New addition

Crawler with side boom
     Many years ago my good friend Vic and I attended our first USA N Scale convention in Portland held in 1994.
     We were amazed at just how big the train show was that was held the weekend after the convention. To see so many layouts, manufactures and retail trade stands was a real eye opener for the both of us. We saw so much more product than we had ever seen and remember this was well before the World wide web and internet of today. One of the small items that we both liked but one that I did not purchase during this visit was a product produced by a small company called REM. This was a series of track maintenance equipment that consisted of a high rail, hydraulic high rail crane and several other items one being a crawler with side boom. Vic purchased a couple of these (well he is into all kinds of truck and trailer combinations along with cranes in N Scale of all shapes a sizes).
    We were talking one day about the fact I needed some more points of interest on my SFRSD and looking across his display I noticed he had actually built one of his side boom crawlers. "What are you intending to do with the other kit" nothing you can have it if you like. So a few bob changed hands and I was off and running.
    The weather here in Melbourne has been really hot this summer high 30's C to low 40 C temperatures so this was perfect excuses to stay in the air conditioned house and get to and build my new kit.
    Unfortunately the kit had a lot of flash and it took several attempts to get the flash off the body and tracks before it was even close to being acceptable and that is a pity as this type of kit is needed.

This is the opened kit with all of it's contents. You can see just a small amount of filings that have been removed from some of the parts.

 

     Lots of days of filing just to get the tracks to fit in their correct position under the main chassis section and to clean up the tracks themselves but we got pretty close.
     Once all of the parts were ready to paint the next challenge was to find a construction equipment  paint colour. There is not that much around however I came across some Tamiya Brilliant Orange TS-56 spray paint that looked like it would work. Now armed with this and some grey Tamiya Primer all of the sub assemblies got a coat first the Primer then within about 10 minutes because of the heat outside a few light coats of the yellow.
    The parts did not take long to dry at all so later that day I started to assemble the bits. First though I did brush paint the tracks with flat black. Once dry I then gave them a very light coat almost dry of  ITALERI Acrylic Paint Metal flat steel. #4679AP If you have not used this before I can highly recommend it.  Anyway that done I super glued the tracks to the body attached the side counter weight and then the special piece made by Vic the etched side boom. Boy does this make a difference to the appearance of the crawler. I attached the exhaust pipe and air cleaner did some painting of the driver seat, used a sharpie to highlight the grill and a few passes over the whole lot with some Pan Pastels and a dry brush with some metal and burnt sienna.

     Here are all of the component parts attached to these place card holders. Boy they make the job of painting small parts easy as they can just stand on their own. These were first found by my friend John in a 2 dollar shop and I found mine on ebay.

I would have liked to have painted the grill better it looks OK from a distance

Note the neat Boom, if you look closely you will see the rivets.

    Next job is to rig the boom and that will come later.
    The next project will be another one of the REM.  Railway Express Miniatures Kits the Hydraulic High Rail MOW Crane
Well that's another project almost completed.
Thanks for coming by.
Rod.