Powsides Private owner wagon kit

A quick late evening project. A Powsides PO kit, actually the kit is the exSlaters 1907 7 plank 15′ wagon kit, but with Powsides branding. These are used in their wagon decals packs but they do sell them as undecorated kits, at normal kit prices unlike the inflated eBay prices. No mention of Coopercraft at all.

Although I prefer the Cambrian kits as they have less flash and go together well, this kit is finely detailed, the buffers are a nice turned metal, whereas the Cambrian buffers are a bit of a let down. The brakes however are only ok if your modelling a wagon with the brakes ON!

Coupling hook is my now standard Lanarkshire models whitemetal hook, drilled to take 3 links. Brakes will be replaced by an etched set. Either Masokits or Bill Bedfords as I was kindly sent a few examples to try.

All in all a pleasant hour spent building a nice kit, 4 wagon kits down another dozen or so to go.

Wordless Wednesday

Track building, an essay in brass.

Although the current trend in track building is the use of plastic chairs on plastic or plywood timbers, there are still other ways to build your track. As much as I like the plastic chairs from Exactoscale and C+L finescale, they are bordering on the expensive side especially when 100’s+ are required, that’s not to say they aren’t worth it as they are exquisitely moulded. It’s just that for your average Dad, it’s getting harder to justify. Also there is a discussion with regards to the checkrails chairs in P4, that under a certain turnout radius the checkrails may not act accordingly in relation to gauge widening. So with both those issues in mind, I cast my memory back to reading about Masokits brass half etched chairs for running track and turnouts.

Michael Clark’s Masokits range of brass etched chairs require copper clad timbers to solder to. These were acquired from Wizard models and a long with a few packs of the etch brass chairs certainly is a step in the right direction for both cost to myself and allows exact control over the building of tight radius turnouts.

Today was spent cutting up copper turnout timbers and fitting them to a copy of my Templot plan on my workbench board. Simply cut with a pair of side cutters they made light work of the cladding and I had a full set of timbers within an hour. Shown here awaiting fixing to the templates with double sided tape.

Now I’m all set to start folding the etched chairs and get soldering.