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Ace Products	W Ascough
7 Ringley Park Road	01737 248540
Reigate
Surrey	Email: a4ace@talktalk.net
RH2 7BJ	Web: http://aceproducts.org

Purchased, built and reviewed by Simon Moore

One of my main railway interests is the ex-Great Northern Railway Queensbury lines which ran between Bradford, Halifax and Keighley. The main loco to operate passenger services on this line was the Ivatt N1 0-6-2 tank which put in sterling work until 1955 when passenger services ended.

I recently switched from modelling in 4mm to modelling in 7mm and in the process kit building became my job. In due course, my birthday was looming. I asked my wife for one of the Ace Products N1 kits, which was attractively priced at £129.99 inclusive of postage, and incidentally, cheaper than an equivalent 4mm kit. Inside the box, there is the usual mix of etched brass and nickel silver plus castings and instructions. At this point I was looking forward to getting stuck in and building the kit.

Chassis

The chassis on the N1 is based on a pair of nickel-silver etches. I cut out the frames and spacers to construct the basic chassis on my trusty Hobby Holidays jig. I made up the coupling rods and got everything aligned on the jig ready for the frames to be fitted. I found the tab and slot arrangement on the chassis very sloppy and it was a bit of a jiggle to get everything sat straight ready for soldering up. Eventually everything was soldered up and then removed from the jig. At this point I offered up a set of wheels and this is where the problems started. The square end of the wheel axle was in the frame bush, not projecting on either side. Consequently, I could not fit the wheels as the spacers are too wide. I put the kit away at this point because I had spent a day putting together the frames, only for it all needing to be split apart.

The kit had been in the box for months which is unlike me to have a kit half finished for so long and eventually my wife asked when it would be finished.

Out it came again. The frames were dismantled and rebuilt with some scratch built spacers which I made 24mm wide. Once I had completed the basic frames I started on the footplate. When I had fitted the nuts for fixing the body to the chassis I noticed the footplate was going uphill towards the smokebox and that the frames were too long at the front and too short at the rear. I had to cut out a large section off the front of the frames to get the body to sit in the correct position. I added some extra lengths of brass at the rear to make the frames reach the buffer beam. After I finished off the chassis detailing, I found I had to shorten the brake hangers as the pull rods were a bit close to the track. I fitted an ABC gearbox with a Cannon motor which is silent and very free running.

Body

Once I had sorted the chassis issues it was on to the body. I fitted the valances and started to build up the basic body. The slots for the tabs on both the valances and the tanks were in the same position on the footplate so I had to remove the tabs from the tanks and bunker to allow these to fit to the footplate. The tank tops have some rather large holes in them which need to be filled if you’re modelling a non-condensing locomotive. I did this by soldering some scrap etches under the tank tops and filling with model filler. I think this could be improved on by just putting some etched dimples on the underside so you don’t have to fill the holes. I had a bit of a struggle to get the boiler to work because the smokebox isn’t a wrapper that goes round the inner boiler, it’s a part that is soldered to the end of the boiler. The sizes of the boiler and smokebox are so close I had to cut a strip out of the bottom of the boiler to make it fit. After getting these parts finished, the remainder of the model was more or less plain sailing although the large sandbox splasher top was too short and needed a little extra piecing. The crankpin splasher was interesting to fit! The only other issue I had was trying to roll the bunker top as the brass is rather thick and takes a lot of heat.

Summary

Since I started this kit I have both read about, and spoken to others about Ace kits and encountered comments like ‘challenging’, ‘not for the faint hearted’, and a whole lot worse. My personal opinion is that yes these kits can be challenging with things not quite right but they offer exceptional value for money and are something of a challenge. I will be honest and say that at times the air was a bit blue but on reflection it was worth it. If you are an experienced model maker you will get a beautiful model for your money and along the way you may get additions to your vocabulary and an increased skillset.

Would I build another? Certainly I would. Ace Products offer a range of prototypes like the Ivatt N1 that are not often repeated anywhere else. I think the next model is going to be one of their GCR C14’s as they were also seen in the West Riding in the early fifties. I know this kit was a challenge but on reflection it was fun to build and I think the end product is a beautiful thing.

A copy of this review was sent to Ace Kits and William Ascough responded:

The mainframe spacers in this particular N.1. kit are 25.5mm wide which should allow enough sideplay for the axles to work through Peco Points. I would ask Mr Simon Moore if he removed the cusps on the side of the spacers before fitting them. This cusp is produced by the etching process – If he had so then the problem that was encountered would almost certainly have been overcome. Nevertheless on more recent kits we have reduced the width of spacers to 24mm to make building easier. The slots in the footplate are wide enough to take both the tanks and the valances, and making them this way obviates the need for a greater number of slots in the etches. Our mission statement – is to provide value for money – make O gauge affordable and to produce dimensionally accurate scale O gauge models. It appears that Simon agrees that we have succeeded and we thank him for his work in producing a fine model from the kit.