Progress slowed over the Summer and Autumn, mainly due to me being busy at work. But I have managed to finish the E2, which has been lurking part finished in my box of abandoned projects since the late 1990s.
To recap, this is a stretched and lowered Hornby body on a scratchbuilt chassis. It runs very well, which isn't bad for my first scratchbuilt chassis. As you'd expect for a model that's been worked on for years, it's not quite up to my current standards in places, but I'm very pleased wi
The T1 is now painted, lined and lettered. It's slowly having detailed added - mostly stuff that would have been in the way whilst I lined it, such as the clack valves, tank fillers, whistle etc. The lettering is by HMRS, I also cheated and used their boiler bands.
This photo shows the current state of play - sorry about the workbench clutter!
The next step will be to weather it - then fit the handrails.
The E2 is ready for priming - the last few days have seen endless pipes added u
The E2 is coming along nicely - I'm currently working on the replacement steps.
It also now has the Westinghouse pump, and a lot of the pipe work that Brighton locos seemed to be cover with at the end of their lives. I've also fitted the brake gear, using a Mainly trains etch. Still to do are the buffer beam fittings and the pipe work under the footplate. It should be ready for painting in a few weeks, but now finally looks like an E2.
The T1 is mostly painted and lined. This was my first
Firstly, I'll apologise for the slightly dodgy photo, showing the clutter of my work table. This is the current state of progress with my much modified Hornby E2. It now has buffer beams, buffers, and handrails. Various bits of beading have been added from Evergreen plastic strip, and and smokebox door fitted. The latter is from Mainly trains and was intended for a GWR 14XX tank.
Progress is very slow, but steady. This might get finished at some point in 2012. Since taking the photo I've fit
The T1 is now mostly complete. There's still a few details to be added to the chassis, and I'm in the process of assembling a cab interior out of plasticard. This is partly guesswork, being based on some slightly murky photos of T1s the show parts of the cab and some photos of the cab of the preserved O2. I'm guessing there's some similarities, since they are both Adams locos. Photos of the ca to follow when it's done.
This is the current state of the loco.
The main hold up was getting th
The T1 can move under it's own power. After the problems with the chassis on the J, it was something of a relief that it needed very little adjustment to run smoothly. Just some tweaking of the bogie pivots and some slight enlarging of the cutouts for the bogie wheels. The pickups are a bit non-standard due to the odd design of the chassis - a piece of PCB was bolted to the top of full length frame spacer between the frames. The do work.
The main castings have now been added. I'm battling
I've finally taken some decent photos of the Chiver J class, in all it's late 1940s grottyness.
I've also done some more work on the T1. Friday afternoon was spent constructing a replacement bogie out of nickel silver. I decided that the lump of whitemetal provided with the kit wasn't worth bothering with.
The new bogie supports the rear end of the loco in a way unknown to the designers of 0-4-4T kits in the early 1980s. I had a good read of an Iain Rice article in an early MRJ, w
A trip to the local Sorting Office after work on Friday resulted in a parcel from Branchlines. The E2 chassis now has a Mashima 1220 motor and 67:1 Branchlines Multibox two stage gearbox. It drives the rear axle under the cab, and the gearbox needed a fair amount of it's sides removing to fit (and not be visible). I also had to reduce the thickness of the moulded backhead.
It's pictured on my hi-tech loco test facility - none of this rolling road nonsense for my locos.
This is the curr
A further couple of evening's work saw the boiler assembled and soldered in to place. The boiler and smokebox wrapper needed some slight adjustments to the correct shape (careful bending with fingers...) and the boiler had about .75mm filed off at the cab end to enable it to fit without pushing the front of the footplate down and out of alignment.
It's still nowhere near finished, but I couldn't resist balancing the castings in place to get a rough idea of what it will look like.
Saturday was spent soldering up the T1, an these photos show how far I got:
It was a lot easier than I epxetced. I made one modification to the body - E75 (the loco I'm modelling) had a flat top to it's cab cutouts. The kit is for the batches with an arched top, so this was adjusted with needle files. I also found that the bunker rear was too high, so it was cut down to fit - I suppose it's better to spend a few minutes with a file than finding that it was too small and having to make a rep
The J is done bar some touching up of the paint. When this is done I'll take some decent photos and upload them
I've (foolishly) decided to scratchbuild an LBSC I4 for the 2012 challenge. http://www.rmweb.co....-atlantic-tank/
This lead me to dig out my one and only previous attempt at scratchbuilding a loco chassis in 4mm scale. It's incomplete and has been lurking in my box of half finished projects for about 4 years. I had trouble finding a suitable motor and gearbox to fit, due my li
The loco has now been painted. First several coats of dark grey (not black) paint and a red buffer beam. The Vallejo red paint covered incredibly well - two coats were enough to get decent coverage.
