Original page created on 18/11/2014.
Intervention on interior fittings
The seats are raw from unmoulding. So, they must be deburred. This is not so easy, because some are very well glued, and others not enough. The fixing pins are fragile. And some seats are crooked.
In my 1st/2nd class coach, the compartments were inverted (five seats in front in 1st class and four in 2nd). It was not possible to simply return the fitting, which is keyed. I had to unglue and reattach the rows, without being able to avoid breaking the fixing pins.
Intervention on lower level fittings
Preparing the platforms
The main purpose is to hide the horrible bean shaped holes, which are hardly justifiable on the driving coach, and not at all on the others.
Begin by trimming the platform floor with a mill bit or a cutter. It does not matter if the surface finish is not very good. Prepare two 24 × 28 mm rectangles into 0.25 mm thick plastic sheet (diagram below), paint them in grey (the original floor is brown, but it seems to me that the platform floor is almost black in reality). Glue these floor coverings to the platforms (model glue applied from below).
Supporting parts for holding bars
Prepare two rectangles of transparent polystyrene (CD case for example), 42 × 26 mm. Why transparent parts? Because they should not mask the light from the LEDs above.
These parts as well as the platform floor must be drilled to receive the holding bars, as shown below. If you have many coaches, a drilling template will be very useful.
There are two different drilling diameters: 0.4 mm for the bars near the doors, and 0.5 mm for the central bar. The ⌀ 0.5 drilling ⑤ must be 0.5 mm from the bogie pivot axis ⑥, which is formed under the arrangement by a cylindrical blind hole.
One last thing must be done for giving a path to the central holding bars: grooves ⑦ of approximately 0.6 mm depth starting from the axes of the previously drilled ⌀ 0.5 mm holes, perpendicular to the axis of the coach, and arriving into the bean-shaped holes. One to the right of the coach, the other to the left.
In the photo, the centre bar is already installed. It has a particular shape, in Z, because it is not used only as a decoration…
Intervention on upper level fittings
To facilitate the wiring of the lighting, I chose to glue the two levels together. The top fitting will no longer be snapped into the panes. So, the clips must be levelled.
For the lower level lighting strip, given the small available space, it must be as thin as possible. So, I decided to put LED through (see below). The components will protrude from the opposite side of the circuit, which will be stuck to the ceiling. We must make a groove in the ceiling to accommodate these components. Difficulty: this ceiling is far from perfectly straight, and there is a risk that the mill bit will pass through, the thickness of the part being only 1.2 mm. So, I practised an individual housing for each component, re-doing the vertical origin of the milling every time. The grooves will have a length of 3 mm and a depth of 0.8. It is obvious that a single groove going from one end to the other would be much faster to do, but also more risky…
Similarly, the electrical connection of the strip without extra thickness requires grooves at one end, as indicated in the drawing.
The visible part of the LED, with the green triangle, is its base. The translucent part is embedded in a hole drilled into the epoxy support, through which the light passes.
