First up this morning was a total strip down of the cab floor and wood, it just wasn't cutting it so it all came out, some new wood has been added but the rest will come later.
The trial fixing of wood with 480 worked really well and it took some considerable force to get the wood off the brass test strip, most of the adhesive remained ingrained in the wood and I suspect it only came off the brass strip as it was greasy and dirty, it was just a bit of scrap lying around. I will keep an eye out for that adhesive Len mentioned too, 480 is a bit expensive for mediocre details like wood floors.
Spurned on by that success I ventured to make some D beading from wire as mentioned by Ozzy above, however I didn't have any thinner wire to wrap around the file to get the right thickness, so I improvised.
I used 1mm electrical cable and found a length reasonably straight and recovered the wire from all the insulation, next it was soldered to a paxolin copper clad length of sleeper material, only because that's easier to hold in my vice.
Instead of wire wrapped around the file I found a piece of scrap etch the right thickness, in this case its a bit too thick at 0.65 mm but good enough to start with, taking it gently I started with a needle file, this being my first attempt at this.
What a waste of time, it's bloody hard this copper cable LOL, so out with the big guns.
Once it was all trimmed and flat I switched back the the needle files and swapped the 0.65 mm scrap for some 0.45 mm and finished off the process.
Adding it to the cab side was a trite difficult and yes in hind sight it might have been better to add it before the turn in was formed, having said that the beading would have got in the way of the clamp for forming the turn in....well the way I do it it would!
In the end it all went in about right.
It was whilst editing the photos for this thread that I pondered the beading shape, looks like an A3 but something was off, I appreciate that my cut out is almost one continuous curve and there should be a small vertical section in there, but looking at the cab sheet half etch there isn't much so this is about as good as it will get.
Next up were some measurements from the GA and RCTS notes and the error becomes clear, the opening is too small, not much, roughly about 1.5 mm, that and tighter radius would have given the required vertical straight section, on top of that the vertical cab handrails are also too tall, by, you guessed it 1.5 mm.
It's not much but to me it kind of throws off the whole area, am I happy? Not really, is there a solution? Not really, unless you want to make drastic changes to the kit cab sides, so for a first effort it'll have to do, of course the second side will also have to be done wrong exactly the same to match LOL
On the real cab there is also a D beading on the inside of the cut out.
We'll see how brave I am later on and whether I'll chance it all and add that in as well.
So big
to Ozzy for giving me the germ of an idea that I might be able to do it myself, I'll store the ordered D beading when it arrives, bound to be a use for some straight bits in the future.
I'm now kind of wishing I had done the cab surrounds as well, rather than the supplied flat etches, it does make a hell of a difference visually
Onward!
so many more details to add now!
