I already had a couple of 2a's with green painted wheels. And I had one with unpainted wheels. But I sure didn't have one with one axle painted and the other unpainted!
When I came home with my new little 2a model I went to Nick's online guide to read the details on this casting. I had assumed that the wheels were mounted prior to painting on the models with green painted wheels and that the wheels were added after body painting on later models with unpainted wheels. I don't know how the heck Nick got so smart but he told me exactly what I needed to know. Nick says the axle with smaller wheels was placed prior to body painting and on these models the front wheels and axle will all have a nice green coating. But the axle of larger wheels was added AFTER the body and smaller wheels were painted. The larger wheels were then later hand painted in green. So the larger wheels typically are only painted on the outside and the axle will not be painted.
Once I learned this important piece of the story it made perfect sense that some of those models would have missed the ladies hand painting the larger wheels. Anyone else have a similar error piece? There may be a bunch of them out there.
