I'm happy to say that, aside from a couple of details, 'King Edward VII' is now finished as (s)he appeared for six months in 1924.
Much of the last week has been spent getting the tender painted and lined to my satisfaction and I think it is just about there.
Now for the next project...
With the locomotive now practically complete, attention shifted to the tender.
With using a Hornby Patriot for the chassis, the intention had always been to use a tender drive unit for this model, so a Hornby 8F tender was bought. I had been expecting to be able to use only the motor and chassis from this, and to have to completely scratchbuild the tender tank, however comparison with a scale drawing suggested that this may not be the case.
The tender chassis itself is around 4mm too
Another month crawls past, and with it more work.
This time however there are pictures to show!
It really does feel like I'm on the home stretch now, and I can't make my mind up if it has been a labour of love or (more probably) sheer brute pigheadedness that I won't be beaten by an old whitemetal kit...
Anyway, this is the state of play as of this morning. I managed to get the wheels wired up to the drawbar at last, and found some old Hornby safety valves and a whistle in one
More slow progress...
Having gotten to the point of having a decent rolling chassis, I made the frankly unwelcome discovery that in changing the wheels I had completely fouled up the pickups. The original chassis has cast metal wheels, and the chassis block is electrically live, but the new wheels have metal tyres and plastic centres.
So what I had to do was to buy a pickup block from a later Patriot chassis, and I was able to glue this directly to the bottom of the cast block (of cour
Last time (over a month ago- really?) I introduced the thinking behind my replacing my current compound Jersey Lily.
The first thing to do was to introduce the Patriot chassis to the body and to make notes of where to cut. There was a fairly large lump to remove from the front of the chassis and another hefty piece to remove from the back, so it was out with the dremel and, over the course of a few evenings, these areas were cut away and discarded. I now had a chassis block that would fit
Last year I bought a completed McGowan Models LNER C4, and it rather threw the inadequacies of my hackbashed C5 'King Edward VII' into sharp relief.
I had already decided that something had to be done about the compound's chassis- I had bought a Hornby 'Patriot' chassis to replace the existing hacked-about B12 running gear- but a scheme to rebuild the loco below the running plate was shelved whilst I considered how to proceed. ,
A few months later a whitemetal C4 body came up on ebay an
I'm pleased to say that the rebuilding effort of this model is finished- and what a beauty she turns out to be:
The finishing touches were the numberplates (custom etched by Narrow Planet, and highly recommended- well worth the wait), some beading around the front spectacle plate (touched in using brass paint on a Phillips' head screwdriver) and coal.
Well, after a few weeks of almost glacial progress, the open third is finished.
I underestimated how much work would be involved with this conversion; my previous Robinson stock being repaints and detailing of LMS period I carriages led me to think that this would be a quick little project. Wrong!
I left off last time with the bodywork largely finished and the interior not even begun.
I re-used the floor from the donor carriage, cutting off the compartment walls and smoothing down
I've also been working on the open third, finishing off the bodywork (the major bits of it at least).
This largely comprised adding ventilators above the doors and the large picture windows, and then on half of those windows adding a strip about 1/3 of the way down from the top, and then 'something' between this strip and the top of the window. The drawing I'm following is ambivalent about whether this 'something' is a solid mass of a series of tiny window slits. So I went for the easier o
I think we're about done here....
I'm sold on the idea of making my own transfers. This looks so much neater and more like what I had in mind when I set out to model an 11B.
As I feared it might, the printer had a bit of a moment when printing and so the transfers were only about 95% the size they needed to be.... I had to deal with this by cutting each one in half and then accepting a bit of a fudge in the middle; this was preferable to the transfer being 2mm out at either t
Just a short post tonight....
I was (and still am) quite happy with how the lining finally turned out on #1042. However I'm convinced I can improve still further on it- specifically around the cab and the splashers.
I don't think I can go any finer with paintpens, and although I have a bow lining pen its ways have always been something of a dark art to me.
A few months ago I'd bought a few sheets of white waterslide paper, so I thought I might be able to create some homemade linin
And so onto the 2015 build programme.
First off is a 56' open third, built at Dukinfield in 1911 and drawn up in Volume III of Great Central.
In keeping with the other carriages in my rake of 1911 stock, the donor vehicle was a Mainline/ Bachmann LMS period I composite. This scales up to about 57' in length, so is (unlike my other 1911 stock) pretty much bang-on for a conversion.
The first thing I did was to copy George Dow's drawing to 4mm scale on squared paper (the use of thi
So, after a break for Christmas and the New Year, I've pretty much finished GCR #1042, with the exception of the brass beading to the spectacle plate and the numberplates, which are on order.
The lining is much finer this time around and the paint finish much closer to what I wanted. I'm happy to chalk this one up as a success.
