Entry posted by Ian Smith
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A little more progress on the Worsley Works coaches, the U4 Composite and T38 Brake Third are nearing construction completion. The T38 has been built as a 6 wheel example using one of David Eveleigh's 19'0" under frame etch kits. Once again the brake hangers were modified to make them look a little more like GWR ones, and the axle boxes have again been rounded off at the top to better resemble an Oil axle box. Rudimentary brake rigging has been added to both coaches from 0.3mm brass wire.
To make the rigging running longitudinally, two pieces were bent to a slightly flattened L shape, the feet of the L's were then flood soldered together trapping a further piece of 0.3mm wire centrally between them at 90 degrees (this latter being the rod between the inner and outer V hangers). Once cleaned up the 2 feet of the L's represents the connecting iron mongery that transfers a rotary motion of that iron mongery (caused by the raising lowering of the piston in the vacuum cylinder) to a push-pull motion lengthways down the coach. The vacuum cylinder, both V hangers and this brake rigging were assembled onto a scrap of 0.004" nickel sheet which in turn was added to the underside of the chassis. I have omitted the connections between the cylinder and the rod between the V hangers.
Both coach chassis' have had wire added between the bottom of the W Irons, this was flattened at the ends (and in the case of the 6 wheeler in the middle too) before soldering in place. Close inspection of the photos shows that I still need to clean up this area as the flattened pieces were made over size with a view to filing back once in place, and that is what i need to do now.
T38 :
U4 :
Because eventually, the 4 coaches will be running in fixed rake I am also experimenting with methods of coupling the coaches together. Initially I tried using a couple of very small magnets behind the headstocks to hold the coaches together but found it a little unsatisfactory (but thank you Mr Carlson (D869) for providing the magnets), so I have now decided to hold the coaches together with representations of vacuum brake piping. A piece of 0.45mm brass wire bent to a sort of M shape - the uprights of the vacuum pipe being the verticals of the M, and the flexible piping being the V between those uprights, the tails of the verticals each have a little hook bent into them (one will be permanently fixed to one coach (with blue tack at the moment), the other hook going behind the headstock of the adjoining coach. This version looks like it might have legs - the inter coach gap is adjustable by stretching/shrinking the V of the M, and the hook behind the headstock seems long enough to prevent accidental uncoupling (a bit more experimentation on the track work of St Ruth tonight should hopefully satisfy me that this is the way to go).
Photos below show this experimental coupling :
Both coaches are sitting on a little test track that has a B6 size point switchback (the tightest I will have on my layout) to trial the coupling to ensure that no buffer locking occurs and also to check that the fixed 6 wheel chassis can negotiate such geometry (I decided to build the 6 wheeled coach chassis without the sliding centre pair that David designed into his etch, my reasoning being that the whole wheelbase is only 38mm so probably shouldn't need such complexity - time will tell whether this was a sensible move but the coach seems happy enough on this test track and also when blown through the yard point work on St. Ruth.
There is still a lot to do to complete the rake, but I'm really quite pleased with the first 2 coaches in the set. Hopefully I won't spoil them when I try to replicate the livery I applied to this 4mm scale coach many many years ago :
Ian
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11
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