Following a nice day out at Telford yesterday and whilst waiting for the Shawplan parts to turn up I decided to have a go at the JLTRT ZZA Snowplough.
I know OzzyO has shown what's in the box so I won't bother with that. The parts didn't exactly go together so well... as as well as I had anticipated anyway. You will probably see what I mean in the pictures but the first job was to get the wheels and axles sorted out. A bit of blackening of some Roxey steel wheels and some 0.7mm NS wire for the spring mechanism:
The 'instructions' say to fix the M4 nuts into the base... but I elected to Epoxy the bolts in instead. It just seemed easier to fit the chassis into the plough base with the bolts acting as guides. A little bit of Devcon later:
I had noted from OzzyO's build that the plough base, once put onto the chassis, rocks a little. Indeed it did but by scraping a little of the cast resin away that was soon sorted out but it did take me a while to work out where the excess resin was. In the end I resorted to adding some masking tape in layers at given positions then refitting the chassis to plough base to see if the problem had been eradicated:
Once I knew exactly where to scrape the job was easy to get them seated together properly.
I wish the housing was as easy, it took quite a bit of sanding and scraping to get the parts to fit correctly. Using masking tape I assembled the 5 pieces and once happy they were fitting as well as I could and were square, I added glue
The pic below is pre-glue:
Lots of sanding and filling ensued. Primarily using the medium Cyano to fill joints and crevasses!!
A bit of time spent with the handle making jig and some NS 0.6mm wire and it's not far off done in terms of building/ sticking bits together:
These last two pics show the parts merely plonked together and the joins at the rear of the housing look a lot worse than what they are. The joins are highlighted by the Cyano rather than obscuring them as with filler. I still have the one window to add yet and I'm pondering at what stage to add the glazing.... I think it's going to end up fogged whatever I do as it has to be added prior to the housing going onto the base
Hope you all had a good day at Telford Yesterday/ today.
Cheers
Lee