent one of the big pipes attached to the tank. This pipe will is visible through the gap left by the missing valence on D6309. The Atlas tanks are not deep enough so a couple of pieces of 30 thou black plastikard were cut to size, scribed and bent to represent the angled bottom of the tank. This was attached with epoxy, filed to fit and then tidied up with Milliput. There is also a visible downwards extension of the chassis members in the area of the water tanks, so these were added using plastikard. Corner Footsteps The other prominent feature in photos of class 22s are the footsteps that stick out from the bottom of the loco underneath the buffers. The design of these seems to have changed during the short life of the class with a fairly simple design being used originally. My loco is modelled as at circa 1969 so it has the later pattern steps where the lower step was shorter and set further back using a more angled design of bracket. Judging by the number of photos of class 22s with damaged corners, I'm thinking that they perhaps had regular problems with clearances related to the long overhang of the body beyond the bogies. By adopting a slightly simpler design than the prototype, the footsteps turned out to surprisingly easy (if slightly laborious) to make. I used a piece of 10 thou brass (one of Allen's freebies again) and soldered two bent strips of 5 thou by 40 thou nickel silver strip on edge to it. Once I was happy with the position of these I filed away most of the 10 thou backing sheet so that there was just enough left to give some strength to the steps plus a tag at the top that could be bent over to attach to the loco. It's easier to do than to describe. I hope the photo will make this clear. The footsteps were Superglued to the plastiard cab floor and adjusted to achieve the correct alignment.

Yup. Seems like strange timing - most peeps are doing other things at this time of year. Maybe they are trying to encourage participation in the southern hemisphere? I was also wondering where the dimensions came from - is there any good reason for them (e.g. fits into/onto some well known object like an Ikea shelf)? Still... hasn't stopped me turning an idea over in my mind though, but since South Yard is smaller than the challenge size and has been unfinished for about 10 years now, I wouldn't have much hope of turning out something from scratch in 4 months. Maybe if I went for 16mm scale instead... one of my locos is about 20 inches long.... hmm... Sandy River shed scene with real steam? Are Ikea shelves fireproof? Regards, Andy

Hey Pete - welcome back! Look forward to seeing the viaduct take shape. Regards, Andy

Hi Pete, Thanks for the comments. I haven't forgotten that I need to say some stuff about the layout, but with the current rate of progress I think there will be plenty of time over the next few months for some more 'retrospectives' when there isn't much else to say about active projects. I can, however, report some recent progress on South Yard. I have given the backscene two coats of emulsion from a matchpot that cost me about 50p from Wickes. they call it 'sky blue' I think but I'm not sure that I like the shade though - maybe a bit too blue. Regards, Andy

