Another background project that I have recently spent time on is to fill in underneath a resin print BR class 37 in 1:87 with the bits that hold it up and make it go.
The bogies, no surprise, come from the Lima Deltic or class 50, possibly one from each as I've been raiding the £1 rummage boxes at shows.
The cosmetic surgery wasn't brilliantly executed but that's OK for the reason above. The concept was proven, to me at least. I think I'd prefer to put time into drawing the frames rather than cut up lots more of them though, as they are still rather approximate even after a cut and shut and have some other disadvantages.
Thing is though I've had a lot of fun working out what might fit and what would not. A setback was the discovery that the Lima pancake didn't fit (blindingly obvious, I know!) but then I found out about micromotors. The 12mm unit in this bogie is held in a plug turned from acrylic to fit in the space which contained the Lima ring magnet and armature. It's much more powerful than they were. And much smaller.
The underframe was marked out on plastic card on a silhouette cutter and then cut with a knife. The space for the motor bogie was approximated and has been one of the areas where quite a bit of tweaking has taken place. I am coming to appreciate how strong the bond that the solvent makes can be.
The drawgear bothered me a lot as fixing any kind of coupling directly to the plastic seemed dubious. The solution has come with a piece of rectangular section brass tube, fixed with screws through the base of the chassis. This also allowed me to release the motor bogie through the front rather than downwards, a trick used in quite a few commercial models but generally not in ones with such crude mechanisms to my knowledge. As the sides of the chassis module come right around the motor it seemed that vertical removal would be very difficult. Pulling out the axles was necessary. So I am happy to have found an alternative.
This is a test fit of one of the coupling hooks (OBKs). The resin print is from Lincoln Loco, scaled up from TT. It's really lovely and I hope to do it justice in the end! Fuel tanks remain to be attended to.