This months scribble is probably classed as the model railway version of a horror story - if something could go badly wrong, then in this instance it certainly did !
In the beginning, there was a 2EPB unit - far from complete, but the bodies had been virtually completed and really only needed the front cables, air-horns and glazing to be sorted out ready for attaching to a chassis. The paint finish wasn't amazing, but I was happy that they looked the way I had intended - see photo below.
Other projects were beckoning and I had a large number of items to sort out, and having applied another coat of paint to the roof of one of the carraiges, I stood it on top of my PC monitor to dry - it gets nice and warm there, but not too hot !!
For quite a few evenings after I had re-arranged the spare room, I could smell some sort of burning - I thought this to be the monitor itself as it was now fairly close to the wall, but strangely there was no smell during the day when the PC was on, so maybe the radiator against the wall was cooking something ....... nothing apparant near, or against the radiator - this was odd !!
I continued to try to trace the smell - it could well have been my old spot-lamp as the paint on that had been baked before, although now I had a miniature spot-bulb in that lamp, so this was unlikely but what else could possibly be cooking.
The smell always appeared after about half-an-hour, and only in the evenings so I was sure that the spot-lamp was involved - all connections were good on the spot-lamp when I pulled it apart, and there were no hot-spots caused by loose cables arcing .... this was getting really infuriating.
And then came the greatest discovery of all .....
The burning smell ? That was the plastic body of the 2EPB cooking under the intense heat throwing out of the spot-lamp which had dropped to only 5cm above the carraige !
Basically, the heat build-up had gradually softened the roof of the EPB and gravity had taken over and allowed the roof and side to buckle and collapse - one side of the carraige is fine, but the other side has all of the linearity of a banana !
Needless to say, nothing gets dried on top of the monitor anymore, and the spotlamp hasn't actually seen any service since that episode took place.
It just goes to show that although railway enthusiasts the world are maligned by critics about what they model and how they model it, the worst damage is usually inflicted by our own inattentative actions to try and get the job done quicker !
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