Lots of modelling has been going on the last week. I have made progress on a lot of projects, although the approach has been slightly scattershot, working on many different things. One project that has been made some significant progress is the Heljan Western project. The model is a second hand locomotive and for some reason it feels a lot less risky to take a tin of paints to second hand loco. I was stumped for a long time on what on earth to do with the brake gear supplied with the model. To be frank it is rubbish and requires some substantial work to get it looking ok and also usable on a workable model.
What a headache! - the brake gear attached to the Heljan chassis.
The first thing to do was reduce the length of the stretchers on the end of the brake rigging to fit into the bogie, so the brake shoes line up with the wheels (well almost line up anyhow!). I drilled some new holes in the brake shoes and cut off the connecting plastic pipework supplied with the brake shoes. Some brass rod was used to connect the brake gear together, using a straight length of 1.9cm between two right angle turns to fit into holes I had drilled into the brake shoes. The brake gear was then aradited into place.
The pipe work has also been added to the front of the locomotive and a three link coupling was added, which has also been araldited to the buffer beam. The standard method of using a spring to attach the coupling hook could not be used, due to it fouling the metal bar for the sprung buffers. A lesson for next time will be to remove the original sprung buffers and replace with sprung buffers with an internal spring. The wheels also had a good clean and it has had a test run around Potttington Quay, traversing all the point work without issue.
The body weathered and ready for reattachment to the chassis before final weathering.
The body work for the locomotive is shaping up, although some more weathering will be done when the body is reattached to the chassis, to try to blend it all together. The next step is to paint the chassis details, such as pipework and brake gear and then attach the Howes ESU sound decoder, before reassembly and final weathering. A long way to go, but I think this one is starting to come together.
Many different shade of white, faded blue and grime have been added to the bodyshell so far.
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