Breda LRV - couplings

Work continues on my Breda LRV project ...

My LRV is very nearly finished. One thing I felt it was missing were some couplings. I had some Kato 11-704 couplers which are just the right style for a light rail vehicle. I very carefully built up some supports for them out of styrene, only to discover the they needed to be lower. So I made them lower to clear the body, only to find they now fouled the rail..!! So I did some more tweaking, in the end I just drilled a small hole and used an M1.4 self tapping screw to hold it in place. Works really well! Those 1.4mm screws are very handy, I bought a 200 of them off eBay for a fiver.

And the finished result:

They are non-functional, but that's ok.

And so with that my LRV is basically complete. It still needs wiring up to make it actually move, but I am still trying a few different options for that.

In other news, my laser cutter has died. I started making a cut and then it just stopped lasing. Unfortunately it seems the laser diode itself is dead, most likely due to a dodgy eBay-special laser driver. Lesson learnt, I will shell out the big bucks and get a proper laser driver, and a replacement laser diode. Very frustrating, I feel like I have lost a limb!