The horsebox is now pretty much complete and ready for final weathering.

The I thought I would try something a little different. Heading back to the 1930’s…

I finally got the transfers on and the glazing in. I just need to refit the buffer heads and couplings and tweak the fit of the straps that hold the door supports in place on the body side.

It’s still very much one step forward and two steps back with the transfers on this one.

After managing to get the transfers on the side that I had to previously patch repaint I now have to to a similar repair job on the other side Grrr..

A little more done today, stepboards aged, black touched where the brown had strayed and a bit of ‘bone’ white on the hoses.

In between other jobs I got the sole bars and head stocks painted in brown. I added the axleboxes and then decided to veneer the step boards too.

Looking at the photo I still need to paint the hoses…

Thankfully, it looks like I got away with the partiel repaint. I have also added an additional coat of Johnsons Klear so now I will wait a couple of days for it to fully harden.

Well I managed to make a complete cock up of the transfers on the first side.

I hadn’t got the surface glossy enough and the transfer refused to be nudged. In the end I was a bit vigorous with the cocktail stick that I use to finally position transfers and gouged a bit of paint off.

Here I am trying a partial repaint of the damaged side. As I was stripping the paint from the affected panels I also noted that somewhere along the line I had lost a hinge from the feed/harness compartment so I stripped that door too and soldered on another hinge. Time will tell as to whether I get away with it or I have to strip the whole side or even the entire body.

I have called this part 7.5 as I forgot to add a photo of my long ago attempt at a buttoned leather groom’s seat now that it’s painted.

Here we are with a coat of paint. I still need to paint the solebars and buffer beams brown but it’s coming along.

It’s now ready for paint (actually I primed it last night and added the top coat this morning).

Buffers and couplings are just pushed into place for the photos and the axle boxes still need to be stuck on.

Unlike most of the castings in the kit which are really good the Westinghouse and vacuum through pipes were not so good so having checked my stock and finding that I didn’t have any cast ones to hand, I decided to make some. Once fitted and painted they should look the part.

They are made from 1.6mm brass rod, brass beading wire, some 2.2mm nickel rod drilled out to create the collars at each end of the wire bound section and some 10thou nickel sheet riveted and cut into strips with my guillotine.

The door dampers also need some way to retain them once the body is fitted to the chassis so again 10 thou nickel sheet riveted and cut into strips.

It needed a bit of experimentation with the rivet spacing because I needed the hollows at the back of the rivets to fit over half etched rivets already in place on the body side.

Back in 2011 when I put the body together despite having scratch built a groom’s seat I soldered the roof on. A couple of years ago I realised that I would never be able to properly paint the groom’s compartment so I removed it again.

As can be seen from my earlier photos it was built before I started using lens tissue to represent canvas on roofs. I wanted to add it and the simplest way to do it was to remove all the roof vents, stick on the tissue and then re-add the vents. I left the two grab handles in place ad worked around them.

I am not sure whether it was because I had removed the roof after originally soldering it on but it no longer fitted as well as it did. In order to improve the fit I soldered a strip of quite thick nickel to the top of each end which filled up the slight gap that was there.

I then started thinking of how to refit the roof after painting. Initially I added a framework using my small vertical belt sander to quickly create the curves to match the roof profile with some angles to brace them apart at the correct distance. On one end I added a fold to hook under the strip on the top with the other end slipping inside the inner wall of the groom’s compartment. It worked but it was not as tight a fit as I would have liked.

While conversing with another modeller who is also building a horsebox from a Gladiator kit I had an idea. It’s not the clearest in the photo below but I soldered a curved length of 1.6mm rod to the underside of the roof tight enough so that it would snapp over the end strip and hold in position below it – think of a reversed percent sign %

That works a treat and is something I plan to develop for fixing other van roofs on going forwards.

I had a look through the instructions for the later NER Diag 196 horsebox earlier to check whether that had brake yokes. The etch doesn’t but the instructions do… Further investigation revealed that Danny does (did?) a separate etch for the brake yokes. I wonder how many more of his kits it was designed to fit. – I have D&S kits for a CLC brake van and a GER special cattle box. The brake van definitely has no yokes. I haven’t had a look at the cattle box yet.

The other question is whether Dan did the etch for the 7mm kits or just the 4mm ones. All the instructions are clearly from the 4mm kits with small footnotes for 7mm

By the time that it was popped aside due to the missing parts I had got it to this stage.

I also had a go at making up a door damper from scratch but I only ever made the one.

A couple of years before I started this blog, way back in summer 2010 I attended my first Gauge O Guild Show at Halifax. While there I picked up a couple of kits. One of them was a D&S North Eastern Railway Diagram 67 Horsebox. Now I confess that I have always had the thing about horseboxes so I was pleased to pick the kit up.

Although I bought it from a trader and the pack was still heat sealed, I discovered later that it must have been both an early kit and possibly packed on a Friday afternoon.

Fast forward 12 months to 2011 and I started to build it.

This was at the point where I discovered that there were no instructions in the packet. – remember my Friday afternoon comment.

I did have Volume 3 of Historic Carriage Drawings by Peter Tatlow which although it didn’t have a photo of the diagram 67 Horsebox it did have a drawing which showed that the kit was missing castings or etches for the distinctive door dampers.

Mentioning the lack of instructions over on Western Thunder kindly brought me a pdf copy a snip of them is included below to show the door dampers that I referred to.

The instructions made it clear that they were castings rather than etches. I also noted and this is why I believe it was an earlier kit in the D&S range that although there were brakes in terms of shoes and hangers there were no representations for the yokes. I also have a D&S GNR horsebox kit and that does have yokes so perhaps Danny realised what was missing in later designs.