MrWolf

I guess I am lucky in that my SWMBO comes from country manor stock and talking about money is considered vulgar But to be fair to her, she is very careful with money and is more impressed if you find her some gem that isn't worth a lot but means something to her. She also has a pretty good idea how much I spend on motorcycles and trains because she's usually with me when I am buying.

It would be as ugly as one of the Great Western's half assed streamliners! How the railway that gave us the Achilles and the Saints thought that they could get away with it I'll never know!

And why the hell not? The loco looks neat in GWR livery, but then again, even a Mucky duck or a Q1 would!

Is that a Met / Brill tramway engine on a Triang well wagon (can't remember what it was supposed to be but it's too short, still got one somewhere!)

Is that some sort of LNER 4-6-0 cab roof and spectacle plate bodged onto a GWR pannier? It should be in the modelling crimes thread!

Er, interesting... For that money I would expect him to throw in the net and a couple of table tennis paddles. The balls are obviously included in the price.

Looking really good, your little and often approach is creating a wonderfully detailed model and something that you (probably!) won't feel the need to rework five minutes after it's completed because you feel you missed a detail. I think it's great and hope I have the patience and skills to follow your example.

Loving the OCD, it's making me want to get on with my layout, keep doing bits at mine but I am holding off until I have completed my latest painting. During which I have been painting individual hobnails onto a boot sole amongst other things. There are plenty of examples of detail obsession around here. For instance I have just replaced two studs on my bike that hold the battery carrier to the frame. It now has two 5/16" x 3-1/2" CEI thread studs as it bugged me that a previous restorer had used two metric bolts. Once the battery, seat chainguard and oil tank are fitted, you can't actually see anything other than the end of one stud, but I know they're right and I only need one set of spanners now. Stop worrying about being obsessed with details, it's a good thing, it's much more common than you think. You're normal, deal with it!

Quite, if I had only been shown the pictures I would have guessed 40+ year old white metal kit or scratchbuild in 4mm scale, seems optimistically priced to me.

Interesting. SWMBO says that I have a Degree In Contemporary Knowledge. Generally she just calls me a D*CK for short... Why have RMWEB not added a tumbleweed emoji?

That's been for sale for ages, he was hanging out for £32.99 before Christmas, when I bought an identical item for the starting bid of £6.99 + £3.50 post. I then committed a cardinal sin, binned the box and the awful triang / kitmaster style wheels, built it with scale wheels and three links, painted it and stuck it on the layout. After a 40 year sabbatical, it has finally fulfilled its purpose. And I'll do it again!

That will be a supplementary charge for the "free refills" of coffee in first class at a guess. Fast forward half a century and think about all those piles of unsellable Triang Pullmans at swap meets and toy fairs.

I like that it "can be collected in person from our shop..." So it's £100 plus the fine for breaking the isolation curfew? Bargain. Pedants please note that I am fully aware that this is their standard selling template etc etc... Seems a little steep, not that I am an expert on Hornby coaches. If buying it will definitely add £100 to the value of your Brighton belle set then okay, we can dismiss the fact that it is basically a mass produced piece of plastic from China. But somehow I doubt it. Three days of lockdown and cabin fever is creeping in already, I'm looking at Southern region stock... Gotta go, it's gone really quiet and I have a nasty feeling that Miss Riding Hood is sharpening something.

Perhaps a very light wash in the lower corrugations of a couple of shades of green, which only really show in the last few millimetres near the edges and the odd tiny dots of yellow on the upper surfaces to suggest the kind of lichens that grow on tarred tin rooves (and asbestos ones) I used artists acrylic for lichen, with streaks of dark green mixed deliberately badly into it, picking up a tiny dot at a time with a 000 brush, remembering that less is more though!

Good to see you soldiering on, it's made me look at the pile of kits and slightly battered second hand items I have here. Not very exciting, but I have no excuse to avoid fitting 3 link couplings to everything I have now and progress is good. The UK lockdown means that today is the last day for a while that I have been able to hurtle across the old greyhound bridge out of Green Ayre on the motorcycle and wish there were still trains on it instead.

I have a couple of exclusive wagons if anyone is interested. They are both broken in uniquely different ways which I doubt could be replicated!

Interesting when you think that a Sherman tank weighs a minimum of thirty tons...

I sold a couple of new old stock car body parts recently. The starting bid was £95. Within an hour I got an offer of £75. I checked out the profile of the person making the offer, clearly a dealer with a score of over 28000. I ignored it and later that day the same person offered £85. I was certain that all he was going to do was put the parts straight back on eBay. He put a bid on the next day as I had ignored the second cheeky offer. The bidding continued and he dropped out at £150, the auction kept going and the parts finally made £245 plus £21 carriage (I didn't add anything for packing materials or my time) The parts I sold ceased to be manufactured by the OEM in 1957 and were never offered by an aftermarket manufacturer. If you have something that you and everyone else in the know appreciates is rocking horse manure, my advice is to start the auction at the minimum price you will accept and sit tight!

"but not actually sure if they can deduct payment from your bank without your specific authority or not?" They can as your bank account is linked to your eBay account and PayPal so that you can add or withdraw funds or pay eBay fees. I have had it done to me a few years ago. I sold a second-hand but unused NOS vehicle part which due to its size was quite costly to send. The buyer then complained to ebay that it was damaged (after leaving positive feedback) I kept up with my end of the process and the buyer was supposed to send the item back. The time period allotted by eBay elapsed before I received the part back and eBay automatically refunded the buyer £140 from my linked account. I never did get the part back, oddly enough. Ebay have tightened things up a little in the intervening years but still seem to lean heavily towards the buyer even if he is a chump

There can be lots of reasons for putting a high price on certain items. I have a rusty old BSA ladies bicycle at the shop, it would normally command £20-30, but with the exception of the main frame and handlebars, all the components are the same as the WW2 air portable Parabike. A highly collectable device commanding around £4500. There are specialist dealers out there asking £200 for a brake caliper, £40 for a seat stem, £300 a wheel AND getting that money too. If I sell the civvy BSA, all somebody else will do is break it up or spend £900 on a frame to create another parabike (shades of Brooklands Bentley replicas) The silly thing is that the civilian ladies bike is far more rare than the military version, I think it should be preserved as is, so it sits there with a £1000 price tag. Anyone not in the know will think I am bat #### crazy. I am certain that the same parallels can be drawn with certain model railway items, but what I have seen here so far looks like speculation at best!

Historical accuracy. Before we had mobile phones to distract us, we used to do strange things like check out the talent or (shock horror!) strike up a conversation...

We might be taking the mick out of him, but seriously, who can blame him? If people are willing to pay the price asked, he would be a fool of a businessman to ask less. (clearly, there are some railway fans out there who have WAY too much money, but I digress) sometimes if you ask daft money for a few items, people will trawl your stock for a bargain. It's common enough in the antique trade.

The same seller has some real beaters of "Kit built Hornby Panier (nice typo) tanks weathered" Yard brush weathering but shiny conrods and flangeless drivers. £15 on a good day at a model railway show. For £60 I can buy something much more modern, better detailed and better running. Today's rant has been brought to you by the words "overpriced" and "junk". Peace. Out.

Damn. I used to have an old Airfix/kitmaster L&Y Pug that I chopped the cab off and attached plasticard skirts to when I was about 14. (Some bogus Swansea & Mumbles Tramway device I think) There may still be bits of it buried in the garden at my mothers house... Of course I would have to sell it for enough to make a 400 mile trip worthwhile...

Buy it - then buy an air rifle! Or perhaps I can lend you something a bit louder and more accurate?