Pete always said he knew that a proportion of the kits he sold would end up in drawer and never get built, and unfortunately it's the case that there are also a few that never get completed, either.
I knew when I was offered first refusal, and sent some pictures, that it was never, ever going to be a runner, and my interest from the start was only to see whether it might be useful as a potential source of donor parts should something catastrophic disable one of our fleet.
This was never going to be a narrow gauge Galatea, but what I couldn’t know until it turned up was how much of it would be salvageable?
The answer is not a lot!
The modeller who first tried to build it (not the person I bought it from) clearly got themselves into a bit of a pickle with it.
For example, it would seem that in soldering on the fly cranks they succeeded in melting the plastic wheel centres.
(For a tip on how to avoid that read back through our posts about building 130)
Perhaps that was the reason they subsequently attempted to fit a Farish 08 chassis in its place, obviously without success,
You might be wondering what possible interest we would have in acquiring the remnants?
Well, for a start there's the two Mashima motors, which are now out of production and so always very handy to have.
A lot of the gears on this kit were unused, and you may recall that when we bought the very last Backwoods NGG16 ever produced we discovered two of the crucial double gears were missing.
In the end we got it working after discovering identical gears on an old Ibertren chassis, but it illustrates the value in having a stock of spares.
Finally, we can used the body to make a some fun features for Bron Hebog.
My initial thoughts are to have the bunkers placed in a DZ wagon - perhaps with one of the power bogie chassis units minus valve gear - and even the boiler unit and frames could be mounted on ambulance bogies to be towed around the layout at slow speed?
It's only usually done to move bits of the Garratts around the site at Dinas, but we're allowed to have a little fun sometimes aren't we?
I have always wanted to build one of these, but I fear my opportunity has slipped me by now they are more difficult to get hold of. Your builds of them are amazing, though, having seen them in the flesh a few times too. I look forward to looking back through your builds on here.
ReplyDeleteAwesome blog yoou have here
ReplyDelete