The chains tested my patience but saw the WMD swear jar put some weight on!

Following on from my last post, the body of the Deltic loco went back on the chassis without issue but then then things went wrong! 

Firstly one of the body clips to the bogie chains went missing and the three others saw the chains separate from the clips.

I bent up a replacement clip from some brass wire which with a dab of black paints will look fine. Fiddling with the rest of the chains tested my patience but saw the WMD swear jar put some weight on!

The chains were not the only thing to test my sanity as many of the detailed parts are separate mouldings glued in place but in many cases not glued very well as they deposited themselves on the workbench. Trying to work out where they went was an interesting task such as this air chamber from the middle wheel braking system.

Eventually all parts were glued back in place and the model was put on the track to haul its first train...

...which was an eight coach mixed rake of Mk1 and Mk2 coaches which the Deltic dealt with easily!

It does look good and run well which made dealing with the issues worth while. Now to enjoy!

Of course there are four chains - 2 on each bogie so the potential for disaster is quadrupled!

 As is my usual butterfly approach to things, I decided to deal with a model I have had a long time but never run mainly as I needed to DCC chip it.

This is the Accurascale Deltic from the first batch that they released. It was a game changing model in terms of detail and the innovative manner in which things were approached. However, that also brought issues. Innovation wise, the great thing about putting a DCC chip in this loco is that there is a hatch on top of the roof held in place by magnets that opens up just for this purpose. Great! However, if you have a sound chip you also need to fit a speaker which was not a standard fitment in DCC ready locos and that means the body has to come off the chassis! Not great! There is a good reason why this is not great. Read on!

Never seen on a ready to run model before, Accurascale included the safety chains between the bogies and the body that make sure that the bogies does not separate from the body in the event of an accident. The chain is tiny and is held in place on the bogies by a strip of etched brass (why do I shudder whenever I say 'etched brass' - oh yes that would be because I never get on with such parts in kit building!) and some sort of plastic clip that you have to release from the body in order to separate the body from the chassis. Of course there are four chains - 2 on each bogie so the potential for disaster is quadrupled!

I will come back to the chains later but I did get the body off revealing the inner delights of the model.

At the time of buying the model I could not get a DCC sound one which would have saved all this additional work but I I was able to buy from Accurascale the sound decoder and one of their 'accurathrash' speakers the name of which implies that it might also be suitable for a Scandinavian death thrash metal band.

The good thing about having the accurathrash speaker is that it the model is designed to have this fitted so it just slots in as does the DCC chip. Fantastic! A quick test showed that both the set up worked and that any death thrash metal bands might be disappointed in the lack of decibels from the speaker! However it was more than loud enough for a model loco!

Next job is to put it back together!