Wiggle Room

No it's not a radical new design of carriage - although it's an interesting idea - it is in fact the chassis of our latest Superbarn 117 on test.

The purpose of the test run is because we've discovered that these carriages, fitted with my own design of proper-sized FR bogies, do not have sufficient swing to traverse the tightest curves on Dduallt.

Previously, when we have run superbarns on the layout, they have all been fitted with Parkside Dundas Vale of Rheidol bogies dressed up to look (not a lot) like FR carriage bogies.

Although the new FR bogies were fitted to carriage 119 it had only run on Bron Hebog, where the geometry of the curves is more generous.

The root of the problem is the way the frames are inset below the doors at either end - a consequence of the designer attempting to squeeze the absolute maximum amount of carriage into a loading gauge designed for horses and slate waggons!

Himself has been hacking away at the underneath of the chassis to give the bogies a little more wiggle room.

He sent me this picture, but now I think about it I realise that he didn't actually say whether or not it was a success....

Screen Time

I remembered one last job I had to do on the inside of 117.

(I told you that snagging lists were never ending.)

It's the small screens that divide the saloon from the vestibules.

You can see from the picture that I knock these up from styrene and I've glued them to the inside of the body rather than have them fixed to the floor with the seats.

This was another job where I was very pleased with the new slow-bond super glue I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.

With a task like this it's good to be have half a minute or so to make fine adjustments to the positioning but also know that you will get a firm fix very soon after that.

The Bits You Don't See

My carriage roofs are multi-functional.

They're made as a styrene laminate.

Part of its purpose is to help keep the top of the bodyside straight and give the shell some strength.

Where there is a plastic skin being curved over the top then I also mount some ribs which help the top surface to keep its shape.

Lastly, I glue some strips on the underside which the hold the top edge of the glazing in place and, along with the seats and tables, keep it up tight against the inside of the windows.

That's what you can see in the picture here.

It's usually the last job I do before bonding the roof in place but not this time because, as has become our way with the Superbarns, I shall ask Himself to cut, bend and fix a brass roof to the carriage.

I'm Glad That's Done

So in the end I decided to tackle one of my least favourite jobs: the corridor connections.

Might as well get it out of the way, I reckoned.

I'm not too keen on it mainly because it's both fiddly and slightly boring at the same time.

The fiddly bit is joining the three bits of strip together the make the U section.

The boredom comes because you have to do that six times, and then after that there's a lot of filing and sanding work to round off the corners so they look at least something like bits of rubber folded over.

I'm always glad I've done it though because I think it's really essential to getting the look of  FR corridor stock right. 

It's just that I never look forward to having to do it.

Four Steps At A Time

When a carriage gets to this stage of a build you end up with what seems like an ever-lengthening list of small details to complete it.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that you can begin knocking them off in a spare 10 or 15 minutes, which happens to be all the time I've had in a single session just recently.

The latest progress is that I've fixed on the footsteps at each corner of the underframe and I've also fixed on some small bits of strip which represent the brackets underneath the bodysides.

These are a distinctive feature of the Superbarns.

There is no shortage of these small jobs, the trouble is I can never decide which one to tick off the list next.

Boxing Night

Carriage 117 is at the stage where there are seemingly no end of small jobs to finish it off, such as the various bits and pieces which live beneath the frame.

It starts off simply enough with a couple of basic boxes which I knocked up in a spare hour the other night.

These will have to have various bits of pipework, large and small, connected to them.

The larger one, I believe, contains the diesel-powered carriage heater and the smaller one is the fuel tank associated with it.

I am always open to correction, however.

Seating Installed

I can report back on my rather pricey tube of glue and..

..I'm quite happy with it, actually.

I doesn't quite give you the full 60 second adjustment time 'like it says on the tube', but it's not a completely instant bond and I was able to shift the seats and tables slightly after I'd dropped them into place.

I think this may be the last knockings of the old mould for the seat units, however, because the tables came a bit taller than they should have done.

Well, 1mm or so, anyway, but it makes me think that perhaps the rubber has stretched a little as the parts have been removed each time.

This meant I had to go through the rather dull process of sanding a little off the bottom of each casting on a sheet of sandpaper before gluing it on.

Otherwise it all went quite smoothly.

Allocated Seating

I haven't had much time to progress my latest Superbarn carriage since I last posted about it but I did have a spare hour last night to clean up and assemble the castings for the interior.

I always used to find assembling the seats and tables from scratch each time a bit of a bind, unless it was one of the more unusual carriages, so I've been very pleased that I hit on the idea of casting a combined seat and table unit which can be arranged together in multiple to fit out a carriage in half the time.

The units at each end have to be chopped in half to fit but that's the only alteration which is required.

I'll admit it's not the most finescale solution, looking more like something you'd find in a Triang carriage from the 1960's, but once it's in place inside the model and running on the layout you really can't tell the difference.

