Oh dear!! Here's proof that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
Firstly, these photos show the pony truck upside down and not as it fits to the loco. (Sorry, Roger. Have a look at yours!) It appears that it should fit as shown above but checked against the original drawings this is definitely wrong. The "drawing"
in the instructions show it in the correct orientation. Actually, with wheels fitted it looks a great deal better than it should.
Initially I made this up following the "half etched line on the inside of the bend" convention which the whole of the rest of the kit follows. In fact there's nothing in the instructions to say whether the half etched lines should be inside or outside the bend but as the rest of the kit follows the regular convention I assumed the pony truck would.
Wrong!
If folded in the conventional manner the spring detail, such as it is, ends up on the inside of the component. I was able to refold it with the spring detail on the outside without cracking any bits off and soldered the bends as they are now rather weak. However, as can be seen from the top photo where I've removed a wheel the design is appalling. The sides do not come together with the bottom of the pony truck frame (they didn't even when folded with the half etched line on the inside). All in all it's poor. However...... I've inspected it as assembled and it looks OK. I'll sleep on it but I think that, with a bit of beefing up at the front to match the look of the truck based on one of my prototype photos, and some work on the radius arm it will probably look OK by the time the cylinders are in front of it.
The saving grace with this sub assembly is that the bearing holes are just a bit smaller than the 3/16" top hat bearings which fitted perfectly with the holes reamed out a trice.
One thing which is totally missing in the instructions is any guidance about applying any springing to help guide the pony truck in to bends and, indeed, to keep it on the track. I'll probably set it up with a simple wire spring initially and try the loco out to see if it needs anything more sophisticated. As mentioned in my previous post I still have to find a way of connecting the pony truck to the main chassis but I suspect a piece of judiciously placed brass spacer will do the trick.
Next comes the brakes.....
This is a pretty horrible collection of bits. The instructions say, helpfully, that "The brake hangers are attached at the top to 24SWG wire fed through the smallest holes in the frames after the brake blocks have first been fitted to the hangers. These hangers may be united at the bottom using the etched push rods provided (these have spacings to match the axleholes.)" There is no drawing. I mentioned the problem of the hole size in the frames, and you can see above that the holes in the hangers and brake blocks are also huge. These brake parts bear only a passing resemblance to the GA. In fact the long etch with the forked ends fits perfectly between the front and rear axles, but how is it meant to connect with the brake assembly associated with the centre axle? The other pair of etches with the adjustment holes at one end and a fork on the other don't appear to match any spacing associated with the brakes. I've also guessed that the cross beans with the funny angular set up each side are, in fact, associated with the brakes but I can't be too sure.
I'm now going to watch Ireland give France a good walloping. I'll come back to this braking conundrum when I've had some time to consider options. I actually believe it might be correctable to give a likeness to the real thing but will need another redesign of the supplied components.
Brian
. The locos as they finally appeared had many bits replaced, well most actually. Then I go and buy another one - a K3 because no one else seems to do one and it will save me time scratchbuilding - hopefully!
