Wednesday, August 1, 2018

In the Top-Left Hand Corner.....

You may remember that back at Christmas 2016 one of my presents was the OO gauge kit from PH Designs for Ivor the Engine. It's taken me a while but I've now made a start on assembling the kit.


The first step was to separate the main chassis component from the etch and then solder bearings into the frames. The kit is designed to use wheels with 1/8" axles but the 1/8" bearings I already had wouldn't fit in the holes in the frames as the walls of the bearings were way too thick. As you can seem I'm using a set of bearings from Nairnshire Modelling Supplies which fit perfectly within the etch.


There were some odd issues with little tags on the etches (not where the tabs hold the part to the fret but elsewhere, almost as if it hadn't etched properly) but in general the cleanup was easy and the bearings soldered into place without incident. I did have a bit of an issue when folding the chassis though. While folding down the frames was easy enough, and two lengths of 1/8" silver steel rod kept everything square, it was impossible to get the step down at the back of the chassis to fit properly. In the end I snapped off the final part of the fold, reduced the length ever so slightly and then soldered it back into place -- hence the slightly messy solder joint. It might just be that I didn't quite get the fold right in the middle of the line (quite wide fold lines) rather than an issue with the part itself. Anyway so far so good.

Next up will be sorting out the wheels...

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