The loco is modelled on a photo in the Bradford Barton album on Wainwright locos showing it in Southern livery, but recently renumbered with it's BR number which is still pretty clean. I added the HMRS southern lettering before doing any weathering to get this effect.
The light colour streaks (
Having undercoated the Loco in Tamiya grey spary paint, I added the missing rivets to the smokebox. These were done using Archer rivet transfers - basically blobs of plastic on a carrier film. I went for a vague representation rather than trying to represent every single rivet. This isn't the best photo, but if you click to view it full size, then the rivets should be visible.
I'm now in the process of painting the loco, using Vallejo acrylic paints. The main colour is a very dark grey, rathe
I'm not a very "clean" modeller. Some people seem to be able to models that look immaculate even when unpainted. Mine, on the other hand, are covered in blobs of superglue and badly sanded down filler.
I've sprayed the J with a light coat of Tamiya grey, which has exposed all of these rough bits. I'm leaving it to harden overnight, and then I'll make a start on rubbing it down and getting rid of the mess.
I'd normally use red oxide on a loco, but the grey is intended to make it easier to
I started this model last November, and just over 3 months later it's ready for painting, and I missed a month of so of modelling time due to Christmas/New Year/Skiing/amateur Pantomime (stage crew before you ask, not playing the Dame). Given that the I3 is still not finished, after 9 years, I'm impressed by my rate of progress on the J.
Tonight saw it being given a good scrub, and brass parts painted with etch primer.
Next steps are to undercoat and the rub down until I've got
Another update on the J.
Pickups are now fitted, and it runs under it's own power. Despite all the earlier problems with the chassis, it's turned out to be a smooth runner. I'm partway through fitting the usual myriad details - handrails, lamp irons and so on. The curved pipes that run down the side of the boiler were surprisingly difficult to do, an took several attempts to get convincing. On the real locomotives the pipe work was a bit wonky looking in places, and it's difficult to get this
Progress over the last month or so has been slow. I'm not at the stage of adding detail to both locomotives, and there's an awful lot of it.
The J comes with some very nice castings - even the clack valves with their piping were usable. The I3 on the other hand is needing a lot of minor detail scratchbuilding. Luckily I have photos of all sides of 32029 courtesy of the Bluebell Museum's photo service.
The I3 is a mass of pipes, being air and vacuum braked, and has a Westinghouse compress
The wonderfully retro Chiver's instructions (possibly done on a Amstrad PCW?) say 'to allow a finescale model to be made, the mainframes have been etched with limited clearance'. I removed these half etched sections with a file - which proves once and for all that I'm not a finescale modeller.
In fact I had to remove a little bit more (and elongate the bogie pivot hole) to get the chassis through a B6 point. The extra clearance was needed to clear the flanges of the Gibson wheels - these are t
Two updates in two days gives the impression that I'm making steady progress, rather than the odd few hours here and there!
This is the current state of the J class body - the boiler and cab roof are just resting in place for now.
Apart from some flash on one of the cabside, and a wonky cab roof ventilator the parts assembled with the minimum of fettling.
The bogies has also been tackled. It has an etched centre and cast sideframes, not a combination I'd seen before. I'm going to have
After an seemingly endless exercise of carefully opening out the coupling rod holes, the J chassis is now free running and can move under power. The motor is just held in place for now, but it all seems smooth and quiet. That's my ancient Hornby trainset controller from 1984 providing the power.
There's a fair bit of work left to detail the chassis, fit pickups etc, but it's all downhill from now on.
I've spent quite a bit of time on the J this week, but have struggled to get a smooth running chassis. The coupling rods bind for no obvious reason - despite all the usual remedies such as opening out the holes in the rods. I've also checked the wheels are correctly quartered, the chassis is square with all wheels touching the track etc etc.
After a few hours of this, I'm starting to suspect there's something fundamentally wrong with the rods., probably through my hamfisted assembly althoug
I thought I'd start a new blog to record my slightly hamfisted attempts at building 4mm loco kits.
The first victim is a Chiver's SECR J class 0-6-4T. These are one of Harry Wainwright's more obscure classes - there were only five of them, and all were scrapped by 1951. I've heard it claimed they were the last 0-6-4T tanks in Britain (although the type survived in Ireland until 1969 due to the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties' peculiar attachment to them).
When finished it will be 31
