On the Intercity Workbench tonight: some fairly recent progress on assembling the footplate of the kit.

This probably isn't the thread for you if you want to know how to do things properly.... but maybe my bunglings will encourage a few others to have a go at etched kit construction. At least you can't do worse than me....

I'm currently working away from home (and at home I've got a beautiful 4 month old baby girl....), so progress has been slowed of late, but here are some photos of recent work.

The Buffer Beams in the kit were a bit weedy to my eyes, so I sandwiched some strips of copper between the inner and outer faces to thicken these up. I'll still need to tidy the edges of these up at a later stage.

Looking at the photos, I'm also thinking that the rivets on the bufferbeam are not beefy enough - I should probably have used a bigger hammer. I'll need to think about this problem.

A couple of views of the footplate as originally assembled. I wasn't totally happy with how square I had managed to solder these so I screwed together a crude jig to hold these better in place whilst I attacked the joints with a small gas torch

These are the sandboxes - they didn't fold up as nicely as I'd hoped (probably due to the thickness of the material) and I had to solder in a little bit of filler (in this case some brass pins seemed to be quite appropriate.

After some rough filing down, nobody will be any the wiser...

The chassis soldered up quite nicely, but I'm thinking of fitting Slaters sprung axleboxes to aid trackholding and pickup. I received a set of these in the post recently (and very nice they look), so more on this later.

This is the underneath of the chassis. I like to solder with a lot of heat (I generally blow over the job with a small gas torch). This makes the solder flow very nicely, but occasionally things fall off.... In this case I lost one of the buffers (again).

I cunningly wafted the blowtorch over the affected area to firmly solder it back in place (until the next time, that is).

Here I've done a trial fitting of the body, footplate and chassis. The instructions indicate to build the footplate and body as one unit, but I've decided to join the chassis and footplate, leaving the body free for ease of painting.

I've realised that if I add the (prototypical) angle brackets to hold the bottom of the doors in place, I can use these to locate the body sub-assembly. These brackets are (just) visible in prototype shots - eg this one on Brian Daniels' Class 06 Gallery:

http://briandaniels..../p25831659.html