I managed some time at the bench this weekend and went back to the J6. I've deliberately left it until i had a prolonged period at it. Over the weekend I put together the gearbox/motor, built the tender and added more bits to the body, which is now in one piece.
The drive unit is intended to be a Mitsumi driving the rear axle through a High Level Road Runner Plus (which I happened to have) - the gearbox is on its front parallel to the rails and the motor vertical in the firebox in this configuration. I shan't do much more to the body now until I've put all that together and tested it. One thing which has become apparent today is that clearances in OO are tight - I've had to clear material from under the cab splashers and around the smokebox saddle and I'll take more out to be sure we have comfortable clearances there.
At the same time as starting this, I've been looking at the isinglass printed resin kits. I'd been aware of this range developing for some time but wasn't overly taken with some of the early examples I saw. More recently, though, the quality of the printing process has improved and encouraged by the Bill Bedford carriages I recently finished, I thought I'd have a dabble. What tipped the scale was the availability of a
D274 Lavatory Third, one of the 58' Gresley carriages which I think are the best looking carriages to run in this country.
You order the kits in sections, if that doesn't sound tautologous: the body is one item, floor another, bogies another. No underframe components are offered. I went for body and floor in this case and sorted out MJT items for the rest.
This is what turned up, within a couple of days; body sides still attached to each other, ends, roof, floor, generic instructions and a copy of the Isinglass drawing for this vehicle. As these generally show liveries and variations and list numbers and withdrawal dates, they're invaluable and worth a fair bit of the kit cost on their own.
The floor is designed to take either RTR bogies (using the boss) or MJT ones (snap the boss out and you have guides for the brass MJT mount. Unfortunately the floor was only 56' long, so I had to wait for a replacement. Here the assembled bodyshell is perched on the short floor.
When the replacement came, I was greatly impressed to see that my suggestion of adding the full length footstep to the print had been acted upon. The printed step isn't as fine as a plastic or brass one would have been, but it's much stronger.
The printing on the sides was much better than I've seen in the past, but it's not yet a match for etched or moulded parts. There are raised square areas on the print and in one place the side much have sagged slightly in the printer so a doorframe and droplight weren't straight. I did some work with a burnishing pencil and left other areas to see how filler primer would help. You can also see the characteristic pips which the Mousa vehicles also had and which have to be filed flat.
The body went together with cyano and very little effort. Subsequent to the above photo I added 40 thou partitions each side of the lav and at the brake end to make the whole thing more rigid.
After that there were a few days awaiting the replacement floor.
Underframe populated - the MJT components give it a bit of weight as well which is no bad thing.
Body primed - it had two or three light coats of filler primer on the sides - and I've started detailing the roof. The roof has a pair of parallel lines in side to help you get the vents central, but no other except, in this case, the skylight for the van end. I haven't checked in detail, but the skylight looks a bit wide and flat to me. I did take some sandpaper to the roof as the striations on that would be very visible on a finished model.
The end detail was a bit of a disappointment - there was very little other than steps. Of course, it's much easier to add than remove, so that's what I did. Passenger end now with alarm gear, brake piping and a cockeyed light switch; van end with revised panelling (the original beading was simply incorrect) and holes for handrails and lamp irons drilled. I've put the lamp irons fractionally high so they don't interfere with the body/floor join.
Roof now with destination board holders, vents, fillers and handrails as well as the rain deflectors. I'm out of Evergreen rod for the rainstrip so that is having to wait for the moment.
So this is where it is right now; I'm also out of black spray cans, so the underframe isn't beyond primer either. I gather our local Halfords is open again so I may get there this week.
On the whole I'm pleased with this. The sides still show print marks when you look along them and the ends are too thick - this has been raised as a concern elsewhere. Just to give you an idea, here are the model ends compared to prototype shots:
You can see that the end ought to fit between the sides to give a scale thickness beyond the end of the panelling and that isn't the case. However in 4mm it's hardly terminal and the range is still developing, so it remains to be seen what can be done. It's still a handsome vehicle and I can live with the compromise, to be honest. You don't get the level of detail I found on the Mousa kits, but that allows you to do your own personalisation and detailing which, to be frank, isn't rocket science.
Irritatingly that passenger end photo also shows a handrail which isn't on the drawing and I hadn't noticed before.
