The van is made of wood, mostly laser cut but all of the stripwood is supplied as lengths that need to be cut by hacksaw, as certainly used to be the case with IP Engineering kits. Also, there are no tabs to help alignment, that is all down to you with the help of some pencil markings that the instructions tell you to put down initially
The style is very much that of an IP Engineering kit, so it should match my IP four wheel vans very well. I've just got the last bits of bracing to add to this side
The construction is very solid, thanks to internal bracing. Time wise, I've been working on this for a few quick modelling sessions now, it's certainly not the fastest build but you could probably get it done in 2 or 3 days if you stuck at it all day. The instructions aren't the greatest, the diagrams are helpful but not always clear and the photo is very unclear and pixelated. Strangely for me, I've not done many modifications, in fact only the stripwood on the ends, I've swapped 1/16th by 1/8th for 1/8th square as I think it looks better. The roof is metal, a completely new one for me so we'll see how sticking and painting that goes.
Meanwhile, I've also come down with a bad case of scratchbuilt carriage sickness, having not done one for a long time the desire to start bashing around with wood again is overwhelming. So I've drawn up this...
It's a Vale of Rheidol Summer coach, only Perfect World does a kit for this but several NWAG members have either Rheidol saloon coaches or a Rheidol loco, yet one of these is on the front of nearly every VoR train. So I've offered to NWAG members to build one for them, and I've had two expressions of interest thus far (I can't really justify one for myself plus I have quite literally run out of stock storage space!) I've bought wood to build them out of today and so hopefully Afonglas Works will soon become productive once again....
