Airfix/Dapol brake van 3/ramble

So to continue:  The buffers are actually pretty good, better than the other major kit manufacturer's offerings. The holes in the bufferbeam mouldings were opened up a tad and the buffers and vac pipes trial fitted. 

The inner ends. Oh dear, getting worse by the  minute. The door is a separate piece and was like a surfboard. I filed the back flat so that it would sit into the recess. The witness marks are another thing altogether. Why? Just why? Why on the outside? There are faint plank marks and the handrails also on the face, so any sanding would remove these. Frankly this a complete dog's dinner and I can't see that this would be more acceptable in the late 60s than it is now.

So onto some general body mock-ups and the sides (which are pretty good were lined up and fixed. However, by the next day all was not well and the floor had resisted all my flattening and weighting and had started to curl over its length and on the diagonal, taking the solebars with it. Now a non-runner. 

At this point I took a long hard look at it, calculated the forward time to spend both finishing and correcting it. I decided that this was not worth the effort and abandoned the project. Sometimes it's better to walk away.

Thoughts: Some of the Dapol reissues work; the building kits are OK with the usual caveats. Here though it gets embarrassing. Say you were a new modeller and you hand over nine quid in Gaugemaster for one of these. This is, or should be, entry level stuff; Saturday afternoon kit building. It's a full ten star fail and thus tars every other plastic wagon kit with the same brush before the ponies are out of the gates. I've had half a century of kit building and I can't make this work without some major non-cost-effective butchery. Detailing a Tri-ang would be a better start point.
 

Airfix brake van

 Oh yes, there's more! On a roll and once more into the box. Well I may as well do the whole train now I'm 75% there. This is a mixed bag, and this is what I have. As per usual it came off a club stand at not much money. There are risks involved here, but then that can be half the fun. Pluses are that the seller (and I know who) included a set of Romford wheels. The downsides are 1. It's Dapol made and 2.as far as I can ascertain at first sift through, there is a set of foot steps that have put the best foot forward and walked off.

The later is not insurmountable as the remaining set can be used as a pattern. The Dapol bit is, well, soft and Welsh. Made from recycled  Coke bottles it ain't the best and most stable material. There is a little flash.... OK you win, there's a lot of flash. It's a Dapol kit. 

A quick trawl through the mighty Paul Bartlett site (link in the list on your right) throws up two things: 1. none seem to have the footsteps altered or removed (Bugger) 2. all have the concrete weights added to the balconies. This is the easy mod. THB this is my happy place. Send more wagon kits for Christmas.

Dapol Class 121

 

Would I buy another one of these - if they were available? Probably not. Is that unfair? 

What I like: headlights.

Welsh branding.

Running quality.

What I don't like: fragility of parts

The weight of it when working on it.

Do I really need working interior lights and the ability to switch these out?

I appreciate the the weight and running are allied, but I felt as though I was was going to drop the thing every time I manoeuvred it around. The bag of bits is welcome, but I could have added these easily enough from commercial or home made parts at low cost. The detailing is superb, but is it too much, taking into consideration that this was bought at an offer price of at least 50% of what it would retail at today (the current crop of RTR DMUs floating at around £300 is eyewatering. I'd love a Class 117 for the layout, but that's beyond me).

Will I do another home conversion using a £40 s/h Lima? Almost certainly. Will it match this? Not by a long way, but is that really the point of the exercise?

Regardless of all the above it's now done and ready to be run/photographed on Rhiw 2.

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Dapol Class 121 - the initial

I don't frequent RMweb or other forums, but the repeated thing that I hear that people complain about is the delicacy of the new bits of RTR and how stuff was much more robust in the old days. By this I take it that they mean 20+ years ago before the days of what I consider the new brands such as Heljan, Revolution et al and in the case above, the newer OO gauge Dapol. If I am correct in this assumption, then I tend to agree and this may affect what follows.

I obtained this Class 121 (OK it was a present) just after the Mk 1 Rhiw had met its maker and it's been in the cupboard ever since. Partly because I knew that it needed some work doing to it and because, as explained above, bits had already fallen off of it despite only having been test run. Both battery boxes had failed and were stored with it in the box. This is/was an easy fix - a quick run over with a small file to remove the ineffective glue residue and a refit with a drop of UHU. The point is this shouldn't happen and a big block of plastic like this is hardly fragile. No matter.

I still have to fit the bag of bits to the bufferbeams and compared to my homegrown method of some commercial screw links and bits of guitar string it will be a fiddle. All this is doing is pushing me back toward a larger scale and away from RTR. Probably not the intention of the maker. 

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Dapol Fruit D for Hopwood

In a hypocritical moment from the last post.
As mentioned earlier there is a very slight rush to get a few items of stock ready for Hopwood's first proper outing at East Grinstead. As the root traffic is DMUs and parcels stock, a couple of things have needed to be bought and mainly s/h.
This caught my eye on the Hattons site. It looks to be a Wrenn body mould and a new underframe. The later is stunning, but then I don't buy a lot of current RTR so maybe those that do will be unimpressed. £17 + p&p brought it to my door which is the most I've spent for ages. Naturally everything else got put to one side, while I fiddled.
The usual glance though Bartlett's photos pull up a couple of blue liveried versions, so I worked from those. Slight rusting on the upper ironwork, a cruddy brown/grey underframe and silvering on the doors where the paint has worn through. Three colours and two cheap brushes got it done.

Hopwood Part 3 in Railway Modeller

The third (but not quite final) part of the Hopwood trilogy in January's Railway Modeller is out this week with a detailed break-down of the depot end with the Dapol engine shed/platform canopy bash. There are a couple of other short pieces in the RM file on the buildings, but no suggestion of when they may appear.
Regulars may have noticed the lack of posting recently. It's that time of year where my life gets put on hold.

Altering the Dapol enginge shed kit

Altering the Dapol engine shed
'Needs a small parcels depot'. 

My first thought was to low-relief the new Wills modern factory unit. 'No, too modern.' Back to square one.

A trip to Crawley found me holding a folder with old RM's and it fell open at a Michael Andress piece from 1973 on turning the Airfix ES into factory buildings. This seemed like a way out of the conundrum. 

It's a fairly obvious chop: slice the back gable-end wall into three, use the two outer pieces as new ends and glue the sides together. It's a pretty rough kit due to its great age and I'm not 100% that I wouldn't have been better starting from scratch, but I'm trying to use as many of the kit parts as possible. It's sort of fun and sort of not.