Since finishing the build of the tender truck at the weekend I have spent some time playing with additional details. I have also primed and started the top coats of paint but I haven’t taken any photos yet (not much to show to be honest).

First I got a bit carried away and made a few more shunting poles…. I found that the pin shanks bent so much better without annealing first.

Then I had a rummage in my scrap etc box to see what if anything I had in the way of tool boxes or something that could be made into them.

First off I came up with this it was a bit fiddly to make up and the first wash lost some of the bits of rod on the sides…. The oil can is one of the Peter Roles castings.

Next up I really wanted an open toolbox. A spare etch and some scratch built straps etc. gave me this which I am quite suited with.

With tools inside…..

Jim also supplies a few cast details in the form of buckets, upright oil cans and shovels so I made a start on painting some of them.

I am not too sure about the buckets……

Last night saw the shunting truck compete or so I thought. A chance look through one of the RCTS Green Books revealed that some locos had shunting poles on brackets along the valances. This got my mind working and I reasoned that if the tender truck had foot boards and handrails for the shunter why not a shunting pole too.

A quick Google search this morning got me an idea of what they look like and the approximate sizes, so I set to this afternoon to see if I could make one.

The hand rails look a bit worse for handling (if you will pardon the pun!) but given that the loco that I plan to run this behind is in post war LNER livery I would expect these wagons to be a little tired by then.

The pole is made from a cut down cocktail stick, which I turned in my dremel wile applying a sanding stock.

I cut the point off and drilled a hole approx 10mm down the centre. I then got the end of a brass pin that I had used the head as a rivet (I have a little pot on my workbench with all sorts of offcuts etc. just for such occasions. I annealed the end of it and twisted it with round nosed pliers to the rough approximation of what I had seen in photos.

I then had a look in the scrap etc. box an found a piece of nickel that had been half etched so was quite thin. I cut a strip off this and shaped it to make the ferrule for the end of the pole and soldered it together.

I then glued the pin in the hole and mixed up a watery mix of black\gunmetal\steel acrylics and washed over the handle to give a used look. A quick dunk in metal black sorted the hook and ferrule.

As a slight aside I have found it very difficult to remove the excess solder on this build – or at least the staining of where it’s been.

Still moving steadily along with this one.

Unlike most of Jim’s other kits (or at least those that I have had the good fortune to build) this ones has taken quite a bit of fettling to fit – I had to file the ends quite a bit to get them to fit properly between the sides (as the kit seems to have been intended) this is no reflection on Jim as he didn’t design it and he does mention most of what you need to file of in the instructions (and he may have mentioned this but I neglected to look at the instructions by this point).

The corner plates are a little fiddly but they do fit very nicely giving a realistic corner – it’s a pity my blurred photo doesn’t show them that well -I only managed those on the rear corners last night.

I have been struggling to have the head space for much modelling for a couple of months due to a house move – I had forgotten just how much you need to do when buying and selling houses….

This has meant that I started to make mistakes through in attention on the 06 so I decided that I needed something simple to maintain the mojo and this has taken the form of another of Connoisseur’s offerings. I collected this from Jim at Cleckheaton after enquiring about it late last year and then promptly forgetting about it until Jim reminded me a couple of weeks before the show. It is his recently released, former Majestic models NBR tender truck. – The plan is that it will run behind Nellie.

Jim’s test build highlight a few areas where you need to do a bit of filing to make later parts fit and so far I have been doing this and making up some sub assemblies.

This is the brake lever and guard as provided in the kit. I wasn’t too keen on it being cast in one piece, because apart from lacking fidelity I reasoned that it would also be quite vulnerable.

The lever guard is a Bill Bedford etch from the spares box, the lever I made from a strip of etch and the mounting was made from a piece of square bar that I cut to rough shape and finished with the Dremel.

The instructions suggest soldering the step brackets directly to the front of the sole bars and to strengthen them with .7mm wire. I chose to mount them through the base of the sole bars using the slots provided but I did strengthen them (albeit with etched strip not wire)

The outer sides are done as per the instructions.

I couldn’t resist fitting them together loosely to see how they would look when fitted.