Update on the Backwoods Miniatures On30 Open Cab Davenport Gas-Mech Conversion

First update to let you know how I’m getting on with this cab conversion. Being a Yorkshireman I’m always happy to speak my mind… and this is no exception!  This isn’t the first Backwoods Miniatures conversion/ dress-up kit I’ve built. I’ve successfully completed a BWM dress up kit for one of my On30 Bachmann Shay Locos - that looks great and runs really well - it has the latest TCS WOW Sound 101 decoder, speaker and keep alive. That brought plenty of build challenges, but I’m happy with how it looks. A similar experience with the BWM dress up kit for the On30 Davenport.  There’s no doubt a lot of creativity went into these kits, so well done Pete McParlin. In most cases there’s nothing else like them on the market - and now that the firm no longer exists its as rare as hens teeth 🐓 to find one for sale - often for lots of money. But be warned - there are a lot of extremely small parts to work with; there are factual inconsistencies and inaccuracies with the instructions (that’s been the case with all three BWM kits that I’ve built thus far); and a few mechanical building challenges facing you. For example, as I mentioned in my video, with this particular kit, some round parts have to be superglued to other round parts. If you think about that, the actual contact surface area is almost zero so it’s hard to get a CA bond that that’s going to last… especially with brass rod that’s only .7 mm diameter. Anyway, I hope that watching this video (and future others from me) will help you to decide whether building a Backwoods Miniatures kit (if one does come up for sale) is something you could cope with. They will no doubt be other On30 modellers (i’m not talking about owners of BWM converted Locos but actual builders) who will disagree with what I’ve said….but that’s just life. Some people can cope with fine modelling like this and solving mechanical challenges; others (I suspect the majority) can’t.