So to continue: The buffers are actually pretty good, better than the other major kit manufacturer’s offerings. The holes in the bufferbeam mouldings were opened up a tad and the buffers and vac pipes trial fitted.
The inner ends. Oh dear, getting worse by the minute. The door is a separate piece and was like a surfboard. I filed the back flat so that it would sit into the recess. The witness marks are another thing altogether. Why? Just why? Why on the outside? There are faint plank marks and the handrails also on the face, so any sanding would remove these. Frankly this a complete dog’s dinner and I can’t see that this would be more acceptable in the late 60s than it is now.
So onto some general body mock-ups and the sides (which are pretty good were lined up and fixed. However, by the next day all was not well and the floor had resisted all my flattening and weighting and had started to curl over its length and on the diagonal, taking the solebars with it. Now a non-runner.
At this point I took a long hard look at it, calculated the forward time to spend both finishing and correcting it. I decided that this was not worth the effort and abandoned the project. Sometimes it’s better to walk away.
Thoughts: Some of the Dapol reissues work; the building kits are OK with the usual caveats. Here though it gets embarrassing. Say you were a new modeller and you hand over nine quid in Gaugemaster for one of these. This is, or should be, entry level stuff; Saturday afternoon kit building. It’s a full ten star fail and thus tars every other plastic wagon kit with the same brush before the ponies are out of the gates. I’ve had half a century of kit building and I can’t make this work without some major non-cost-effective butchery. Detailing a Tri-ang would be a better start point.