Bogie assembly

Well, the weathers crap here so its an ideal time to stay inside and potter at the old work bench.
This weekend I've been working on the 2mm etches that arrived last week. having tackled the simple fold up W irons and plate frame bogie inners, I decided to tackle the 4'6" archbar bogies. How hard could they be?

"A quick reminder of what we face"

Quite hard is the answer. The 7 pages of instructions are very thorough, thankfully with pictures. The first part is the easiest in fitting the bearings. then comes the origami section where we get to fold up the center bolster springing bit. this was a real challenge at times, and it took me 3 to get it absolutely right. There are some fiddly wee folds that must need some Jedi mind trick to get to work. However after a couple of hours work I had 2 bogies up and running.

"Mmmmm, pretttyyy"

Further research reveals that I could have saved a stack of time as the earlier bogies in this style didn't have any springing on the middle bit, so I could have tossed that out. Later bogies to BP 3181A had 2 coil springs rather than the one shown here, also available from the 2mm chappies.

Oh, and the moral of this story is, have a crack, even if it appears to be too hard for your skills, and don't expect perfection first time round.