I’ve painted the wagon in undercoat and then a topcoat of what I thought would be a good representation of the Midland Wagon Grey, but it looks too light/pale to me.  The answer might be to put on the MR transfers (white) and then “weather” it to a darker colour.  I’m not sure.

Here it is, without the wheels or buffer heads.  The inside needs to be made a realistic wood finish also.

Meanwhile, I have started another wagon!  This time it is a Williams models “Flexi Kit”.  These are an “economical” type of model, which Mike Williams is a little hesitant to sell, actually – he thinks they are lacking the detail of other kits, and though less expensive are not (in his view) good value.  There is no internal detail, and no floor inside the wagon.  However for coal wagons (which this is a model of) filled with coal, these features would not be visible anyway.  So if I make a model load (with real coal incidentally), the lack of internal detail will become irrelevant!

The way it is constructed is very different, as you can see.  The first part is to put the “W-irons” (the bits holding the axleboxes) onto the underframe.

The underframe has NO detail, and this is added by glue-ing detail facings onto the frame – which you can see in the picture.  I think the resin mouldings of the facings must have shrunk when moulded – they are too short by a couple of millimetres.  Fortunately there are no details in the central portion, so I could simply put a cut into the facing and line up the detail (bolt-heads for the W-irons) and then fill in the central cut with Milliput filler, later.

The brake gear is much less complex to put together – it is a single resin moulding, seen here in the top of the picture.

Mike is correct in that it looks crude when first seen.  However with care I think the wagon can be made to look good.

 

It’s interesting to start the wagon from the bottom and work up, whilst my previous wagons I have built the bodywork first and added the W-irons, wheels and brake-gear later.  The details on the mouldings look OK, so with care I suspect a perfectly acceptable wagon will emerge.  

We will see.  Click on pics. to enlarge.

On the wagon front, we have progress as the pictures will show.

First is the assemblage with wheels.

Importantly the suspension works, the wheels are at the correct height – shown by the buffers matching up with my other wagon.

 

 

 

So it is starting to look the part.

 

 

 

 

 

Next is to add all the gear under the solebars: mostly the leaf springs and the brake gear.  This is a picture taken after I have removed the wheels in order to paint the gear.

 

 

There are some other items to add, though: the brake lever racks, together with the chains which I have added, with the pins used to “pin down the brakes” as the old locomotive men used to have to do (by hand, down the whole train!) before taking a train of these wagons down a steep hill.

The following pictures are of the largely completed wagon, prior to painting.  I will admit that the load is not “to scale” (merely stones from the garden) but they hold the suspension compressed and so at the correct height.

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Click to enlarge, as always.

This ‘blog may be updated as I build the wagon, but to start off with …

In gauge 3 I have found at least three companies make model wagons largely from wood. This is good, rather than using largely plastic, and I approve for all sorts of practical reasons, as well as ideological ones.

So this is my latest model, made by Woodbury wagons. It represents a Midland Railway “5-plank” open wagon, meaning that the sides were five planks high.

One of the peculiar things about the larger scale compared to 7mm/foot, is that some of the parts are smaller! If you look carefully at the second piece down from the top, on the centre of the side-piece of the wagon it a little pile of 1/32 inch rivets. These are used to model the rivets on the real wagon, and each one has to be inserted into a hole through the simulated “strapping” parts on the sides and ends of the wagon, as you can see in the picture – the model strapping is made from this strips of acrylic, with holes bored (actually laser-cut) where the rivets are to go.

The is a somewhat laborious task – each wagon will have over two hundred of the tiny pieces to put in place. It will look good in the end, I have no doubt.

Laser-cutting of the pieces has made this not just possible, but remarkably accurate and so easier- the holes in the strapping and the holes underneath in the plywood match up exactly. Very impressive. It takes an awful long time to do, however.

NEXT ENTRY

After laminating the sides together (each side and each end has two flat parts to laminate), the time comes to start putting it all together.

It looked good at first, but then I realised that one end had a minor mis-match with a 1mm step between the side and the end. One of the little-known virtues of Araldite is that it is somewhat heat-labile: by dipping the corner into boiling water the hardened glue softens and can be pulled apart. In stages the whole construction could be dismantled.

NEXT ENTRY

Now I can show the not-quite-complete body of the wagon. It has been a title bit of a struggle, but it has turned out almost perfectly square without too much trouble really.

NEXT ENTRY

I decided that next I should make the fasteners which keep the side-doors closed – a pin held in place with a loop of metal. Clearly these are prominent features but quite small, and not provided in the kit. So I decided to make them from 7mm-scale hand-rail pins and loops of brass wire made by wrapping a length of 0.5mm wire around a 2mm drill, then cutting the resulting spiral longitudinally to make a lot of loops (albeit with gaps in each loop).

Some fine soldering work and adding small lengths of straight wire produced the necessary fasteners:

Adding a small length of copper chain specially purchased

I think the end result looks good, and very realistic – which is the main idea, of course.