The carriages are creeping slowly towards completion, in fact I think that weathering and glazing are now the only main jobs that remain, although as some of the following pictures show I shall have to do more than merely clip the roofs onto the bodies if I don't want to leave a gap where the top of the side meets the cornice on the edge of the roof:
A quick glance with the naked eye does not immediately reveal the disparity of side heights and roof widths with the new vehicles standing in line with my earlier D & S exampls, but this photograph confirms that the discrepancies are there.
Ballast, in the form of rectangles of lead cut easily with snips from "unrolled" walls of old lead water pipe has been slipped in "dry" under the seats of the passenger vehicles, or glued to the floor of the luggage van, bring thw weight of each vehicle to about 95g, roughly matching my D & S examples. I believe this makes the suspension do a more meaningful and effective job of keeping all of the wheels on the track.
I decided that I couldn't tolerate the way that the central parts of the width of the roof on the D.245 third curved upwards at each end. I tried softening it in very hot water, pushing the offending areas downwards and then quenching it in cold water, but after a while the distortion re-appeared. I filed the tops of the ends to give it more freedom to sit down and again heated, straightened and cooled the roof, but again it assumed the wrong shape when left clipped onto the body. I concluded that permanent physical restraint was the only answer, so I've super-glued a length of solid 4mm square plastic to the full internal length of the roof. Even then, a dry run confirmed that simply leaving the top of the plastic beam dead-straight wouldn't be quite enough to do the job, so I filed a slight taper each end before gluing it firmly in place. That seems to have forced the ridge of the roof to stay nice and level, so far.
In an effort to make it possible to use reasonably realistic-looking Smiths dummy screw link couplings on these carriages without risking buffer-lock when they have to be propelled, and to afford some facility for coupling to vehicles fitted only with tension locks, I've fitted a rather oddly shaped set of wire "goal posts" to each headstock. That dropped central section is supposed to act as the bar for an adjoining tension lock, whilst being sufficiently low and slim to avoid any snagging of the screw link coupling or a shunter's coupling pole. It isn't a perfect arrangement though, and only works at all tolerably if the Tommy-bar on the screw coupling is kept nice and short. The head of the pin that forms the Tommy-bar also needs to be at the top, not at the bottom as in the latter position it snags on the wire crossbar
. I've a feeling that I may end up eliminating that central section of wire and simply having a small goalpost just in-board of each buffer head...
The available side-play on the middle wheel set of the long luggage composite initially showed some signs of being insufficient for smooth passage through some of my crossovers, but perhaps it is settling down to better behaviour with use. If problems require action in the longer term I shall have to ditch the sprung bearing-holders which take up some of the space between the W-irons and substitute an axle floating on some long springy wire as in the D & S arrangement
so I think you'll be fairly safe... 
