Chris Leigh
has decided that it’s high time he built some of the expensive kits he’s bought over the years.
Nothing concentrates the mind quite like a cancer diagnosis. It’s early-stage prostate cancer, it’s treatable and not a threat to life expectancy. One in three men, so they tell you, die with it but not from it. Many are not even aware they have it, as they have no symptoms. I can’t say I have any symptoms as such, and it was picked up through some careful monitoring over recent years.
Anyway, the treatment has side effects, best described as all the symptoms of menopause without being female! I haven’t had the hot flushes – yet – but I certainly noticed the mood swings. These range from a desire to do nothing, sit in front of the TV and vegetate, to a need to get on with modelling projects that I haven’t touched for years! In the past 17 years, since I’ve not had the steadying hand of anyone else to question my purchases, I’ve started numerous projects and finished very few of them, unless they were tied to a magazine deadline.
Now, I want to try finishing some of the expensive and rare kits that I’ve bought. For instance, I’ve recently bought a soldering station. I’m not very expert with a soldering iron and I thought that a new and more sophisticated piece of kit might help. There’s more about this in Staff Show & Tell on page 22.
In particular, I have a pair of Lambourn Valley Railway four-wheel coaches to build. These are ‘O’ gauge kits from Robert Kosmider’s excellent Steam and Things range and they came all the way from Adelaide, Australia. They are well-designed traditional etched brass kits requiring some solder assembly, but what I like about them is that the instructions also mention glueing some parts. So many kit instructions assume that you’re an expert at soldering everything from massive lumps of brass down to the tiniest whitemetal detail. It’s nice not to feel that glueing things somehow makes one inadequate.
Speaking of my inadequacy, I did pass the Agenoria Models Hunslet 0‑6‑0T Eadweade to Mr Dave Lowery to build the chassis, which he did. This is the locomotive which will work with the Lambourn Valley coaches once I have built the body. Back in the 1980s I built Roy Link’s limited edition Lynton & Barnstaple 2‑6‑2T in ‘O16.5’. This is actually a bit bigger than the Hunslet so I am hoping that my revived soldering skills will be sufficient.