Cheating

With a weekend that is currently scheduled to involve working until 9pm on Sunday night I'm wondering, as ever, about how to make life easy for myself and what shortcuts I can take.

By now I should know of course that every shortcut turns out to be a diversion with a Road Closed sign at the end of it. But something has to be done about the signal box.

So yesterday morning this popped through the letterbox:

It is a laser cut kit for a GWR signal box from Lcut Creative costing the massive sum of £6. At that price I think I can afford to try it out as an experiment.  I was thinking about using it in conjunction with their other style of GWR signal box window, or with my previous attempt to utilise the Ratio frames, to help speed up building a model based on Blodwell. First of all though I'm going to build one straight out of the box. Although not correct for the TVR it has roughly the right footprint and will at least let me judge if it improves the composition before continuing to invest time in the scratchbuilt/kit bashed  box.

To be honest I want to see what results I can get with laser cut wood model since I still think it is a possible way forward for the buildings on Llanrhaiadr Mochnant. I'm a little concerned that I have yet to see a painted version of one the Lcut Creative models, and I'm not sure whether the interlocking brick approach to corner joins will work or not. Actually if I could get the toy poodles to stop jumping around I might have built it by now, but I've found by bitter experience that starting work on anything whilst they are in the room is a big mistake, especially if glue, paint or scalpels are involved.

Incidentally one nice touch is that the kit includes parts for both right and left handed doors, which also gives me a couple of spare pieces to experiment on.

An attempt at adding some relief to the flat kit wall

Lcut Creative have some You Tube content on the techniques for building these kits, and a comprehensive manual available to download.

Whilst on the subject of cheating, though I know it isn't really, I've also succumbed to order a very small selection of Silfor products. I think Apa is now at the stage where I can justify the relative expense  and I can use them to best effect.

I've also been thinking about a few other things that might make life simple going forward. Most of these are below the baseboard. Something that crossed my mind the other day though is whether anyone has considered a discrete coupling, in the spirit of the Sprat & Winkle, to fit a NEM coupling socket? I know there is the Kadee option.