Superstition

Do you ever get the feeling that some models are fated?  I'm coming to believe that there's some kind of curse on my Super Barns.

If you've read this blog from the beginning then you may recall on the first one I made - a styrene model of 103 - I discovered late on the build that the drawings I was using bore no relation to the actual carriage. All the window pillars were in the wrong place.

I had to conduct a surgical operation to remove the carriage sides and graft on a replacement pair with the correct dimensions.

Well, blow me if it hasn't happened again on my resin Super Barn production line.

I was working away steadily on the fourth of these carriages (being built for clients) gluing the struts for the truss rods in place on the underframe when I noticed the brackets along one side of the frame were in a different place to those one of the other carriages I was using as a guide.

These brackets are all in line with the window pillars.

I was flummoxed. I could not understand what was going on. Then it began to dawn on me that I'd made a very silly mistake in casting and assembling the parts for this carriage.

The thing about the Super Barns is the two sides are not symmetrical - they are a mirror image of each other -  there is a left hand casting and a right hand casting.

 (Or a Clock and an Engine side casting in Boston Lodge parlance.)

Eventually I realised that I had made this one up with two of the same type of casting instead of one of each.

And it gets worse.

"No problem", I thought.

 I had a couple of extra sides sitting on the shelf  because I've still got a 5th one to make, so I thought I could just borrow one of those,

I wasted another 15 minutes clearing the flash out from the windows until I discovered that this was the same type as the faulty one I'd just removed, and so was the other spare on the shelf.

It turns out I somehow managed to produce 4 from the same mould in my last casting session instead of two pairs.

So progress has been halted for a day or so while I cast another two replacements from the opposite mould, and I have triple checked it's the right one this time.