THE DRAGON WAGON

My MOTY entry for 2014 has been inspired by Terry Pratchett's latest book, "Raising Steam" about the introduction of railways to the Discworld.
It's going to be a Diplock Trophy entry.............

January 14th, 2014

I started off with one of these..................

which rapidly changed to this..............

................. and this. It is of course a Houston Gate Loco Works flat truck - at only £12.75 it's not worth buying the bits and making a chassis from scratch! You will notice that two pieces of wood have been added at floor edge level - these will provide somewhere for the body sides to fit to and somewhere for the door bottom runner to be fixed.

As the axle box covers are square, the fitters can't always be ar$ed to put them on the correct way round, with this result! (and yes, the other end of each axle is the opposite to what you see...............)

January 23rd, 2014

Last night was mainly spent cutting up stripwood for the planked floor and the ends, coz when you're scratch building, you don't get everything cut to length. The former (apart from two pieces) were stacked to one side and the end planks were glued to a pair of previously glued-and-pinned verticals at each end. The pointed tops were cut and added and the whole set aside to dry.
Today, two pieces of wood were added at the "eaves" of the wagon, the rough edges of the ends and the bits of vertical which stuck up above the ends were all trimmed off and tidied and a pair of Roundhouse lamp irons added before the vehicle was sent to the Paint Shop. This vehicle hasn't been "designed" like you might possibly think: I've got a picture of the completed model in my mind's eye, but there isn't even a drawing on the back of a fag packet (given that I don't smoke, that would be difficult) but things get "designed" on an ad-hoc basis as I'm going along

From here on in, the vehicle won't be getting any more paint - the floor's going to be stained and the interior partitions should arrive ready-painted - if they don't they'll get a coat of 16mm scale limewash. I'll also be using this stuff.........

January 27th, 2014

The body painted and the floor installed..................... I was going to make and fit the interior partitions, but after one cut, the jigsaw decided it wasn't going to play any more, so I gave up for the day!

April 3rd, 2014

Because of the need to (a) keep the dragons from seeing each other and (b) incinerating the wagon, the pen dividers are made of best Klatchian brick.....................

.

Following the arrival of a small parcel from Poland, these two little beauties arrived.....................

.....................which with a little painting turned into these!

After the dragons were fitted, work started on the body sides and roof.....................

................... which are made out of the aluminium mesh used for car body repairs in fibreglass. It's very soft, so easy to cut with scissors or a craft knife. It's fixed with a combination of track pins, 5 minute epoxy glue and Evo-Stik.

The signs were all printed up on the computer (using standard BR lettering).....................

.............. and were fixed to the body with impact adhesive. The model was well-received at Peterborough and was higly commended - I got certifed at last!