Saturday 9 July 2011

Service Carr Surgery

After weeks of procrastination I decided to conduct major surgery on the WHR Service Carr 2011. More specifically to replace the louvres on the doors of the generator compartment.

I had attempted to make these myself, chamfering pieces of 60" strip and fixing them on one by one, but feedback from readers on the blog and other forums suggested they weren't up to my usual standard.



The photo didn't do them justice - they looked a lot better in 3D reality - but the comments sowed some seeds of doubt.

For me there were two problems with them. They were too thick so there were fewer louvre blades (?) on each door than on the real carriage. The bigger issue for me, though, was that the bottom panels had a slightly wider spacing than those on the top.

It was one of those situations where you know you're not satisfied with the job, but you're reluctant to start messing about with it because of the chance of making it look worse.

Every day I would stalk into the study and stare at the carriage on the shelf, pick it up and examine it from all angles, desperately trying to convince myself 'it would do', all the while knowing in my heart of hearts that it wouldn't.

So this week I made up my mind to stop faffing about and sort it. I took the advice of one of my critics and ordered in some Evergreen clapboard styrene to represent the louvres.

Before that, however, I had to remove the originals. I inserted a new blade in the scalpel, borrowed the best wooden coasters from the coffee table to stack inside the bodyshell (don't tell Mrs W!), took a deep breath and began cutting.....


They came out easily enough with no other damage to the carriage (although I did draw blood from one finger) and then I set about cutting some clapboard pieces to graft into the holes.


I know, I know, it still looks pretty ropey, but once again I'm going to have to ask you to take my word for it that the photo is not a fair representation of how it looks to the naked eye, especially now those gaps have had filler put in them.


Anyway, it now has roughly correct number of louvres on each, so that's one problem fixed at least.

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