The Sunset Samhongsa Challenger arrived today, I was expecting the worst, poor packaging, grubby filthy model but having got it cheap wasn't going to get too downbeat with it.
I have to say the seller didn't take very good photos of the model...to my benefit....it's actually not that bad, there are some huge elephants in the room, but the overall condition is much better than I first envisaged.
It's certainly big, heavy too and yes, I do need to sort my white sheet out and get rid of all the creases, a wash and iron is in good order, problem is these big brass engines are big, really big.
There's a little bit of damage here and there, primarily where the original owner, or an owner in the past, has tried to fit lights into places where, well lets just say, places where their skill set was lacking.
Up front the class lights and number boards are mullered, as is the headlight, they'll all need coming off and repairing, maybe new castings from PSC, I get the whole light thing but it's not an essential thing for me.
I may have mentioned previously about having concerns with the front engine pipework, I wasn't wrong, there are three sliding pipes missing, one for each cylinder exhaust pipe and the middle live steam pipe, these are completely missing as are the flexible joints the tubes fit too. I know PSC do the Big Boy and Jablemann Challenger ones as castings, they might fit the earlier 'lite' Challengers too, if not, some more flexing of the limited scratch building skill set will be needed
The cab area is okay not sure about the extended frame section aft of the rear drivers, that might need some work and fidelity.
I have my doubts about that trailing Delta truck, it's a bit of a chunky sort of affair, the front end needs some work and there's no transom at the rear.
The tender is a bit beat up, it's a good representation of the oil equipped 19-C tender, again the lights have taken the brunt of a previous owners handiwork.
The trucks are really nice, fully articulated and fully sprung, not with the usual spare tractor springs Korean brass models seem to sport, mind, quite a few of them appear to have 'escaped' over the years
. The rear end could do with some work on the coupling and draft gear area too.
Up front, not so good.
Big hole in the front, two big switches and a gaping hole in the middle, something seems twisted as well, either the footplate or buffer beam, there's a also something loose inside, probably the weight...hence the foam to try and keep it in place. I may not even be able to get in there, I'm hoping the centre tender frame comes away to reveal a lower opening, failing that it'll be the 'ship in a bottle' tool set to sort something out.
I've got a good set of 19-C drawings so should be able to replicate and fabricate all the required bits to get the front end up to scratch.
Now to the really big elephant in the room, a whole herd none the less.
Massive amount of front end swing, way more that the model is designed to do, which is why the three inner ends of the steam and exhaust pipes are missing, they would prevent a lot of this side play I suspect.
Even worse is the amount of vertical play in the front end, I've wedged it with a bit of wood to show just how much slack there is, another reason why the inner ends of the pipes are missing, or maybe even broken off.
The real engine has a sliding bearing between the boiler and lead engine, it sits above and rests on the motion bracket, the model has small little wheel which rolls on the motion bracket to replicate the real thing. Over time it has worn a nice little patch on the motion bracket, quite a wide little patch actually. The long and short of it is that someone hacked the front end to give more lateral play.
Despite all that, it has merit and promise, it's a much better starting point to upgrade and detail out than the later Sunset 3rd rail production version. I may just put that one up for sale and use the funds to offset the next target, a Samhongsa 4-12-2, again it'll need some work but if the price is right
First thing (hopefully tomorrow) is a total strip down of the tender and then a good bead blasting to see what's under all that lacquer.
In other news, I finally managed to cross another three books off the wanted list, these are basically the bibles of each class, we don't really have an equivalent sort of theme in the UK, they have all the minutia and detail that the 'Book of' series have, but more engineering based as opposed to sheds, tender swaps and boiler changes, they also have a good smattering of detailed drawings, some are works drawings, others generic line drawings but more detailed than say Railway Modeller or Isinglass.
They're big, heavy, top quality paper and in a nut shell, not cheap, especially prime copies like these, like all niche audience books, print runs are small so getting hold of any copy is hard, the UP type I've been looking for around four years, the Daylights around three, the ten coupled I didn't even know existed until I saw it linked next to the Daylights on the web pages, that was a big bonus.
As a bit of a yarn, the ten coupled are near copies of the UP ten coupled classes, the tenders differ and some fittings and detail differ, but underneath there is a lot of commonality. Both UP and SP have 2-10-2 and 4-10-2 classes, the 4-10-2 being three cylinders with Gresley 2:1 valve gear (as indeed the 4-12-2 have).
UP only ordered 10 and converted them to 2 cyl early on, SP ordered many more (not sure of exact number) and ran them until scrapping as three cylinders.
Those not up to speed with US stuff won't know that the 2-10-2 wheel arrangement is called the Santa Fe class, simply because they were the first to employ that wheel arrangement, however, SP had/have an apocalyptic loathing toward ATSF and refused to call the 2-10-2 Santa Fe's, instead referring to them as 'decks' a nod to Decapod.
The 4-10-2's came later and with their three cylinders and asynchronous exhaust were referred to as 'Stuttering decks'.