White Pass Shovelnose: bodywork...

Back in December I began a project over the holidays to design and build my own White Pass and Yukon shovel nose diesel...

The basic idea was to use an Arnold N gauge chassis and scale the bodywork to fit the proportions of the chassis - what I ended up with was a 2.6mm to the foot scale body, which matches the wheelbase perfectly - although makes the track a little wider than the prototypes 3ft (which would mean really I should use 3mm/ft scale).

In my original post in December I shared photos of the prototype along with some CAD renderings of the bodywork I had drawn up. Well since then the body shell has been ordered, smoothed and detailed. It is deliberately smooth sided to improve the quality of print, so I have added white styrene microstrip for the nose and above the windows and grills.

I have also drawn up a small fret of etched parts, to add some rivet detail and some finesse to the grills. These have been etched in nickel silver and fitted perfectly to the 3D model.

The back of the body is particularly nicely detailed with the see through grills, where they are on the prototype, and the read access hatch. The body is fitted to the Arnold chassis to allow it to be easily removed. Microscale N gauge knuckle couplers are fitted, and I've used 0.3mm brass rod for the various handrails. Next job will be to add a little roof detail, and then a coat of primer.

This is very much a personal project but it shows the sort of thing I can do for you, designing and prototyping a kit of high quality parts to produce bespoke models that take pride of place in your collection. Contact me for your own proposal, using the form on my website, Facebook or the various forum messaging services. More soon...