Some time ago I alluded to a saga about the lamps on the roofs, as if the roofs haven’t proven to be enough of a saga in their own right. With the bodies finally in the paint shop, I started to work out how to solve a little problem.
Now, these coaches are oil lit. Each lamp had an associated trivet, onto which the lamp could be placed for servicing. It also acted as a stowage for the lamp blanking tops. For various reasons, it is the trivet with the lamp top that I have to fit to these models.
Of course, I drilled the roofs to take the trivet castings, as they all have a little peg underneath them. Of course, if I’d thought about things a bit harder, I would have spotted right away the trivets would sit on an angle. They’re really designed to sit on the apex of a curved roof, not halfway down it.
This rather brought me to - another - halt while I tried to work out what to do about it. I wondered if the castings could be tweaked so they could sit as flat as possible. They couldn’t. Time to let it fester for a bit to see if I could come up with a workable solution.
Eventually, I came up with this scheme: angled slices of styrene tube, capped off. Fourteen of the beggars on one coach, which all have to about the same size and angle. Well, I worked out a basic method that gave me a relatively similar shape for each bit of tube, reasoning I could adjust for fit by sanding if required.
And so it proved. No perfect, but then nothing about these roofs is perfect. Everything is more or less square, give or take. Well, to be charitable, it’s about the best I can manage so it’ll have to do. I’ve only another three to do, after all.
What about the trivet castings? I haven’t found a way of reliably marking a centre point for drilling a location hole in my new plinths, so I’ve chopped the cast pegs off instead. Hopefully, adhesive will hold things in place well enough. I suppose I ought to get on and make some more styrene dust.