Less of the talk (Or 'stuff the plan, lets make something')

Kiwibond's rash of projects in the last couple of weeks have finally got me inspired to get started on some wagon projects. I've been guilty in the last month or so of doing too much navel gazing, thinking about how to make the (near) perfect wagon chassis etc. Sunday night I decided to stop worrying about things like that, and actually build something.
For my Paikakariki layout I need a model of the tank train that ran daily north from Wellington. I've decided to build 6 wagons. We now get the normal question. What sort, how big were they, where's the plan etc. Tossing aside such trivial concerns, the building commences. I purchased a piece of 18mm pine rod (3/4", funny how even though the countries been metric for 40 years, the old measurements just don't go away) from a local building shop. I worked out the length using a picture on the Online models website of a Uc14, which was close enough for my purposes.

From this we get a length of 176mm in S scale, which converts to 94mm, or 38' long. didn't quite sound right, so I rounded up to 40'(100mm, a nice round number). The tanks are a bit shorter, so I cut the rod to 90mm long. The ends were shaped with sandpaper using the Mk1 eyeball for prototype accuracy.


At this point I did a bit of work on the chassis, based on John Rappards Ub/Usl article and plan in the Dec 1990 issue of the local rag. The width should have been about 19mm, but I added a bit to make 20mm, as the tank is a bit over scale. I had a couple of Kato bogies off a Japanese tank car to use.


To get a correct deck height I then worked out I would need a 0.5mm deck, and 1.5mm glued below that on the outside.


The next problem is to mount the tank on the deck. The picture shows a large central cradle and 2 cradles over the bogie mounting points. After trying to sand a round hold in a 2mm piece of plastic and failing badly, I changed tack. The upper edges of the end cradles were marked, and the carefully sawn out. A piece of 2mm plasticard was cut to 2mm and then glued into the hole. This looked good untill I put the model on the track next to a Da and 50' Z15, which revealed that the whole thing was way too high.

Bugger!

The answer is to cut out the gap underneath the tank, which will lower the height by 1mm. this should be enough to fix it, but not tonight.

The last picture show the other 5 tanks on the workbench, waiting for their turn.

To finish tonight, I've got my first link from another web page. From the home of modular goodness, www.hotrak.com, comes this comment.
"Motorized Dandruff - Bills itself as “The worlds first (and so far ) only NZ 120 blog”, and covers the NZ120 scale and module scene in New Zealand."
Well, not quite so sure about the module scene. Must employ more staff to cover this area. On the blogs current budget, I'll be looking for a homeless guy who drinks meth's ( anyone out there who feels qualified can drop me a line)
Still, fame is fame I guess.