Excess holes

Chassis hole blanked
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker

This Ruston locomotive doesn't feature jackshaft drive, which means the chassis has a hole too many under the cab. It seemed sensible to fill this in before starting assembly proper. You can't ignore these things in Gauge One, people notice.

Holding a bit of scrap etch behind the hole I poked a scriber through and drew a circle. In turn, this was cut out with tin snips and filed to fit. Lots of heat, flux and hardly any solder fitted the blanking disks in the hole. Some light filing and polishing with a fibreglass stick left a nice neat job I was pretty proud of.

Then I looked at the prototype pictures properly. These clearly show that the chassis isn't blank in this area on the real thing. In fact there is a slot. A slot with a circular top. The gearbox is obviously pushed into the chassis from the bottom with the drive shaft poking out through the sides. When the loco was converted to conventional drive the slots were simple left in place.

I may have uttered some bad words at this point.

Soooo, I scribed a couple of vertical lines from the bottom go the chassis to the sides of the hole and then cut them with the piercing saw. The blanking disks came out easily enough by wobbling them with small pliers. Then a quick clean up with some files. Finally more spare etch was soldered in the back and the model looked a lot more like the photos.