One day I will build an On30 model railway. I have the plans, some buildings, a loco or two and some wood for the baseboards. What I'm short of is rolling stock. You see while Bachmann make some very nice RTR models, they are all designed to run behind big locomotives. Put even the smallest tippers behind a Porter or Critter and they loom over it. For the models I want to build, I need something smaller.
Wrightlines (now ABS models) seemed to have the right sort of thing with their v-dump tipper wagon kit. It's O-16.5 so the right scale (sort of, stop being pedantic). At 12 quid we aren't looking at the cheapest kit on the planet but in a specialised scale so it's par for the course. Put in RTR terms, 3 of these will cost the sames at 3 Bachmann v-dumps but you have to build these.
Kit assembly starts with the soldering together of the bottom chassis. This includes axleboxes so you have to trap the wheels during building. With a hot soldering iron this is fairly easy - solder allow the join to be made and then adjusted if required. I needed to fit Kadee couplings and as far as I could tell the way to do this was to hack a hole through the girders and replace this with some real metal. Just to make things more interesting the coupling box has to go right through the structural metalwork. I soldered a bit of nickel silver scrap etch in the bottom and then another in the top, trapping the coupling box. Of course I worked one end at a time and it seemed to work OK.
The bucket is a reasonably simple brass etch. Admittedly there are no aids to location but tack soldering bits in place and adjusting as required worked OK. I decided from the outset that this would be a well weathered model and very tatty so if my building was a little rough around the edges it wouldn't matter.
As a kit I'd say you need to have some building experience to get the best out of it but not much. If you are new to whitemetal and brass then there are simple models out there. It is a lot cheaper than a locomotive though so a useful step on the road (rails ?) toward fully fledged kit building.
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