Going against the GRAIN!

Well, the instructions said I might need filler. I should know in future that those words mean ‘you will need filler.’

I’m now at the point where I have something which looks like a wagon. However, to get to this stage, there has been a lot of filling and sanding and some filling again. Oh and a little bit of panic!

I thought I had done a good job fixing the sides but in hindsight I should have been more careful about the angle of the sides when the glue was drying.

Despite a few internal braces, there is no real information to help you get the angle of the side pieces correct. The bottom of the bracing doesn’t sit on the chassis and while the end pieces do slide in with relative ease, these do nothing to guarantee that the sides are fixed at the correct angle. Having purchased two of these and being unhappy with one, I attempted to flex the join of the two pieces. This risked breaking the whole thing but before I fitted the roof, I found that I could pack out the gap at the bottom of the side piece and this would push the side out to a better profile, so this was done to both wagons before fixing the roofs into place.

So, as you can see from the above picture, there is a nice ‘unwanted’ gap between the roof and the grey piece. I aligned the roofs as best I could to limit the gaps and once the glue was dry on these, i used some modelling filler to fill the gap, This needed a lot of filler, so I had to build it up and let it dry over a few days.

This required a few repeated sequences of filling and sanding to get the desired smooth finish. While doing all of this, I kept my eye on reference pictures and realised that there was a small gap between the roof and the end piece. However, I had actually engineered this out so that there was no longer a gap.

I decided to glue two thin pieces of plasticard to the ends leaving a small gap similar to the prototype vehicles. This was then sanded back to the shape of the model. This was fiddly but no harder than anything else up till that point and a bit of primer helped to show up any imperfections.

So this is where we now are. The ends look better. The bogies have been built, primed and even painted light gray with the axle boxes picked out in yellow. The sprung buffers have been added to both wagons, the steps are fitted to both wagons. I’ve even managed to fit the screw link couplings to one wagon.

Phew!

I’m no expert at this wagon building game, but they aren’t too bad, given the nature of the kit. The sides could be better but they are now starting to look like wagons. As the small details get added, they are starting to come alive and this is what I like to see.

As for the green paint and transfers, I’m trying to forget about that for now!

Advertisement