Manning Wardle K class footplate and bunker

I had been putting this off because I knew the splashers would be hard to do, and also expected trouble with the flared top on the bunker.

The first job with the splashers is to bend up the splasher faces connected to the footplate with a half-etched fold line. I started from what I thought was the back to get some practice in... turns out that was the front. As usual by the time I did the last couple I'd got the hang of it. The trick is to score along the half-etch fold lines a number of times until you can just see a mark coming through, at which point these small parts will be easy to bend up without damaging them.

Building the Slaters/PME Manning Wardle K class kit

One of my hobbies is building model trains. I have been posting the progress of my different models to a Yahoo group for Australian modellers (or is it for people who model Australian trains?) so thought I may as well change over to publishing progess in the form of a blog.

The current project is a Manning-Wardle 0-6-0 tank locomotive, being built from a Slaters kit that has extra parts and rewritten instructions supplied by a Sydney firm called Prototype Model Engineering (PME).

PME specialise in high quality/detail kits and parts, are a local reseller of Slaters products, and also sell modelling tools. Unfortunately they do not have a web site at the time of writing.

Any posts in this series will be given the label "mwk". Model railway related posts in general will be given the label "model railways".

I'll go into more detail on various sub-assemblies in other posts, but to give an overview of progress so far I nearly have a rolling chassis, and the footplate and splashers (wheel covers) are done.

The next steps are to get a freely rolling chassis, then add the pickups so it can be tested with a motor, and to modify the leaf spring castings as described in PME's instructions and fit them.