Ivor's Cab

Although I seem to have done quite a bit of work on Ivor over the last month, amazingly I'd not actually used any new parts from the kit given that the wheels and gearbox were all made/bought separately. Building the cab, seems to have involved almost all the remaning etched parts though, so has been a bit of a mammoth session.

First up was building the back of the cab that also forms side of the coal bunker. This was nice and straightforward as it only involved soldering one detailed piece in place and making two simple folds.

Annoyingly the door looks a little wonky in the photo but having stared at the part closely it seems level so not sure what is going on with the photo.

The rest of the cab is made from a single piece which needs folding and carefully soldering together.

Prior to folding it up though, the backhead needs a lot of detail adding. There are no indications on the part itself as to where everything should go though, so I scaled one of the drawings from the instructions and stuck it to the etch. I then used a modelling knife to gently mark some of the lines and positions so I would know where everything should go. The paper was then removed, the glue cleaned off, and then the detail parts are put in place.

Of course "the detail parts are put in place" hides quite a lot of work. Each of the gauges and controls have to first be made by laminating three layers of etch together before they can be soldered to the cab etch. After a lot of work with the soldering iron I gave up and used superglue to fit wire to represent the pipework. I've also not fitted all of the pipework shown in the instructions. Specifically it shows a pipe going horizontally to the edge on both sides of the cab; these are to feed the taps (for making tea) on the outside of the cab. I've been using the Ivor story collection book I've had since I was a child for prototype information and that only shows a tap on the right side of the cab, hence I've only fitted one pipe as I'll only be fitting one tap.

With the backhead detailed the next step was to fold up the cab and incorporate the first piece I made up to build the coalbunker into the back of the cab. Including the coal bunker was nice and easy as there is an etched line it sits in. As the cab is all right angles the rest of it is prety easy to form as well. The only real problem is with the outiside of the coal bunker. This essentially folds across from one side and should nicely line up with a half etched seem on the other. Unfortunately it's slightly too wide. My guess is that when the artwork was drawn no allowance for material thickness was made, and so the part is too big by the thickness of the sheet. I filed it back a little and it's now mostly right, although looking at the finished can it's still ever so slightly wrong, but it's not visibly unless you are looking directly down on the model and I think once I've cleaned everything up (and yes I took the photos before cleaning up the excess solder) and put coal in the bunker it won't be noticable.

I know I'm not the most skilled person with a soldering iron (possibly as the soldering iron is cheap and fairly rubbish) but I'm pretty happy with how that all turned out... it's going to be a nightmare to paint the backhead detail but that's a problem for another day.