A Little Alteration to Lyd

After much havering Himself has elected to put our model of Lyd under the knife and carry out some cosmetic surgery on the cab.

As you may know the FR’s new L&B replica engine has removable sections at each side of the cab which slightly alter the profile to enable her to fit through Garnedd Tunnel. When running on the Welsh Highland, with its much more generous loading gauge, these extra pieces are replaced to give Lyd her traditional cab outline.


Here she is wearing her FR profile..




Because we plan to run our Lyd on both our layouts, Dduallt (FR) and Bron Hebog (WHR) we thought we should really have our Lyd (a Backwoods Miniatures kit) built to the FR profile.

The alteration has been quite a challenging one, mainly because Himself had already made up the cab in original condition before committing to the modification.

The tricky part is that the modification requires a strip to be cut from the top but there is not enough brass above the doorway to do this while still leaving a linking piece.

So what he did was this.

First he cut the top of the doorway out, then cut 1mm off the top of the remaining cab side and then fitted a 1mm strip of brass across inside to bridge the gap in the doorway and keep the shape.

As the kit has various cab style etches for the modified cabs that were fitted to the class he cut out the top doorway from a spare etch with the same size doorway, soldered this to the new brass strip so that the top of the door arch was level with the top of the window arch, then filed the top all level.

He then re profiled the corners of the front and back cabsheets to meet the the cut down sides and then altered the cab roof to fit by bending in a vice.





What do you think? Have we got the effect right??