Many thanks Robert Jan, that’s a link (maybe even a portal) to a parallel universe of things that run on tracks. My German’s woeful alas & when Google-translate came up with “The railway zeppelin is finished” I had to stop - never did find out what a railway zeppelin looks like because the link provided by the creator didn’t load but I still fell off my seat, so maybe I should return the compliment as you suggest.

Anyhow in view of the apparent lack of activity on this forum I selflessly present for your entertainment (and much sooner than I’d expected Jack!)…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiNOYO6ZBsU



...a disastrous attempt on the cab roof’s compound curves using a new tactic (sneaking up on it) eventually torn/scraped off last night

The facts of life for the guy that takes chances! Sometimes the best laid plans fail. The point is,you are trying awesome new levels of scratching and detailing buddy.
I m sure you will find another way and drive on.
I know what you mean about this forum though. I am seeing LOTS of tumbleweeds blowing through lately.
J

You said it Jerry – what gets posted is half the story, snafus seldom get snapped. I’d tried to make a single sheet of thinner grade Evergreen (than Tram 1) stretch & bend to cover the curves, but it just buckled & warped. It needed a proper footing all around the edge too so that was first…





Test fit…



I was nearly inclined to use putty instead of sheet to cover the roof until I got inspired while staring at my underpants…hmm so many possible endings to that sentence, maybe best to pass altogether. Anyhow these pics show how Y-Fronts can often hold the answer…depending on who’s asking the question of course…







The roof assembly fits OK now with some cosmetics to come & the compartment windows need to stay off during internal fit-out. I didn’t attempt horizontal handrails in Tram 1’s compartment mainly because I was gambling Tram 2 would turn out better so I’d only have to do them once. I still wasn’t sure how to scratch them either but found the answer, surprisingly not in my funky 2-tone CK’s but in the spares box;



After 10 or 15 years in stir those pesky Dragon throat-mike collars’ time had finally come…





When righted the rail drops into the angle of the supports OK…



Nearly there…



Next stop - Tram 2 Terminus

Wow man , all that beautiful work just from staring at your junk holder .
Tim , you've come a long way with ups and downs and mastered them to get to where you are , very , very cool !!!

Love the small details. ... Reporpoising at its best!🐬🚊🐬🐬

—mike

Very elegant solutions to these details. "One small step for man...."
J

Top Job Tim!

Thanks guys & pls keep seated until Tram 2’s come to a complete halt, I wouldn’t trust those rail-holders further than the ones that already flew off. Hmm never heard of junk-holders - presumably referencing illicit substances rather than household garbage…or maybe it’s underwear for dudes with small…bins? Over here we have Budgie-Smugglers… aw sorry Glenn were you enjoying a beer just then?

While I’m here, a mill-stone er milestone’s coming up on Sunday for this thread…



I got the lighter ready in my other foot

Tim I was just going to mention that!
Wanting to refresh myself with the overall progress of this excellent endeavor (as well your conversion work on the MB and those incredible trams), I realised you actually began your journey down in the valley village on March 10th '18.
So as the Anniversary approaches, all the trials, errors and triumphs whilst ascending the slippery slopes up the mountain of scratchbuilding are all finally coming to fruition!
Well done Tim, all the research and fact finding (or not!) , mad skills, community support, and problem solving are soo very cool dude and appreciated.
I'm not on here as much as I would like, but this blog is outstanding. I thank you for your spirit in staying the course to the final push to the peak.

Power on man
Cheers
Dave

Many thanks Dave, I’m not sure I deserve such praise but I’m truly touched & if there are any 1st class seats on this Tram, one of them’s got your name on it. So at long last All Change, Tram 2’s arrived at its temporary Terminus before being wheeled into the paint-shop along with Tram 1, and the Trailer when it’s built. Here’s the last of T2’s construction steps, barring detailed parts left off until post-paint such as the 4 pairs of handles either side of the doors, windscreen wipers, mirrors etc.

