Steve Cook
Flying Squad
A fairly gentle move back into the realms of railway modelling after a few months of ambivalence...
It was only after attending the S Scale Society Autumn meet and then shooting the breeze with Simon C last weekend that my modelling mojo stuttered back into life, the task was to find something fairly easy and workbench orientated to get back into the swing of things. The chosen subject was a Tower Models A30 Autocoach, bought last year as a 'To me, from me' Christmas present. The first Autocoach arrived with some damage to the front window frames, but Tower were excellent at sorting out a replacement. Aside from running it up and down the garden line, its spent its time in a box in a cupboard, gently corroding where 'sticky fingers' have man-handled it about.
Still nothing is too difficult to rectify, and having sourced a set of replacement wheels from Dave Hammersley (Roxey Mouldings), I figured it was good time to start upgrading the thing. As it turned out fitting the new wheelsets was nothing more than disassembling the bogies, sleeving the existing bearing down to take the new bearings (axle diameter reduced from 1/8" to 2mm on new wheels), then putting back together.
I need to colour the wheels black, but as they are stainless steel, my Carrs metal black won't touch them...anybody got any other ideas (paint is the obvious, but least preffered option).
Anyway, a couple of photos showing before and after
Steve
It was only after attending the S Scale Society Autumn meet and then shooting the breeze with Simon C last weekend that my modelling mojo stuttered back into life, the task was to find something fairly easy and workbench orientated to get back into the swing of things. The chosen subject was a Tower Models A30 Autocoach, bought last year as a 'To me, from me' Christmas present. The first Autocoach arrived with some damage to the front window frames, but Tower were excellent at sorting out a replacement. Aside from running it up and down the garden line, its spent its time in a box in a cupboard, gently corroding where 'sticky fingers' have man-handled it about.
Still nothing is too difficult to rectify, and having sourced a set of replacement wheels from Dave Hammersley (Roxey Mouldings), I figured it was good time to start upgrading the thing. As it turned out fitting the new wheelsets was nothing more than disassembling the bogies, sleeving the existing bearing down to take the new bearings (axle diameter reduced from 1/8" to 2mm on new wheels), then putting back together.
I need to colour the wheels black, but as they are stainless steel, my Carrs metal black won't touch them...anybody got any other ideas (paint is the obvious, but least preffered option).
Anyway, a couple of photos showing before and after
Steve
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