Back at the bench

You may have noticed from the three month hiatus this blog appears to have had that I've not had a lot of modelling time of late, but in those odd moments I caught I considered, or rather reconsidered, the chassis I had used under the second A1 Models loco build.  The kit is promoted for the Kato mechanism and both my kits had an appropriate baseplate in plastic for this.  Putting myself into the frame of mind of "what would I do coming to this anew with a Kato in hand?" the result was this chassis frame, caught here after overall application of grey primer and then red primer on the "buffer" beams:

This frame uses the A1 Models plastic baseplate (which I was surprised stuck OK with Humbrol liquid poly), and 40 thou styrene frames and buffer beams.  The axleboxes and springs are from Cambrian Models 4mm scale mouldings with hangers fabricated from evergreen section.  Coupler pockets from MicroTrains couplers are scratchbuilt as before and the cab interior pretty much replicates the version I built on the Bachmann frame. Cab detailing would later be appropriated from the old version.

The new frame was sneaked into the paint booth for varnish just before we went on holiday, so the Dullcote had a week to dry before weathering.  The overall result was this:

I am much happier with the way this now looks, the old frame looked a bit too 'stumpy' and I don't think that was helped by the grey paintwork.  Of course I could have just painted the old one black and saved some work....

The frame has been weathered lightly to match the loco body and highlight the spring detail, those Cambrian mouldings are quite detailed! Inside the cab the controls, cushion and driver have been transferred over from the old frame, with only minimal touching in required:

Of course, although I planned for it to be as simple as possible to describe and build, I did perhaps over-detail in places, and didn't take any progress shots of the build. So I then went on a quest to develop an even simpler version, but more about that another day!

Colin