DB says: That might sound appealing if you managed to buy Otira and are reading this from its cold and miserable bowels. Over here, its been 30 degrees C in the kitchen for the last week ...at night. Personally, I'd rather be sitting under the damp veranda of the Otira hotel with a ham and cheese toastie in one hand and a cider in the other, watching three banker locos idling away by the station, their exhaust rolling lazily up to the still misty heavens...
But I digress.... I managed to sweat a few minutes away in the train room last Sunday evening in a feeble attempt to progress the passenger train a little. My first thoughts were to throw some blue paint on carriage sides, but then something sensible in my head thought it might be best to do some work in their nether regions first because getting the bogies mounted might require the use of paint-damaging power tools.
You may recall from the earlier application of these Kato bogies, that the bolsters of these things are oddly stepped down in the middle, and literally on top of these, the nice pinpoint copper bearings/current collectors stick up as you may see below on the stock bogie at left.
To get around this, I crudely applied sidecutters to the task of removing the tabular protrusions from the copper pickups (will paint or permanent-marker what's left later on), and used two small washers per bogie to lift the bolsters away from the resin bodies. To deal with the 'downstep' in the middle, I removed the edges of the lower washer so it would fit within the step, and to stop it spinning around and making everything crooked, I lightly contact glued it in place per the item on the right of the above pic.
The application of a power drill, washers and screws later had me staring at the following:
It's all a bit hard to see in the pic because of the masses of white, but they look fairly decent. I'm ok with the coupling distance and will make up some sort of concertina/bellows between the cars later on to fill this in and hide the Rapido couplers. I think the ride height is ok, but I can always unscrew things and slip another washer in there later on if I want to jack them up a bit.
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