Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Chassis with pickups

Finding time to work on the J72 is proving difficult at the moment. Too much to do for work sees spare time vanishing. However, the other evening I managed to get the pickups fitted to the chassis.

I'd painted it with a nice off-black spray paint bought years ago from 4D models. There's a bit of texture to the paint, but with a little extra dirt, this works really well.

One pickup plate could be bolted in place (I planned ahead) while the other had to be glued in (I didn't). After that, it was a "simple" case of bending up some phosphor-bronze wire to bear in the back of the wheels and join all this lot up with fine wire. Being quick in and out with the hot iron and using some DCC Concepts no-corrosive flux helped me not desolder previous work. I might be getting the hang of this - although proper modellers will say I should plan and engineer things better.

To avoid short circuits, I ran superglue on to any exposed pickup, and managed to gum up the front axle. Taking the wheels out (good job they are Romfords) wasn't easy and it took 2 goes to put them back as I managed to make the classic mistake of swapping insulated and uninsulated wheels over...

Still, it runs. And quite nicely too. Time to move on the bodywork I think.

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