So a little more progress on my 7 plank last night and this morning. The next stage was to tackle the side sheeting, as Mr Hayes suggests I scribed a length of 60thou which was long enough for two sides and two ends altogether, so that the plank lines all meet up again once the body is put together. I only have a 12inch steel rule and tried to do the sheeting in two halves, with limited success. It's very difficult to do this accurately and I'm not 100% happy. I have now ordered a two foot steel rule from ebay which should cure this issue;
Once this was done I cut out the sides and ends and scribed the side doors on, the standard width of a side being 4ft. The ends are cut to size and fitted and then the sides are cut over length and fitted to allow the side door to be centralised on the floor
I then left the body to harden overnight. The next stage is to try and introduce the bowing on the sides as my modelling period is around 1950 and lots of these timber wagons were very work worn, the sides bowing due to the constant weight of coal etc. Following the John Hayes method I fitted two props to bow the sides and dipped the body into near boiling water for a moment and then into cold. Bloody worrying I can tell you, I thought it may melt into a blob!
However it seemed to work well and this picture shows an eye view of one of the sides, looking at prototype photos it seems about right ?
Next job was to trim the sides back and file flush. The door end is scribed in where it meets the sides as this is lost in assembly and the side sheet ends are cut in also
The photos aren't too kind but my saving grace is that these wagons have knocks and lumps out of them all over so hopefully once painted it won't be too bad. Next job was the fixed end, the corner plates are 10thou and the stanchions are again from Evergreen strip. The end stanchions are left overlong so they can be filed back to fit and the taper introduced, apparently this is easier when they are fitted but we shall see,
Finally I managed to knock a solebar off whilst doing this lot and the other didn't take a lot of shifting. I think there are two reasons for this, the MEK I was using was the last dregs of an old bottle and the Evergreen seems more resistant to it compared to the plastikard sheet. Anyway I took this chance to introduce some relief at the ends to allow room for the buffer nuts, which I hadn't noticed would be an issue until I had fitted them first time around. The picture shows an exactoscale underframe sat in place, although this is the wrong wheel base it just allows me to space the solebars correctly,