I should add that all doors & windows are not glued, just wedged which is why they look so badly fitted - they've all got to come off before the red mist. Scratchorama one more time…







It never ceases to amaze me how much I/we don’t see in images. You’d think I’d have noticed by now that the tram roofs weren’t white – but no, I’ve been so focused on modern reference images & videos from the Prague Tram Museum – in which all inter-war trams do have white roofs - it was only last week I was looking at the “crime-scene” reconstruction photos looking for something else & duh! - light/mid gr*y. Well that’s my best guess, I don’t think it’s khaki or anything else. So, following a re-prime of T1’s roof I took the pair outside to test the tones with daylight – here’s T1…



& here’s T2…



Six coats/washes later (red, yellow, blue, black & white in various denominations) I finally got the variegated shabbiness I was after, semi-accidentally getting that ribbed effect – it’s perfectly smooth I just lucked out with the right brush, I’d never have got it with an airbrush…



Surprise! I used a steel ruler to hold that side panel down while the glue set…



The outdoor shoot was then brought to a premature close when an on-shore gale blew up from Bondi beach & the trams suddenly started moving off on their own. In haste to get them indoors I made the mistake of picking up T2 by its upper roof & just caught the body as it fell away in slo-mo, narrowly averting an uncontrolled descent into terrain. Switch to Plan B: night-trams…









It’s good to finish T2 right on the 1st anniversary of this project - I’ll be taking a brief break to decide whether to do some more figures or go straight onto the Trailer build, which is looking scarily like 75% scratch/25% truncated kit skeleton

Still following,still impressed.
J

Tim, this is absolutely getting one of the best builds (IMHO) I've ever seen, subject Trams related. Very good work!

Kind regards,

Robert Jan

The level of historical detail you are committing to this scene is amazing. I'm loving the attention to detail, even so far as making sure the wood color is mismatched on the benches. Keep up the great work, and loving the step-by-step process.

Beautiful Tim , some of the finest scratchin and conversion work I've seen . Looks like you're entering the home stretch man !!!

Good to see T-1🚋 and T-2🚋 leaving the station soon — more passenger capacity for the lot of us. Looking good!

Cheers!🍺
—mike

Thanks as always guys & love the tram emoji Mike – can they move too? As for home stretch gee Glenn you must be standing on the roof looking over the horizon with some pretty cool Zeiss lenses! I’m seeing nothing but hairpin bends from down here – talking of which I need some research assistance please, if anyone in Team Anthropoid has knowledge of…

1) The Trailer (# 624) interior – I have no images at all so if anyone’s rode on it in Prague or been inside it at the Tram museum & took snaps or selfies…?





2) There’s a video of a Tram tour through Prague which was filmed while period vehicles were being assembled for a movie, possibly Anthropoid in 2015/2016. From the following stills can anyone identify the manufacturer(s)/models?





Either of them looks like a good candidate for the furniture polish van Heydrich was taken to hospital in. I’m resigned to converting something even vaguely similar that's on the market (why break the habit of this thread?!) & looking back at pp 4-5 Frenchy found S-Model’s Polski Fiat 508 – either that one or their Ursus A truck looks the closest.

The top one reminds me of a 1931 (?) Ford AA truck...

H.P.

Hello Tim.
About you wondering what the heck is a Zeppelin doing on tracks!
I forgot about it to post a picture. German Streamline from the late twenties.




The German Schienenzeppelin (means Rail Zeppelin), the prop-driven V12 locomotive with a 46-liter BMW engine, developed by Franz Kruckenberg in 1929. In the summer of 1931 it reached the speed of 143 mph (230.2 kmh) in the summer of 1931.


But fun to watch.

Kind regards,

Robert Jan

Its well deserved Tim, and it's given w/o hestitation!
BTW the coach lids came out perfect, well done.
Very inspiring project, to say the least.

Sincerely
Dave

H.P. - I think you’re right about the first van, MiniArt or Zvezda’s GAZ AA kit would do the job too. The other van looks similar to a 1927 Skoda 125 but I can’t find a match for those distinctive 3-slot vents aft of the radiator. Robert Jan thanks for the Schienenzeppelin photos – now there’s an engineer who skipped the lectures on Friction at college, with a v12 46 litre engine you could have flown more passengers further & probably faster – & I can’t help imagining the effect on those passengers waiting for the next train on the platform when the S-zep moved off….Thanks again Dave, those roofs were a bit fluked - er as you’d know that’s a model-maker’s technical term meaning to mess up initially & get lucky with the fix.

