STEP ALTERING A TENDER BY STEP

This alteration became necessary when I purchased a DCC Sound decoder for my Hornby ‘B17’ and discovered that the slope of the Hornby tender didn’t provide me with enough space to fit the chip and the speaker.

I had two choices: swap the speaker for a smaller one and keep the tender as it was, or make the most of the space, introduce a new false floor to the tender and slightly increase the weight with the larger speaker. As I also wanted to replace the plastic coal for the new-at-the-time product from Geoscenics, I decided to make the more significant change of altering the tender.

Taking your time and being careful is really important when carrying this out as while this will be hidden when the project is finished, a wrong move could result in an imperfection or a hole on the sides of the tender which would be much more difficult to put right later.

The second project was to make improvements to the look of the coal wagons and the tenders by adding real coal to replace the plastic. This takes less than a minute per wagon and provides a quick and easy way to make a significant change. To make life easier, the new coal can go straight on top of the old.

Adding real coal can significantly enhance the look of your steam locomotives but it is always worth removing any electronics in case any of the glue seeps through and damages them.

In this tender I had to make some alterations in order to fit the speaker. I used a combination of a drill and some cutters to firstly create holes and then to remove the false floor of the tender.

I kept doing practice fits to make sure that the wires and the speaker could fit in place with the tender properly in position. Eventually, I had cut away enough of the tender to make everything fit.

At this point you can make a false floor for your bunker. This can be done from a piece of plastic card cut to size with a sharp knife.

I also kept the original plastic coal, just to help give the result some form of shape.

Geoscenics coal was used to fill the tender, making sure that I had removed the shell from the chassis and any electronics. It’s also an idea to glue the plastic card and plastic coal down first to avoid any imbalance.

Deluxe Materials Ballast Bond was an ideal glue for fixing the coal in place. As I had misplaced the nozzle that comes with the glue, I used a pipette to add droplets of the glue across the whole tender.

The glue will dry clear but it will take a while so it’s best to leave it somewhere to harden fully before putting it back on the chassis. This also gives you a chance to clear up – as you can see it makes quite a mess!

I took the opportunity to refresh the coal loads in my wagons at the same time, as pieces had gone missing over the years and the base of the wagon was showing through. It only took around a minute per wagon.

Once everything has dried, the tender can go back on the chassis and be reconnected to the locomotive. As with the DMU, it’s a good idea to test your model to make sure everything is still working as it should.