On first inspection the castings look nice and crisp however I found an issue with the roof which had quite a large bubble in the resin, on first glance it looked fine so I could see why it hadn’t been picked up when packing. Out with the files and it was tidied back to a squarer hole and filled with an off cut of plastic rod and fillers, once dry, filed and sanded back to shape. I needed to do this a couple of times to get a smooth surface. Although as mentioned the castings are nice and crisp on the outside there is a fair bit of work to do on the backs of the sides in particular to get a nice tight joint. A lot of trial and filing is required here, but working with resin it’s not particularly hard, just a little time consuming. This was meant to be a quick fill in job to re-gain some motivation so I probably should have spent more time on this than I did. If i do some more I will spend more time on this stage and hopefully get a better finish.
At this point I fitted the buffer housings and brass wire to the ends then offered them up to the chassis, first gluing one end with Cyano then the opposite end with the roof fitted loosely to hold. |
The axle boxes supplied with the kit need some trimming and tidying up, you’ll see the mountings on both sides of the axle boxes bellow need trimming off with a razor saw and filing back. The axle boxes should then drop into the slots on the underside of the chassis. While doing this I noticed that the axle box covers are wrong for a VGA so off to the spare parts box and I found a set of spare plain round axle box covers. The original axle boxes were carefully filed off and new ones glued on. Here I made a bit of a mistake, I should have fitted the bearings first! I have used Peartree wheels on this kit and they are supplied with suitable bearing, after drilling out the back of the axle boxes I fitted the bearings then trialled them in the chassis with a wheel set to make sure they turned freely. They didn’t. So, after removing the bearings I drilled further into the axle box, yes you guessed it, I went straight through a couple of axle box covers! Thankfully I had a couple more.
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Peartree supply their 3’1” wheels with brake disc inserts for £1.50 more than just the plain wheels, I have now taken to ordering these as standard instead of without the discs, those not used provide spares that can be used on other wagons, Dapol’s RTR HAA’s for example, though I have not checked if they fit. The discs are simply glued to the outside face of the wheels. The axle boxes can then be glued into the chassis. I did one side first with the opposite side loosely placed in the holes making sure everything is square, once set I slid the loose set out to glue again checking it was square.
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First up is a couple of coats of Tetrosyl grey primer and once dry I gave the whole wagon three coats of gloss black, I have read somewhere that black gives a good base coat for metal coloured paint. I am not sure if this is true, but it was also relatively easy to mask the chassis off so thought I would give it a go. I had been undecide what paint to use for the main body colour but found autotek Aluminium spray paint on ebay so invested in a can (well, three I think as it was better price and will come in handy in the future), if it turned out bad then it could be used for base coats. I am quite pleased with the outcome so on to masking the rest of the wagon, firstly painting the roof (Humbrol Matt 67) and then masking up for Railmatch Rail Red (204).
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