Oh G what now?

Earlier this year I bought a Austrains G-class in of all things: VR blue and gold. Up until a week ago it was running fine. The last weekend I put it on the track and went to move it, a loud grinding sound could be heard emanating from the loco. Oh great, sounds like a motor is about to cark it. It went back in the box and waited until I had a night free to take it apart and find the problem. Well it wasn't hard to find:

Those filings are from one of the flywheels. Turns out they were grinding on something, that something appeared to be a wire or screw that I had no access to. I did find that the motor mount has a fair bit of play in it, in fact I could lift the motor inside the mount! So the fix was to put some packing under the motor. What did I use?

Turns out a used chocolate packet can come in handy for these things:

That is the packer being positioned under the motor. On top of the board is the TCS DP2X decoder I installed not long after purchasing the loco. Initial tests indicate this repair has been successful. Saves have to send the loco back anyway.

Guard against trouble 2

Painting an item of rollingstock you've built can be a joy or a curse depending on the number of colours you might have to use. The Z van proved to be the later as I used no less than 5 different colours to get the result I wanted (that is 2 more than the instructions dictate):

The main body colour is 'wagon red' (using Humbrol #100), the underframe and handrails satin black (Humbrol #85), roof a sandy tan colour (Humbrol #63) window surrounds and blinds for cupola windows light grey (Humbrol #40) and finally the stove chimney metallic silver (Humbrol #11). There is a 6th paint colour I use to do the axles and wheel faces which is an old pot of Polyscale Grimy black to cover the shiny brass of the axles and the raw steel of the wheel faces.

Anyway enough of the waffle, here is the van ready to go:

Just a final thing on those window blanking plates, I gave the wrong styrene thickness in the diagram. I used Evergreen .25mm sheet and not .025" (which you can't get anyway). I'd like to build another one of these in the near future to the same spec but coded as a Z and not a ZL.