Thanks again guys for your reactions and suggestions regarding a more realistic look of the coal! This fueled an idea. At home we used to have a tropical aquarium and the water filter core was filled with active coal. I found a small container with refill coal in our garden shed, which will be quite useful when the time has arrived. Won’t need a hammer to break it, probably crushing between the fingers will do.
Continued with the body of the tender and installed several parts on the front and back side. Some of these parts are more or less box shaped and need to be glued onto each other. Accuracy of fitting can be significantly improved if you laminate the inside of those boxes with thin board (0.5mm thickness or similar). Because of this reinforcement, gluing them together is so much easier and by far more accurate. It takes extra time but the effort pays off.
Despite spraying the model sheets with varnish before starting the work, which makes both print and paper stronger, the print remains very vulnerable and damages easily. Unfortunately some damage occurred to the grey print at the tunnel shaped connecting piece between tender and front coach as you can see in one of the pictures. There’s probably a proper English word for it but I wouldn’t even know the Dutch word….
I’m using Tamiya Sky Grey for touch-ups but this is not exactly the same. In any case, care remains required at all times is the lesson learned here.
At this point in the build the rolling chassis has to be prepared, as per the building instructions. There are still remaining parts to be installed on the body but that will be done later. Most of them are small and vulnerable so it’s good to keep them for last.
The undercarriage is quite a bit of work and definitely not finished yet as you can see. The various holes for the wheel axes can best be made by the sort of puncher as shown in the picture. Very, very useful tool! The formers of the wheels come with the laser cut package. They are a bit too large and need sanding down in order for wheel rims 140c to fit properly. Consequently, this requires trimming of the outside radius of each wheel cover (part 140) by approximately 0.5mm.
One “guinea pig” wheel is ready, and the other 7 are due to follow.
Hopefully I can finish them in the coming week, allowing me to concentrate on the wheel axes, brake rigging and other related details over the weekend. The entire assembly looks relatively complicated and needs a bit of studying in advance.
It’s like the excitement one feels before going on vacation
. Interesting model to make, that’s for sure!
Erik