Now its coming together! Having developed my own method for putting the running wheel assemblies together they suddenly come together.
There were still more parts to add!
Return rollers and suspension dampers make up the rest of the parts. So far, what you see in the above picture is made up of 123 parts! And that is only one side of the running gear! However, now armed with my new metrology, the other side should be quicker to build!
I thought about it! That is, following on from yesterdays post, I have found a better way of putting the running wheel assembly together than the instructions instruct!
I have, in this blog before, berated myself for not following the instructions but in this case I initially did but found an alternative better way! As I have carefully explained to Mrs. Woody on many occasions, instructions are there for when you can't get the thing to go together or work and then they are only for guidance!
I have started gluing and my initial impressions are: -
1. The plastic that MENG have used is like nothing I have come across before. A seemingly hard plastic that sands easily! not the easiest to cut cleanly either.
2. The tank is a Tortoise and I am guessing my progress will, as I previously joked, be tortoise like given the complexity of the running wheel s and their carriers!
Having tried to put one of the set of eight together I am not convinced that the instructions actually show the best way to do this so as so far I have spent about two hours trying to get the part of the first carrier together. One to put down and have a think about!
After several months of railway modelling I have a need to do something different and glue some plastic together in the form of building a kit and this is it!
Tortoise is probably apt in that I will no doubt build it at a rate comparable with the progress a tortoise makes in traversing a garden or similar!
There are not as many parts as in some of the kits I have built and no etched brass! Fantastic! Just look at the size of the hull and upper body. This is a beast and one of these assault gun tanks is in full working order at the Bovington Tank Museum. Well the box is open so time to start gluing!
I talked yesterday about OBOE - Open Box October Experience - and how I had opened some boxes up to reveal their contents and more importantly get them on the tracks. Well the WMD film crew have been busy and there is a YouTube video about my experience and a challenge I set to other modellers.
Being that it is October I thought that I would talk about OBOE! Not the musical instrument but my challenge to actually get some of my models out of their boxes and on the layout or as I have put it - OBOE - Open Box October Experience!
I dug out these three boxes with a Class 31 that was bought two years ago and never been out of the box, five Dapol cement wagons that remain in their cardboard since purchased six years ago and finally the Queen Mary brake van that I am ashamed to say remained unopened for over 20 years!
This is the first time that these have been on the rails and they look superb! Why have I left it so long? No idea but I am now enjoying them as they were intended!
The Class 31 is a really stunning model especially in RailFreight livery.
No doubt I am not the only one to have models still in their boxes and unopened and more on that tomorrow!
Almost a Wordless Wednesday post as I have not done much model making but had a great time playing operating trains! Sometimes you just have to do it as that is what I built the layout for!
I was sure I had posted about my Dapol Class 121 before but I cannot find any trace of that! Strange!
A great model of the single unit DMU that was nicknamed the 'Bubble Car' which was a reference to its small, by railway standards, size and big windows reminiscent of the micro cars of the 1960s such as the BMW Isetta, Messerschmitt KR200 and the Heinkel Kabine
I thought that I had previously posted about one of the drive shafts having a split universal joint and how I had fixed it using superglue. Well that problem reoccurred on the other drive shaft!
And like last time I superglued it back together and refitted it to the model and also re-soldering two wires that broke because there is so little room to reinsert the shaft!
I'm not sure what else I might have said last time but lets end this by saying the Bubble Car is mended!
YouTube can come up with some great things that you might never see in reality but make you smile and that was the case with this less than a minute video showing a Massy Ferguson 35. You might think that is nothing unusual as there are a lot of these that have been either conserved or restored. However, not many have a V8 engine installed and this one looks so perfect and sounds incredible. I really would not mind having to follow this down the road!
Here is the video and well worth the 44 seconds of viewing!
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!