Spot The Difference

Once again 'Waller's Law' - which states that no two FR carriages are identical - has been proven to be true.

I have found the difference between Superbarns 119 and 117, but I had to do it the hard way.

The prospect of a couple of hours modelling time over the weekend was the perfect opportunity to tackle one of the jobs which requires a lot of concentration and, ideally, no interruptions: bending and fitting the truss rods.

I've been expecting to be caught out ever since someone - who should know better - told me the two latest carriages (117 & 118) would be identical - that was the word he used - to the previous one (119).

And in most respects this appears to be the case, but if you stare closely at underframes, as I do (that's underframes) then you'll see that 117 is a new hybrid Superbarn.

The truss rods, in terms of the point at which they disappear behind the frame, are the same as the first series (103, 121 & 108) but the design and position of the supporting posts is the same as 119.

As you can see in this photo below.

I didn't realise this, alas, until I had spent an evening making up a set the same as 119 with the ends of the rods staying below the frame and being anchored in boxes at either end.

So I had to spend some of the following afternoon ripping off the old ones, re-bending them, drilling yet more holes in the floor and fitting them.

And now a well-placed source tells me that 118 is going to be different again.

As the kids say these days: Sake!

Aide-Memoire

It isn't only Boston Lodge which has a problem producing identical carriages.

Left to my own devices there's every chance my latest Super Barn 117 would turn out rather differently from the previous one, 119.

Fortunately, now that Himself lives just a few miles up the road, it is easy for me to raid the stock boxes and get hold of a previous model to aid my memory.

Although the body sides have been cast from the same moulds there's lots of potential for deviance when it comes to things like the depth of the frame which sticks out of the bottom or the detail of the bits and pieces beneath.

So it's invaluable to have it on hand to refer to and cross-check against, the only challenge is to make sure that it doesn't sustain any accidental damage which is all to easily done around a workbench full of sharp tools, bottles of solvent and a house inhabited by young children and a periodically psychotic cat.....

I'll Just Be 5 Minutes

That phrase has got to be one of the biggest fibs in the English language, now that we no longer send cheques to each other in the post!

In this case the 5 minutes in question is the time it is alleged that a popular brand of rapid-set 2-part epoxy resin glue takes to set.

Not in my experience this week it doesn't. More like 5 hours, if at all!

Allow me to explain.

I usually fix resin parts together using a slow-set 'super glue' which gives you quite a few seconds adjustment time, but I have run out of that at the moment and I only have the standard stuff in the house.

The Super Barn castings are quite tricky to join together and you've got to position them very carefully so I thought it would be best to allow myself a little wriggle room and I elected to use epoxy resin instead.

Perhaps it is because the tubes are quite old - maybe as much as two years old - but it has been very slow to cure. In fact 24 hours on from being mixed the stuff left over on the pallet remains soft and tacky.

I wanted a glue that allowed me some adjustment time but what I definitely didn't need was one that allowed the parts to adjust themselves by the force of gravity whilst they set!

I had to leave it a whole day between gluing the doors on either end of the main body sides for them to be fixed firmly enough to be handled without moving - and during that time I had to return to them every so often to check they hadn't slipped out of place. (And they had.)

Trying to put the ends on was even worse!

Six hours after I'd joined them together, and with countless visits back to the workbench to fiddle with them, there was no sign of the joints curing into a firm hold, so I pulled them apart, cleaned up the parts and resorted to Super Glue.

Within minutes the basic carriage body was formed and I could cut out a basic floor to slip inside to help keep it in shape.

Epoxy resin?

Poxy resin more like...

Labour Saving?

It is open to debate whether resin casting carriages ends up saving you much time and effort over scratch building the parts in styrene.

Yes, it is undoubtedly much quicker to cast a number of them once you have made the master and the mould, but it takes rather more time to clean them up and get them ready for gluing together.

For example it was an evening's work this week to tidy up the bits for Superbarn 117.

It's also the case that when you come to build up the carriage that comparatively brittle resin is not as easy to bond and work with as soft, melt-able styrene.

Very much in its favour, however, is the fact that the whole body side is much more rigid and robust than one fabricated out of styrene.

Next time you seem them here I hope these eight pieces will be a single carriage body.

Carriage Kit

Some time last year the carriage works crew told me, on their word of honour, that the next two Superbarns 117 and 118 would be identical to the recently out-shopped 119.

Ignoring a lifetime's bitter experience I choose to believe them and cast the body components for another two carriages from a master I made for our model of 119.

They've been stored nice and flat in a photo album since then waiting for their time to come.

Well, with 117 in service on the railway, and my model of the Disco Car handed over to Himself for painting, I've decided that time is now.

I'm getting close the point where I feel brave enough to have a go at the new Observation Car 150 but think I should probably get at least one of these out of the way first.