B-ginnings Of Our Fleet

I recently presented Himself with half a dozen of my B Wagon kits to turn into a rake for Bron Hebog depicting the latest arrivals from South Africa.

This is the first one he's tackled which is awaiting lettering and weathering.

Fortunately nothing gets past Himself because it turns out that SAR operated to the same standards of standardisation as the FR / WHR, and it appears that you can't take it for granted that six supposedly identical wagons are, in fact, identical.

This wagon is going to be a model of B1621 which has a number of detailed differences to the wagon I based the kit on.

The most obvious difference is perhaps the diagonal handrail at the right hand end which is positioned the opposite way around to all the other B wagons.

The V hanger on the brake gear is also located slightly differently on this wagon - the right hand leg sits astride the right hand door hinge rather than being place up against it.

Himself has also added vacuum pipes and footsteps (which are also slightly at variance with other B wagons)and given it a coat of red oxide primer and picked out the brake wheels in yellow.

Only another five to go, then.....

Tool Van Progress

I've had my fill of houses for the moment so last week I gave a bit more attention to the WHR Tool Van.

If you recall, this is a sort of shed-on-wheels which was plonked onto a stripped-down DZ wagon.

The latest developments are the doors at the 'platform' end of the wagon, the roof, and the handrail at the end.

The handrail is just resting in place in its locating holes, by the way. It's not really that wonky.

I'm rather pleased with the way the handrail has turned out.

Soldering is still a comparatively new skill for me and this handrail had to be fabricated from 7 bits of brass wire of different sizes.

The challenge, of course, is to not melt all your other joints as you add each subsequent bit.

I have no doubt that expert solderers will scoff at those joints but it will do for me for now.

Almost There

It may have sounded labour intensive the way I described it the other day, but adding roofing slates using my paper rows system is actually quite swift.

As you can see I've completed the slates on all the aspects of the roof now.

What do you think?

So this house is 99% complete - or maybe perhaps 98%.

The two halves still have to be joined together, the roof sections glued on and finishing details such as soffit boards and guttering added.

Put like that there's still quite a lot outstanding....

But I think I might put it to one side for now and start work on the second of the pair.

Slating

So the time has come to start slating the roof of the first Oberon Wood house.

For this job I'm choosing to use rows of thick paper strips which are cut to represent the individual slates.

This is the same technique I employed on the farm buildings at Cwn Cloch and I find it the best solution to represent traditional Welsh roofing slates.

There is a very good commercial product on the market produced by Slater's. Unlike most embossed plasticard sheets they have the proper three dimensional overlap, but the downside is the sheets are quite small and they are very thick (about 60 thou) and rather hard to cut to shape.

So instead I've developed this method which I first used on a model of Minffordd Weigh House I was asked to make as a retirement gift for the FR's Fred Howes.

That is why the slate shapes you see here have a diamond shape at one end because this sheet - which I drew on the PC at home and shrank to scale on the office photocopier - was intended for the ornate slates on the roof if this building.

However it works just as well for conventional, rectangular slates if you turn them 180 degrees.

They are cut from the sheet into rows and I cut a slice with the tip of my scalpel two thirds of the way up each line - enough to separate the slates while still leaving the row in one piece - before gluing them in place with a smear of PVA onto the styrene.

And repeat....

Eventually when all the rows are in place you end up with a full roof of slates, thus.

The trickiest bit is to get all the rows level and equally spaced.

I will be the first to admit they rarely come out without one row slightly different to the rest, but I guess that's the essence of s scratch built model, isn't it?

Laying The Foundations

Last week was one of those weeks where lots of little jobs got done on the house model.

If you've not been watching carefully then you might think that there's been little progress but the walls of the building are now pretty much complete and slating the roof is the only major job left.

The latest change is adding on the brickwork along the bottom of some of the walls.

We've had to do the best we can from the photos we have. There appear to be a few courses visible on most aspects of the house although in a couple of places the render does look to come all the way to the bottom.

Those who suspected that I might be mad enough to add them brick by brick or score them on may be disappointed to learn that I've used bog-standard embossed styrene for this.

Now I shall have to brace myself to tackle the slates.

Baywatch

No, this post is not about Pamela Anderson, although is it all about horizontal extensions so I suppose there is some connection....

It is concerned with the very distinctive bay window on the eastern side of the Oberon Wood house I've been building.

This has been one of those details that I've been thinking about how best to tackle for a number of weeks before deciding to give it a go one night last week.

This is the very delicate side to building construction and requires some of the fabricating techniques I use in my carriage building.

I started by making up the three glazed sections of the bay window. Rather awkwardly there are very slim, glazed openings on either sides. It would have been an awful lot easier if they were blank...

My main consideration when planning it was not how to build it, but how best to allow access to slip the glazing into place when the model has been painted?

In the end I decided it would be too fiddly to try and do it from the inside with the window bonded into place on the outside of the house.

It wouldn't be too much of a problem if there was only the big pane to fit, but those small side ones would be very tricky indeed.

So I've opted to keep it removable until after its all been painted.

In this shot below you can see that I've glued the three pieces together and have offered it up to check for fit against the big hole in the side of the house.

This particular window also has sloping sections - a support below and a roof bit above.

I have chosen to bond the roof to the top of the window unit while the bottom shelf is fixed to the wall of the house and, until it's all put together for the final time, the glazed section can be rested, when required, in position on this shelf, as you see below.

I'm really rather pleased with how it's turned out, but I'm also glad I don't have to make a second one, because the second of this pair of houses has a blank wall on this eastern aspect.

Chim Chim Cheree

This post comes with apologies to Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke, naturally.

It's just a small update - an oblong one, in fact - on the Oberon Wood house build.

I have added the chimney the the eastern aspect of the house.

This is one area where I have to report, regrettably, that I have found the Artistic Director's plans wanting.

His designs showed the chimney breast standing proud of the wall all the way down, but the research photographs I have to hand appear to show, quite conclusively it must be said, that it is entirely internal until it pops up out of the roof.

Sorry Francis.