You totally misunderstand. I am full of admiration for your raising of the floors on the locos.
However as I read your posting you were saying that OOB the tanks were at the wrong height and I was just trying to correct that!
I cannot see how the tank support straps/brackets appear to float in mid-air though when they locate into either slots in, or onto tabs folded down from the loco floor [all eight of the castings]. If you are talking about the longitudinal girders then yes, I applied to same logic to these as I did with regard to not raising the floor. As I say, you are a brave man to try it though - full marks!
We put in as much detail as we could for the price, [as with the 08] and there is for sure more more to be added, as you rightly say but in these times price rules - you ain't gonna sell many diesels @ much more than £250 a kit.
Regards,
DJP
David,
My sincere apologies for misunderstanding your comments, I'd blame it on the meds...or lack of...but that would be a lame excuse!
You are quite correct, my initial comment was regarding the water tank height, I went and looked at Simons site and re looked at my efforts and found that where I had added the fish belly floor to provide the correct height you have provided longitudinal girders (Part 1), I'd forgotten about that part and it does space the tank the correct height, hence my original comment, now amended.
Your right, I was talking about the eight longitudinal parts with lightening holes in them, the outer ends have no primary longitudinal beam to support them, I.E. an extension of part 1.
To be fair, to represent the fish belly floor would take a lot of effort in etch work, there's no easy half way approach, your either all in or not. With the kit employing a [_] body format of construction where the floor is joined to the walls and thus the floor is flat, then trying to replicate the fish belly engine section would actually make it look worse I think.
One side effect of the floor rework is that you can no longer use a vertically mounted motor or large in line motor as the motor openings are now sealed, hence Steph's drive (with a little prodding from me here and there LOL) toward a lower below floor gear box and motor arrangement to fit your motor bogies, all in an effort to get that 'air' between the bogies and body when viewed at low angles.
I understand the pricing constraints on design, but lets be fair, if the only faults are 1mm in the bogie side frames and other minutia, then I'd say they were pretty good value for money.
The only other issue I found down below thus far is the drag box side valances (part 6), the etched tab slots would have you solder this tapered valance parallel to the cab side, in real life this part widens so that it meets the body side at the rear cab door hand rail. If the etched slots are followed this would give an incorrect distance between the valance and the cab door kick plate at the lower edge.
The other area that so often gets built wrong is the small triangular fillet at the cab door upper hinge area, a lot of models have the cab door flat where as it should have a inward kick from where the base of the window is and the body side part near the top should have a small radius, often this whole area is soldered up flat which means then that the roof doesn't fit correctly or that the roof panels cant rail radius doesn't match.
Regards
