Joan

The last exhibition showed the need for a good 3rd engine. I had the Chivers Finelines RC17 Welshpool & Llanfair Joan kit sat in a box, so out it came.

The kit was designed to go on a Minitrix chassis but I had bought a couple of the Dapol 2-6-2 tanks when they were cheap on the OO9 Society Second Hand stall so these were an obvious choice for conversion to an 0-6-2.

Removing the body and pony trucks showed that I just needed to lift the coils and capacitors and make a larger hole in the footplate and it would be a perfect fit. I needed to remove a locating lug so I sawed that off and promptly sawed through one of the wires which are ever so tiny and delicate. A repair by my good friend Bob had it running again in no time.

The body was cleaned up and glued with superglue gel. Working with whitemetal is so easy. No fiddling with soldering irons unless you want to and it is easy to file and to fill. The whole kit took only a couple of hours time to put together.

One nice touch was the coupling hook on the rear which I was able to superglue into the NRMA standard socket on the trailing pony truck. It provides the necessary movement on tight bends and was easier to do than expected.

I've made one mistake in not putting the fixing nuts in place early on but I reckon I can still do that. The picture shows the completed body with a few gaps to fill with putty. After that it's a case of clean it up and take it into the garden and spray it.

Hopefully this will all be done in time for Abingdon show in early March.