petesworkshop

The tender sides supplied with the Shedmaster kit were a very long, thin, one-piece wrap-arround affair which was soldered to internal strengthening pieces. I just couldn’t manage the thin metal at all; the curved corners turned out all different radii; I couldn’t get the sides to fit the tender footplate correctly; and the thin metal just wouldn’t stand handling at all. I gave up and made four seperate sides out of 0.4mm nickle silver sheet and soldered them in place on the footplate; a much easier solution. The rounded corners were a problem, but I found that simply thickening the corners with scrap and filing them to shape worked well and produced a solid structure. I’ve had some help researching the arrangement of the brake levers under the tender footplate, I understand what needs to be made to represent these now, so I intend to tackle this next.

There’s been a lot of work done to the chassis, much of it out of sight, since the last photos of my Skye Bogie appeared in this blog; in fact the chassis is nearing completion and I’m happier with the model now than I have been at any time since I started it. I intend to work the project through to a finish now without getting too distracted by other projects. There’s still a lot to do and I was dismayed just now to discover that the smokebox door casting supplied is a couple of millimetres oversize. Well I can’t just trim it down without ruining the hinges and the door straps are wrong too I see, so I’ll just ask LG at Shedmaster for something more to scale, a useable replacement that is, and see what happens.

A well designed Zero-Zephyrs kit was the basis of this little 7mm loco. I fitted an ABC gearbox inside, and though I could find no space for a flywheel it runs well. Recently I took it to Carlisle for an outing on the local 0 gauge group’s layout where it proved its worth by hauling a quite incredible number of trucks. I airbrushed the engine with fairly dull black then tried to line it with transfers with no success. Assembling all the cut up lines and corners just didn’t work, so I bought a lining pen. Eventually, after a good deal of trial and error, I managed to line out the engine which I then weathered in an attempt to disguise my rather inexpert lining; you can judge for youself whether I was successful.

I’d always fancied an LNWR Coal Tank in 7mm scale, so I bought a kit from Mercian Models, it was the first engine I built. The end result can best be described as semi-scratch built, as the whole of the chassis and much of the superstructure detail owes nothing to the kit at all. The chimney was practically the only casting that came with the kit that I thought was useable, and if you look carefully you’ll see that I should’ve replaced that too. The kit did not help the modeller, it was just hard work. I can’t see the point in manufacturers producing kits such as this that are well past their sell by date, the ordeal of building them must discourage modellers from buying more of their products. It may be possible to upgrade kits such as this to present day standards though I doubt it as practically everything in the kit needs reworking; you might as well start again from scratch in fact.