Realism and a plan B

Last week, the Super D was looking good. Then I went to sleep and had a good look at it again in the morning. Overnight the model railway gremlins had struck and ruined it.

The front plan view was the worst problem. Despite marking and (I though) soldering the smokebox in the right place, adding the boiler had twisted it horribly. To be fair, the photo exaggerates the error but it was till there and bad enough I couldn't ignore it.

Running rulers and dividers over the model, I found other "issues":

The footplate was quite badly distorted. On one side it was was spot on, the other could be pushed up to a flat edge but refused to stay there. I suspect this happened when the boiler got dinged. The metal hadn't just bent, it had stretched and distorted.

At the back, the cab and side tanks (?) were pretty good but the front of the firebox wasn't perpendicular to the footplate edge. This gave the boiler an natural path diagonally along the loco. Fixing this probably contributed to the wonky smokebox issues.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why taking on kits someone has already had a go at is harder than starting with a fresh set of parts. I need a plan B.

Those with sharp eyes will have noticed that the tags at the bottom of this post include one marked "G2". You might even have clicked on it and realised that this isn't the first such loco I've constructed in 7mm. The last go became a still-born project that has been gathering dust for a couple of years.

Unearthing it made me realise I had another option. If I nicked the body from this loco, I could marry it up to the parts I already had. My construction didn't look too bad and it sat on the chassis OK. I've ordered a replacement body kit to go in the box I'm robbing stuff from, but for the moment, it looks like this will keep the project on track.