By popular request (well, one person anyway), I will occasionally post an article describing one of my earlier projects. This one is about my bubble car and its trailer. If you think that this is to fill in when I don't have much to say about active projects, then I couldn't possibly comment… The bubble car is the mainstay of the passenger service to South Yard (there isn't room on the layout for anything more). The model is 'based on' a BH Enterprises kit and a Kato chassis that I picked up from MG Sharp at the Warley show a few years ago. I picked the Gloucester class 122 variant (without headcode boxes) for my model. There are some photos by John Vaughan of 55016 on the Looe branch on railcar.co.uk, so it's a reasonable match for my chosen period. This was a fortunate choice because Dapol have gone for the class 121, so at least my bubble car doesn't look the same as the off-the-shelf model. As far as I can tell, the trailer cars were nowhere near Devon or Cornwall by 1970, but the trailer was part of the kit so I modelled a Pressed Steel one that would have frequented the branches West of London. BHE have continued the range of kits previously produced by Fleetline and MTK before them. At the time I bought it, I didn't know of any other DMU kits and the Dapol bubble car was probably not even a gleam in anybody's eye. I'd built several of these kits in the past, so I knew their strengths and weaknesses. The kits provide an opaque plastic floor, roof and clear plastic sides. There are etched overlays for the sides, moulded plastic bogies and whitemetal ends and underframe details. The kit provides no real help with fitting any kind of drive unit. The whitemetal castings were hopeless in MTK days and they were still hopeless when I bought my kit, so they went in the bin without further ado. Most of the rest of the kit is quite reasonable, although the accuracy of the BHE floor mouldings was pretty poor on my example and needed remedial work by shaving with a chisel (the old MTK/Fleetline ones were better). Having binned the end castings, I had given myself quite a lot of work to create some new cabs. These were made up from a solid multi-layer sandwich of 40 thou plasticard which was then drilled, filed and carved until the right shape was achieved. Quite a lot of work, but I was pretty happy with the end result. I also tried fabricating an end using some thinner plasticard and a sort of composite plasticard structure behind it to create the right shape. This turned out OK as well, so I used it on the trailer car. Since then I've discovered that Worsley Works sell etched DMU ends that would have saved me a bunch of effort. Such is life. The Kato chassis was intended for some sort of Japanese railcar, so it had a nice low profile and partial mouldings of seats on top too, which was useful. I had to chop a few mill from each end to make it fit lengthways. Widthways I think I needed to shave some thickness from the back of the sides and I probably also cheated a little by setting the bottoms a little further apart than they should really be. The chassis uses a split axle design with pinpoint bearings. If memory serves, it also had traction tyres which meant that it wasn't a good candidate for the 2mm Association wheel turning service, so I had to improvise. My re-wheeling solution involved the use of some very old 2mm Association coach wheels on 1mm axles. These have brass backs for most of their diameter with an insulating boss around the axle. I hammered some 5 amp fuse wire flat (and very thin) and soldered this to the back of the wheel. I then poked the end of it into the axle hole, pushed the axle in and then assembled these onto the Kato gear muffs. The result is not perfectly true, but it does the job. The detail on the Kato chassis was filed away and representations of class 122 underframe equipment from plasticard were added instead. Likewise, the Japanese bogie detail was filed off and plasticard overlays added to produce something resembling a British DMU bogie. Test running showed that the chassis was a little 'skittish' but could be calmed down nicely by adding some weight. The snag was that there wasn't anywhere to hide the weight so I wound up having to put a piece of lead sheet it in the roof space. This means that the centre of gravity is rather higher than I would like so the ride is probably a bit rock and roll. One final bit of pain was attaching the etched sides. This is done after everything is painted, but from past experience I've struggled to find an adhesive that will fix brass to MTK or BHE clear plastic and is both neat and permanent. For the bubble car I used 24 hour epoxy. This has held so far, but judging the right amount proved very difficult. On one side of the trailer car I used too much and it oozed out onto the paintwork before setting. I have no idea how to rectify this so the trailer car now always presents the same side to the audience to hide my mistake. The cab windows were flush glazed by cutting clear plastic sheet and gradually filing it to fit. This takes a lot of time but I don't know of any way to get better results. The trailer cab is still awaiting glazing and grab rails. I'll get around to it one day. I couldn't find anything suitable for the 2 digit headcodes - these use a different (taller, thinner) font from the 4 character ones so I got hold of a free font editing tool on the Internet and created my own font by tracing around some scanned photos. This was then printed to the right size, sprayed with clear lacquer and stuck to the DMU with a frame made from 5 thou plasticard stuck on top. So now I have a bubble car to run the passenger services to South Yard as well as occasional trips to the seaside on the branch service at St Ruth. It's quite easy to pick faults with it (there are plenty), but I'll gloss over that. It will probably be mistaken for an RTR model by some observers, but at least I know that it took a lot more time and care than that.

> Etched Pixels also produce some bogie side frames Yes, I noticed that too, but I've asked Allen for a set now, so I think I'll wait for those. Etched Pixels also do the Ultima kits now, so if I order from them I'll be very tempted to buy a bunch more Hawksworth coach kits that will go straight into the gloat box. > and then not being able to see it through to completion That happens to me a lot too (I recently finished off a Stewart Hine etched SR GUV kit that was shelved incomplete well over 20 years ago), but having written about the class 22 build on here, I have more people watching, so I reckon that I have more motivation to see it through. It's still a bit sould destroying though when it seems that every job you try to do ends up needing a re-think. Painting will likely be a big hurdle (eventually) - this is never my favourite stage of any build and always a bit hit and miss with me. Sometimes I get results that I'm really happy with and sometimes it just goes horribly wrong.