Rainy Day Rebuild

Regular readers may recall that nearly three years ago I completed a scratchbuilt O9 i/c locomotive built ago on an unmodified Kato 11-109 chassis (Finished Business). Following the work I did on the Simplex to better hide the Kato chassis I decided to revisit this model as well. I am rather pleased with the result as seen below.

I actually commenced work back in November, with storm Bert making the shed rather unpleasant to work on the layout I opted to stay in the house and tinker. Having separated the top of the Kato chassis from the motor unit I used a fine razor saw to remove everything outside the representation of brake gear to the end of the chassis, resulting in some pleasing daylight at each end when viewed side-on.

I also took the opportunity to correct something else that bothered me about this model, which was that the coupler units looked a bit too "industrial", so these were carefully parted from the buffer beams and everything smoothed back. New bolt heads were added to break up the otherwise featureless space. Behind the bufferbeam a new mount for the MicroTrains coupler was added in the space freed up by shortening the chassis moulding.

The bufferbeams were then carefully masked up, primed and painted red well before Christmas, but after that sat awaiting a coat of Humbrol aerosol matt varnish for some time. I was waiting on the weather to be fine/dry enough and ideally something else to varnish at the same time to make it worth getting spray booth out... I finally got around to it last week, allowing me to re-assemble everything the following morning.   

The new position of the coupling now looks like a simple mount on the buffer beam in the style of a link-and-pin coupler, MicroTrains even mould a little dimple in the top that looks like the hole the pin drops through! As the side-on view at the top of the page shows, the lack of the end parts of the Kato chassis really improves the look compared to the views when first completed.

At the time I started this I did propose to myself at least one other winter rebuild and this may still appear in due course, watch this space!

Colin