Radial handrails

There's not a whole lot of detail to add to the Radial but you can't avoid the handrails. I wish I could, they are always a fiddly job.

Anyway, first I counted the knobs. I needed 8 to fill the holes in the boiler sides and 10 if I wanted to include the two that should be in the smokebox front but K's had "forgotten".

In the box, there were 7. That's the perils of buying half-completed kits for you.

No matter, digging through my pot of leftovers, I found enough to replace the lot. They all look the same even though the leftovers come from a variety of sources.

One problem with using knobs (stop sniggering at the back) is that you need a variety of lengths (I said STOP sniggering) as the smokebox is wider than the boiler. Pragmatic modellers like Tony Wright use split pins to get around this figuring that the straight handrail trumps a wobbly one even if the later is hung from the best brass turnings Mr Gibson doth supply. I've tried pins but just can't get on with them which is a nuisance.

Anyway, the handrail was first bent over a pen of a smaller diameter then the boiler and then the corners put in using small pliers. The knobs were threaded on the wire and pushed in their holes. I opened out the ones in the smokebox to allow the knob to seat all the way in. Some filling superglue will hide this subterfuge. Then there was lots of tweaking and a little bad language before the job was done.