Dan Vadas

Hi all, I thought I'd give you all an update on my current situation, as I've received over 100 replies to my condition. WOW - I was expecting maybe 15 or 20 .... thank you all very much for your concern and good wishes. What a family you all are to me . I'm still hanging in there, although nowhere near at "full capacity". The pain is being managed quite well now that the docs have finally arrived at the right dosage of medication. I'm going in for a treatment later today that hopefully will keep me going for a while yet - perhaps even years. Fingers crossed. I know I said that the Bulgar locomotive and wagons would be my last model, and I didn't want to start a model on MSW that may have remained unfinished, but I've managed to keep going with another card kit which I'll post pics of a little later on when I get nearer to completing it. It's a Harbourside diorama of a section of the Hamburg docks from HMV, including a freighter (so it will be in the "normal" Build Log forum under "Cross Sections, Guns and Dioramas" in the Index). Here's a taste of the kit's cover art : So far I've done the Warehouse/Background section and I'm getting very close to finishing the Freighter. How much of the rest will be done will be up to my health, but all the other pieces can be classed as "optional". Cheers, and I hope to see you all for quite a while yet . Danny

It's not necessarily a "Like" as such L.H. It's more of an "I reacted to this post". Danny

I don't know how many of you are aware but I've had cancer for the past 6 years, and it's progressed to the stage where they can no longer do anything for me. The pain in my lower back has been getting so severe lately that I'm finding it nearly impossible to sit at my workbench for longer than an hour or so at a time before I need to take a long break. In addition the pain medication I'm now on makes me extremely drowsy and I sleep for most of the day. I don't know how much longer I'll be around, so while I'm still able I'm taking the opportunity to say my farewell. Thank you to everyone on this wonderful forum for the friendship over the years, and to all those who followed my many builds. I'm making this my goodbye. Danny

The final wagon in this set - a Beer Wagon : Unfortunately this may be my last model - I don't know how many of you are aware but I've had cancer for the past 6 years, and it's progressed to the stage where they can no longer do anything for me. The pain in my lower back has been getting so severe lately that I'm finding it nearly impossible to sit at my workbench for longer than an hour or so at a time before I need to take a long break. In addition the pain medication I'm now on makes me extremely drowsy and I sleep for most of the day. Thank you to everyone on this wonderful forum for the friendship over the years, and to all those who followed my many builds. I'm making this my goodbye. Danny

There's also a Beer Wagon in progress at the moment . I've made 2.5 metres of highly detailed rails (in two pieces for easier transport) which will hold the lot. Danny

The ends of the tank body are convex, so I made up my usual extra filler pieces. There is also virtually no internal framing, so once again I scratch-built it : Lots of rivets on this one - over 1,400 of them which took 2 1/2 days to glue on : The final pics : Danny

Hi all, Here's another wagon to go with the Bulgar Locomotive. I actually completed it before posting any pics, but I did take them as I went : I made a major mistake early in the construction of the frame. The "X" shaped centre piece is back-to-front compared to the outer frame. Not a really big deal, as all it meant was that the location markings were no longer correct and needed to be painted over. I also had to do a fair bit of measuring off the plans - just as well that there is a full-scale drawing of the side elevation in the kit : More pics follow in the next post. Danny

I mentioned earlier in this build log that I would need to modify the trucks to suit the standard gauge rail of the rest of this train. Now that the loco is finished I could work out the correct height. It looks a bit weird, but all is as it should be : Danny

I've made the rails on which the whole train will be mounted. I used some ballast and "grass" from Woodland Scenics. The rest is two add-on laser cut paper kits from Modelik, very detailed and complete with plates and bolts : Danny

Hi all, and thanks to all the guys who commented and Liked this build. Now that it's finished I guess I'd better post the final pics - I'd forgotten about them : Danny

The two "cow-catchers" are the last major things to fit to the loco before it's finished. Here are the pics of them : The bars are all different angles and lengths, so I sorted them out and marked them before gluing them together : The brake hose fittings : All the front is now finished. Just a few rivets to re-glue and I can spray it with satin finish clear lacquer : Now to build the tracks for the base. Danny

Yes I did . Thanks for the replies guys . Speaking of problems - I found a doozy. A long time ago, when I was building the front bogie, I made this drum-like piece which turns out to be part of the steering mechanism : This is the only diagram of this part - nothing in further diagrams to show how it fits, so at the time I put it aside with the thought it may become more obvious later in the build. Unfortunately it should have been fitted much earlier before I'd fitted the main axles and wheels, as the front axle is supposed to go through the middle of it. How to fix the problem? I approached the dilemma with the thought in mind of leaving it off altogether if I couldn't work out a solution. There was no way I could easily remove the axle as it was attached to the wheels with CA glue - impossible to remove without causing major damage to already fitted parts. In addition the crank and a few other parts would also have to come off. I came up with the idea of splitting the drum in half and slipping it over the axle. If the idea didn't work then I'd have had to leave it off, but at least I wouldn't have damaged anything else. The sequence below shows how I did it. First pic is of the axle it had to fit around and the seemingly impossible place it was in : Removing the two hexagonal ends was fairly easy, as I hadn't scraped off the clear coat. A single-edge razor blade did the trick : After cleaning everything up the three pieces went on relatively easily : All done : Danny

There's only 1840 rivets in these two assemblies. There are a LOT more in the boilers, cab, coal bunker etc . Around 4,000 in the whole loco. Thanks for the insights Cap'n Mac and Ken . I've discovered a new way to roll long pipes. I usually use a long piece of tubing to do the whole pipe in one go, but the tubing I have isn't the right inside diameter (missed out by about 0.3mm ). So I cut a short piece of the slightly undersize brass tube, cut a slot in it lengthwise to open it up and cleaned it up with a fine diamond-coated file. Then I used a long piece of tubing to support the inside and used the outer one like a clamp to squeeze the card tube together while I glued about 15mm in one go. Once it dried sufficiently I slid the tubing along and repeated the process - it took about 10 minutes to do a 100mm pipe and it turned out perfectly : The ends of some pipes had bends in them : Also flanges : The water piping down the left side of the loco - the right side doesn't have any, instead there is a "balance pipe" between the two tanks that keep the left side one full : I'm guessing this is the water pump ? It needs a little re-aligning which I can do when all the glue has dried : Danny

There was a mistake with the kit much earlier in the build, which means that the cab/boiler/bunker won't go on properly. The section below is 1.5mm too deep (I cut it right ) so I had to remove it using a combination of scalpel and Isocol and fixed the problem : It took me a couple of days to fit the sand pipes, all 24 of them. I still need to do the very bottoms of them, which I'll do a bit later in the build : I made up some brackets to anchor the pipes above the wheels and keep them in position : A couple more views of the pipes : The last major sub-assemblies are the two water tanks alongside the boilers. Here's one of them during assembly of the framework : After skinning the water tanks there came the job of gluing on the rivets - all 1,840 of them. I've had problems with the rivets coming off on the cab and coal bunker due to the clear coat on the kit, but I think I found the solution after a bit of experimenting. Isopropyl Alcohol removes the clear coat without harming the printed finish : Some lifting lugs. I'm going to re-do the four I did earlier on the coal bunker to match these as the others look too thin (0.3mm as compared to 0.5mm wire and a different shade of red as well) : One of the tanks sitting in place. More work needs doing to it before I can do the final fitting : Danny

The roof is lined on the inside as well. I pre-formed it before gluing it on. There are 8 air vents in the top section : The coal bunker has now been fitted to the cab, and the cab roof as well. It sounds easy when you say it quickly : Next job will be to fit the entire boiler/cab/coal bunker unit to the chassis. Danny