Hopefully you approve. My whitemetal soldering is improving although I certainly prefer brass. Fitting it to the Prairie chassis has involved a lot of hacking. The bufferbeam has been reduced in profile, the inside of the tanks thinned and the top of the chassis filed down to within a micron of its life but I can now just about jam the thing in there.
It now sits roughly parallel and only about 2" (to scale that is, not 2 actual inches!) higher than it should. The bogie is roughly assembled. Before anyone points out that it's too far rearwards I'll let you know that it's only under there to prop up the body. The chassis still needs to have it's rearmost extension filed back to allow the bogie to be positioned correctly.
Elsewhere I'd made good progress with Livingston Thompson. The Backwoods kit is as good as expected although I over-softened the tank wrappers when annealing them so I'll need to use some filler to flatten the ripples on it's top. As the kit was quite an old one and it had been stationary for a while I thought it best to give the motor a good run, hence the wires sprouting from the cab; the motor is permanently fixed where the firebox is on the actual loco.
I decided to put the effort into Moel Tryfan, partially because it's a true NWNGR loco but more because I was having some issues with the first power bogie for LT. The con rods and coupling rods have a very small clearance and I was getting bored of filing all the components back and trying to rejig the alignment and thought it best to put it to one side and breathe deeply.There's also been some progress on rolling stock, a plasticard shell for my first building, a bit of terrain profiling behind the stn area and a lot of playing with the new airbrush and compressor. Hopefully it'll be less than 4 months until you next hear from me!