After a few hours' work on the model this weekend I've managed to add coal rails to the tender (scratchbuilt from lengths of plastic rod, plastic sheet and paper), the boiler bands and the outside lining to the tender panels.
These photographs I've tried to get roughly the same angle as I did the previous three...
John Quick's excellent book on GCR loco liveries has been an absolute goldmine of information for this model. I can see that with the number of locos I'm plannin
These last few weeks I have been quietly working on rebuilding my Great Central 11B. The original model was 'good' but I was convinced I could do 'better'.
What finally convinced me to do it was two things. Firstly I found Narrow Planet will custom etch GCR numberplates, and secondly in the E M Johnstone GCR loco volumes there is a photograph of the real no.1042 as she appeared in 'late GCR days' (post 1920) and there are a couple of differences:
1. Ross pop valves instead of the more
Here is the list of projects I have planned for 2015....
- LNER class C5 'King Edward VII' as she appeared between April and September 1924. (GCR livery, LNER number).
- LNER class B4. Two models- one in 1922 Great Central black and one in 1923 LNER green.
- LNER class B2 'City of Lincoln' in Great Central green (as she appeared August 1922- February 1924).
- LNER class B8 'Sutton Nelthorpe'.
- LNER class D11 'Jutland' as she appeared March 1924 (GCR livery, LNER num
After a month of being suspiciously quiet, I think it is time to talk about what has been going on in 'the works'.
The complete rake of 5 clerestory carriages has been comprehensively rebuilt (I covered the work this involves in an earlier post). It is well worth the effort I think and much improved by now being the right colour (!) and being fitted with kadee couplers rather than the horrible massive tension locks.
The fourth carriage in my GCR mainline rake has also been reteaked- t
On to the next project then.
Rebuilding some old clerestory carriages....
I built these late last year/ early this year and ended up with a set of five carriages, all looking like this:
Typically, no sooner had I finished them then I found a better way of representing the teak finish. I was also more than a little annoyed by the massive couplings on each carriage; leaving a 1.5-inch gap between each coach (put another way, this was a scale 8 feet. Put differently, it added six
Finished!
The cruel camera aside, I'm quite pleased with it.
What I am doing at the moment, aside from drawing up a list of projects for next year, is slowly buying up the more expensive bits of trackwrok required for a small shed scene diorama and (and this I think is quite exciting) gradually going about removing the trainset couplings from my passenger locos and carriages and replacing them with closer-to-scale Buckeye couplers. So far my rake of clerestory stock (5 carriages)
This last week has been spent mainly on finishing the paint job and doing the lining.
The loco footsteps still need doing!
This last photo is pretty much a mirror image of the photo of the original loco that inspired the model in the first place (which I shall post when the model is finished).
After I had finished the loco lining I came to the decision that the Revell 'leaf green' enamel alone does not make for a convincing reproduction of LNER apple green; it is to
Getting there; indeed nearly finished:
A cab roof was made up from cardboard tube, rolled with a rolling pin to the correct radius.
Safety valve covers were fabricated from a sheet of 0.5mm plastic; two laminations for the base and three for the covers; with a length of thin wire glued around the top edge to form a fairing.
This same thin wire was used for the cab handrails and the smokebox door dart.
I think that the largest job still to do now, if you ignore the paintin
Still slowly plodding along with this!
She's now gained the coaming around the cab cutouts and a tender.
The tender is a Triang 2P/ 4F tender which I've cut down to tank top level then laminated around with 0.5mm plastic sheet to build up a new tank 20mm in height. Some 0.5mm sheet was then cut into 1mm strips and laid down on top of this, and given a liberal smothering of filler to suggest the flare to the tender top. Once a rudimentary interior had been built up out of mor
The pace has slowed down a lot over the last month or so (not that that is entirely a bad thing).
Work has been getting done on the D6, just not a lot of it!
Anyway I've finally managed to get the splashers and boiler to my liking and primed so from here on in (at least until I reach the lining stage) it should be fairly easy, for a given value of 'easy'.
I ran out of model filler a few weeks ago and it was only in the last week I was able to buy some more. The new
Finally some progress actually worth reporting!
I found a spare 2P chassis in my bits box so I decided to use that instead of my scratchbuilt chassis, and when it comes to the body I've added new splashers and cabsides and some brass handrail knobs.
I'm also experimenting with three link couplings- homemade from brass wire and bits of Hornby tension lock couplings- as the trainset couplings really don't do anything for me.
Perfect? No. Better than tension locks? I thin
Work is progressing slowly with 'Hector'- in part this is because I'm using gloss paints for the model. Ordinarily I use matt or satin finishes but with this one being that much larger than my usual creations I felt that it would benefit from a gloss finish. Which in turn means that the paints take that much longer to dry and set (the red on the frames taking two or three days to cure properly).
I'm starting to get a good idea of how he'll look when completed!
