My Mruder (bruder cat320 something look alike)

[cdm]

The only bruder part is the upper body lower plastic basin that is now enclosed in inches of aluminum and styrene.... it serves no purpose other than i can't remove it at this point. hah

Been working on the cab raiser (to solve my symmetry issue due to the big oil tank), cab walkway and ladder.

Got some more fittings on monday from beswick and argh.. Their 90d ones are so small there isn't enough clearance between the mounting surface and the nipple to even squeeze the hose in! ok you barely can jam the hose in there but impossible to put the retainer. You need to file down the surface right next to the thread so there is enough space, basically like an L bracket; can't be mounted on a flush surface, only on an edge. Alternative you can spend 9.10$ on male to female extender to offset the fitting 5mm and have enough space for your hose and retainer. Photos later. Fittings themselves are tiny though.. good for loaders if you can mount them against an edge or machine an edge like a step or ident (0.5mm of tolerance between edge and seal not sealing from the looks of it). I also got some of their plastic retaining sleeves (35$ for 100 vs 10 for 10$ from leimbach). Again they use bloody imperial and claim this fits 4mm hose.. well not really. you need pliers and vaseline to get the fitting onto the hose and no way in **** to get it around the barb. You could always drill them out though, though they are only 1mm thick so really more fiddly work to do for no real reason.

So i am a bit frustrated, i was hoping to put the hydros in this week, but seems like i may just abandon the leibher design/routing of the hoses and go for a cat.. straight from boom block into valve. no 90d riser block in there. i'll just cut a hose clamp block to wrap around the hoses instead.

weather has been miserable so i have been working in the garage on other things. but now that i know where i stand with the hoses, i should speed this up again.