Mick,
Many thanks for for link to Harry's modelshop. I can see now why you consider Zander Heba an expensive source for German prototype drawings.
As to a large scale 01, I think I would most certainly put my hand in my pocket for one, although I'd be happy with the boiler it came with. I get the impression on the LZ website that they are making some kits (or having them made) as injection mouldings rather than resin and I believe the proposed BR80 and one assumes the 01 will be plastic???
Here are a few photos of my early dabblings with the kit when I was just going to build it "out of the box". Having then seen several upgraded builds on various forums, it was clear that would be a waste, so after much googling (albeit without finding Harrysmodels
) various magazines, books, drawings and the aftermarket parts were sourced. Not cheap, but still a fraction of the cost of a RTR gauge one loco of any sort.
It comes with a plastic plinth and length of rail to display the finished model. The plinth has moulded ballast and without lots of fettling it would be very difficult to get the rails in after the sleepers were fitted from underneath. In any case, plastic ballast has about as much appeal as plastic coal, so those parts went straight into the recycling. The rails and sleepers on the other hand look OK, of will do after painting and weathering, so I will use these and make the plinth from wood and ballast it up ( or ask my brother to do it as I don't do civil engineering).
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I suspect the rail chairs are a bit lacking compared to the real thing, but after it's ballasted I can live with it.
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Here's the fire box after the front lower corners were rounded as per the prototype. Not quite out of the box!
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On this side, some moulded on pipework has been removed, but at this stage the rear boilercladding band was still on the front end.
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The left hand side of the boiler after removing the moulded pipe that runs from the cab to the steam operated bell behind the chimney.
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T'other side. The cladding bands were taller than Everest so they had to come off.
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Scraping and rubbing down the bands took a while, but styrene is a much easier medium to work than white metal for example. The bands were replaced with strips cut from brass shim to the same width as the originals. After carefully rubbing down the boiler joint at the top (and bottom), I then re-scribed a line to represent the cladding joint and added a representation of the fixing screws from tiny brass rivets.
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After receiving the drawings, I noted that the sand domes were a little short, so a disc of plastic card was glued to the top of the base, then the edge rubbed down to match, and the top piece glued to plastic card disk. By now out of the box was out of the door.
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Thinking more about Dikitriki's earlier question in post #3, I would guess that it will take a lot less time to build this kit than for example, the MOK or David Andrew's 2-6-4s, as there is a lot less preparation of parts required and almost no cleaning up to do after joining the parts. I've got most of the extra /replacement parts that, after minimal preparation, will just need fitting, so scratch building of parts will be minimal. I'm using a product called Plastic Weld (Methylene Chloride) applied to the joint with a small brush. After the joint dries, a little rubbing down with a fine grade Emery paper is all that's required. The etched parts will be fixed to the plastic with super glue and where a brass to brass joint is required, then I will solder before fitting to the model.
In terms of reference works, I sourced this excellent publication from a book seller in Greece, at a very good price compared to many others that I found. It doesn't give any history of the class, building dates, allocations etc., but contains dozens of high quality colour photos of three of the preserved locos including many shots inside the cab and as such is an excellent aid to building this kit. An equivalent version for the BR52 Kriegslokomotive is also available in the series, which is mainly dedicated to combat aircraft and armoured fighting vehicles.
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Cheers,
Peter