January Jumble

January has turned out to be a month of finishing off and tinkering. I've already shown the completed tramcar, and sneak preview of the A1 Models 'Albert' can be seen later in this post.

When I swapped it's place in the display case for the tramcar, I re-evaluated how I finished off the bufferbeams and couplers on 'The White Rose'. I was never quite satisfied with awkward L-sections either side of the couplers, so these areas have been carefully reworked with a deeper bufferbeam and sweep-downs at the ends of the side frames, taking cues from Trevor Guest's Dudley Zoo Bo-Bo, now at Windmill Farm. 

This work was carefully completed around the existing paintwork and the new paintwork varnished and blended into the existing finish and a touch of weathering to complete. Couplers were refitted and I am happy with the overall result, still very much a 1960s machine in the latter stages of life!

Having found myself struggling to find anything I wanted to "build" whilst the paintwork on other projects was being completed, I eventually found myself making some changes to a wagon last seen a year ago. At first glance not a lot has actually changed... but I'll give you a clue, the main noticeable difference is the longer wheelbase...

This model was originally built on a Black Dog Mining 6ft chassis frame, however I had noticed that it had a bit of a wobble, more so than usual for these chassis. Separately I had been coming to the conclusion that for layout use where shunting and uncoupling were required, especially with MicroTrains couplers, my wagons with Peco chassis were actually the better performers. So this wagon has received a Peco underframe disguised with a scratchbuilt styrene underframe 'surround' with Black Dog style axleboxes hiding the N-gauge ones. Built and painted away from the body, I was able to get a close-enough colour match of the timber shades. 

Although the official line is that I still don't "do" paintshop progress pictures, at this point it was only really short of a coat of varnish/lacquer so I thought I might as well share it...

The green (Citadel 'Moot Green', brush-applied) is of course based on 'Rachel' at Cleethorpes as pictured in an earlier post, although the shade is perhaps a little darker. The model is now varnished and finished and will be seen in more detail in a future post.

Colin