A couple of hours with some packets from the Plastruct rack and bits of plasticard and I've manged to finish detailing the bogie sideframes on my 3mm scale Class 26 diesel. The results are still a bit wobbly but look good enough for me.
It's interesting to conside the different types of plastic. Cutting the brake cylinders was simply a matter of rolling the plastic rod along the cutting mat under the knife blade. Amazingly I managed to get the cuts square and pretty clean first time. OK, so I managed to ping off a few bits into the depths of the bench but since you have to buy packs of 5 lengths of rod and I needed about 20cm of it, I had enough spare to not be bothered looking.
Compared to the plasticard though, the material was quite brittle. This is brilliant for the job in hand but I wouldn't fancy working with a flat sheet of the stuff. From memory, Slaters put some rubber in the PlasticardTM mix which makes it a lot easier to use.
Anyway, the sideframes look very nice on the model. I had to remove the fuel tanks and reposition them a bit as they were too close to one end once the bogies were finished. The important thing is that the area under the body is now full of plastic. I wonder if it's riding a bit high - maybe 4 thin washers under the bogie fixings would drop it down half a mm or so. Or maybe I'll leave well alone for the minute. I know the thing works on the layout as it is !
Looks really good, Phil!
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