Brass Hand Rails

One of the first improvements I've tried while building the static Dapol pug kit, which I talked about in the previous post, has been to replace the hand rails on the cab sides.

The hand rails were simply moulded plastic and as you can see from the first photo below were fairly ugly and oversized.

So I started by using a 0.45mm drill to drill small holes in the centre of each handle right through the plastic. I then used a sharp craft knife to remove the mouldings before polishing up the plastic using a small amount of T-cut on a cotton wool bud. The result of all this you can see in the second photo.

Having now removed the original hand rails, it was easy to fit a small piece of 0.417mm brass wire into the holes. I used a piece of cardboard to keep the wire away from the surface while I glued it in place. I then trimmed the extra wire from the back and removed the cardboard to give the final result you can see in the third photo.

This turned out to be very easy to do and I think you'll agree that it drastically improves the look of the cab side.