It's been a few weeks since I last made a post. I'm afraid that's because I've been busy with other things - both Scalefour Society matters, advertising the Scaleforum exhibition in September, and more importantly preparing for our house move that will take place in two weeks time. That means that I get a dedicated study cum railway room :-)
The Pug has made some progress since I replaced the axle after the unfortunate Loctite Incident. It has been put on a rolling road, and shows a slight limp that I need to eliminate. To help the running and road-holding, I also needed to add some additional weight to the kit chassis. The normal model has a large cast weight in the tank, and this is replaced in the High Level model with the motor and gears, to give the benefit of clearing the cab and allowing full backhead detail to be seen.
I used lead sheet to pack up the free corners, cut to size with a scalpel and snips, and held in place with either superglue or epoxy resin. This photo shows how it was done.
The locations are:
1 - under the cab, next to the reversing rod
2 - under the cab, behind the rear valance
3 - in the front chassis "box" between the cylinders. This has a section cut out to allow a screwdriver to the chassis mounting screw
4 - inside the coal bunkers on either side of the cab. There was a need to be careful here not to intrude into the area of the floor fixings
5 - two curved strips placed under the roof, and glued out of sight.
Together, they've brought the weight up to 76 grams. Probably not as heavy as the original model was, but a definite improvement. Let's see how it runs when it's back together.