I know, I know, look what’s coming and I’m apologizing already, I didn’t want to see another tram for a long time either. But if I don’t go straight into the Trailer build now it’ll be 10 times harder to come back to it in a months’ time - like a bunch of blood-tests or root-canal appointments lurking ahead in the diary, it sure felt like that anyway when I opened the third MiniArt tram box last Monday. After a spine transplant it quickly became obvious that in order to scale the kit version down by approx. 33% I needed some accurate drawings, which didn’t exist apart from this one…



…which is moderately handy despite depicting a different (earlier) Driver alongside. So, using the 3 relevant “crime scene” images & 7 colour photos of Trailer 624 I nutted out the basic dimensions using a combination of relativity, estimation & The Force to start a basic 1/35-sized drawing…



…from which I could mark up usable kit parts for surgery…



It won’t always be a matter of slicing out one mid-section, sometimes to retain as much detail & end/edge locating points as possible twin sections either side of middle will need removing instead. In the above pic you can see the trailer’s smaller wheel-base compared to the kit’s side-plate openings. The big wheel’s from the kit for comparison - a free travel-pass for the first to identify the smaller wheel on the drawing (bonus points for manufacturer), re-purposed from the spares box as the closest match. At the top, the full kit floor laid out to show how much needs cutting out.

Step 1 – bogies, using T2’s assembly as reference. Cutting the inner rims…





Cross-hatching indicates required surgery…



Presto behold the incredible shrinking chassis…





The leaf-springs will wait until I’m sure of the connection points under the compartment body, meanwhile a check it fits the rails & the wheels spin…



So much for the easy part

Allright , lemmie guess , you stared at your socks for an hour to achieve this next stage of brilliant scratchology ?

Beautiful Tim , see I told you you're almost there ......

Ok Tim, first off love what you've started here, brilliant! And I'd venture to say
the wheel sure looks like a PzrIV idler wheel (Dragon?) of some sort.

Regards
Dave

Thanks gents - Glenn you bet when I switch to imperial measurements, but the underpants are still inspirational for scratch-shrinkage now that it’s much cooler um Down Under. The Pass is nearly yours Dave & certainly the bonus points – bravo - but the adjudicators request the exact i/d…

And so to the Trailer compartment. In this image I present the original kit wall at top (useless for customization purposes), in the middle a total fail trying to cut the whole wall out of a single sheet of 1.5mm thick Evergreen (impossible to get clean straight cuts), and at the bottom the saner way…



Testing height & joint position to chassis.…



Retaining frames built using E’green angle-strips; unlike the driver-tram the trailer’s compartment frames pop outwards…



Yep chopsticks, imho about as useful for cutlery as they are for picking up photo-etch parts. But here I used them overnight to tape strips around to get the right curve for the concave lower panel, bottom edge glued/cured first…



…before gluing the top edge flush to the bottom of the upper panel…



Painting & masking those is going to be so much fun – red upper panel, yellow curved panel, black bottom strip, white edges…

The side-panels’ all-styrene construction allowed many opportunities for my episodic measuring dyslexia…and I really thought I’d conquered it, right up to the final check when I put the two sides back-to-back to find one was 1.5 mmm taller than the other. I’d measured the first of the 2nd side’s end-pillars against the nearly completed 1st side’s to exactly avoid using a ruler before I cut it & then it’s companion – couldn’t possibly go wrong doing it that way, right? So no need to check them again before completion, right? After a lengthy bout of Tourette’s I noticed there was a pencil mark on the inside face of one of the 2nd side’s pillars…1.5 mm up from the bottom. There must have been another mark on the outside face of that strip from a previous task & that’s what I’d used. Anyhow the fix was adding a 1.5mm thick strip to the bottom run on the basis the two sides will never be seen together, so only you & I will ever know.

Test-fitting a trial window frame with a scratchy offcut pane…







Wedged tight in place as usual or they’ll just fall out. Observant lurkers will note there’s a subtle arch to the top edge of the frames on the real thing, which is beyond my skill to replicate with exact uniformity six times over. My mega-rail-layout mate Alistair’s offered his busy 3D printer so we’ll see if it can do the job better - some may say that’s cheating & not “pure” scratch-building…you bet.

A preview of the cab – kit floor v. a template of the trailer’s…



…useless too, so…

Thoroughly impressive scratchbuilding there once again buddy.
J