With Christmas holiday season upon us, and an improving wrist, we started on assembling the G6 body. This project has turned into a father son affair, I took on the role of sanding the edges, and bending the brass, while dad was chief gluer, cutter and assembler.
Parts were cutout from the fret using a sharp knife, and then either filed down or sanded using wet and dry paper to remove the notches. Using the supplied instructions which were very comprehensive and detailed the parts were assembled and glued. Using a vice, and a straight edge parts where bent into shape. There are some very fiddly small parts especially the detailing. We found that it was difficult to create the ribs on the boiler using the supplied wire, so in the end a novel idea of using cotton thread soaked in glue and then applied to the boiler was slightly easier than trying to form the ribs from wire which just kept on springing out. The iron handles and boiler rails were also particularly tricky especially threading the wire though the boiler rail fixing, in fact we lost one in the carpet as it pinged out and landed on the floor - good tip: Don't use pliers for that part, as no spare is provided. However a few hours later we managed to find it, but slightly too late, as by that point the whole boiler railing had already been glued in place minus one fixing. In the end we still glued in the rail fixing but we could not thread it on the wire any more. From a distance you don't notice this and even close up you really have to look for it.
At every stage we were testing the body on the chassis to make sure it fitted and aligned correctly. It is mentioned in the instructions that the body will sit higher than it should due to the motor impeding on the boiler. There is a rather drastic fix which is to file down the magnet. We were not too happy in doing that but to give us some extra room we compromised on filing the edges of the plastic surrounding the motor, this made it sit a little lower but still not as low as filing the magnet.
Once we had finished the body and some of the detailing we thought it would be good to make sure we have not damaged the chassis, nor that any of the body was impeding on the mechanics. We were a little worried to begin with as when we set it going on the track it would not move. On closer inspection we found that one of the steps was bent a little too close to the wheel interfering with the side rod. Once we bent it out a little bit away from the side rod, the train moved without needing to do anything else, pretty impressive we thought.
All in all about 4 afternoons and a few evenings to get it to this stage.
Next up painting...
Ed
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