Cut and shut job!

For those of a certain age the phrase 'cut and shut' will bring about memories of unscrupulous backstreet garages welding the undamaged halves of accident damaged cars together to make a good one. Done well this is safe. However many of these garages didn't know what they were doing or just didn't care resulting in some lethal death traps being driven on the road by innocent owners who had been conned.

At WMD HQ we like to think we know what we are doing and if we do a cut and shut job we do it well! After yesterdays escapades with the chassis for the Italeri Scania 143H the need for the cut and shut job on the chassis rails manifested itself so today the cut and shut equipment was located - one miter cutting block to ensure a right angle cut and one razor saw to cut the plastic.

Conveniently, Italeri had marked the inside faces of the chassis rails with three lines to denote where the cuts should be made for different models. In this case the two outer most marks were the ones I needed. Cut one, fine. Cut two, Doh! Yes I got the wrong one but luckily it made no difference to the final result as the one I should have cut was  to the outside of the cut so it worked out. I did learn from all of this and the second rail was cut as it should be in two not three cuts!

The rails are reduced by 44mm which is a fair chunk of chassis in this scale. You can see to the top of the chassis rails the first major part of the chassis I removed and then above that the smaller piece subsequently removed once I realised my mistake!

Joining the two parts is a bit fraught as the chassis rails themselves are not flat as they bow out as they reach where the engine is mounted. That together with various protrusions from the chassis rails means it is just about impossible to set the rails down on a flat surface to ensure they are straight and flat. A lot of eyeballing the alignment, the reinforcement of the joint with some plasticard and using a small straight edge was all that I could do but hopefully both rails are as they should be. I will certainly find out as the build progresses! A bit of progress on the engine block too. Luckily that is not a cut and shut job or we might end up with something very strange knowing the skill set here at WMD HQ!