Quick photo following fitting of handrails and a quick coat of Carplan grey primer, looks quite nice 😁
note top of drive unit poking through the hole in the coal space. The shell is not quite sitting down as well as it should, need to take a wee bit more off the top of the tender weight then it will be fine.
Will start fettling the loco body over the weekend, first issue is that the casting has the blower duct/tunnel on the left hand side of the boiler that was
I'm currently doing a Crosti 9F for someone and thought it would be good to blog the build. It's my first go with a resin kit too.
Firstly thanks to Chris at Golden Arrow for his persitance getting a kit to me through the Royal Mail, hope you can use the second kit sent (received broken - thanks postie!) somehow ....
I thought I'd start with the tender to easy myself in. Castings cleaned up easily, one or two air bubbles to fill with Humbrol Model Filler but nothing too o
got the lettering done on the other side this lunchtime, so 'tis done
Going to leave it for a few weeks for the transfers to "set" then I will start the weathering. I'm going to use a combination of the techniques described by David Spencer in Hornby Mag Issue 6 and bounce spraying the underframe. I'll take it slowly as this little wagon has took a lot of time so don't want to mess it up in the weathering stage 😃
HMRS transfers arrived in usual speedy fashion so here's the wagon nearly finished in it's pristine Summat Colliery PO livery
There's a bit more black painting to do then it's going to have a nice photshoot before I attack it with a fibreglass pencil 😏
It's number 88 - a nod towards the days when I was involved with a motorcycle race team and club, we always used #88 whenever possible (two fat ladies .....)
One can (well, not all of it!) of Halfords Ford radiant red later and we have this:
The intention is to do a "Summat Colliery" version of this little wagon from my childhood home town
Must get an order off to HMRS for some black shaded lettering etc, it's starting to be quite a pricey wagon 🤑
Basic construction is done on the Parkside wagon. I've fitted the Bachmann NEM pocket mounts - took more fiddling than I expected to get the height right. I ended up carving off the vertical projections off the mounts and then cutting back the underframe bracing until the correct height was achieved - silly me for expecting that they would just fit 😏
Here's a pic of the underframe prior to priming
and here's it resplendent in red oxide primer
Picked this kit up at Wycrail along with some Bachmann NEM pocket coupling mounts. The wagon will hopefully end up as a severely distressed wagon on Summat Colliery used to ferry loco coal from the screens to the coaling stage.
Anyway, following half an hour's work this lunchtime we have this
buffers and couplings yet to fit, will rob a couple of NEM pocket couplings off Summat's 16 tonners to position the pocket mounts. I want to use the NEM pocket couplings
It’s all built. Will do the painting etc later in the year when I’m feeling better. I’ve also got a TS and a TF to build too, so makes sense to do all the paintwork at the same time
Ok, the plan to use ndm/pacer couplings on the dev coach was a non starter. They were too long by about 5mm to give a consistent distance with the other cars. Here’s the dev coach to ndm compared with the tgf…..
So the tgf couplings received a 2.5mm hole drilled as close to the blade end as possible
and then shaped to approximate the ends. Here’s an untouched one and one I’ve attacked next to it. A lot shorter
Fi
So seeing as folks will be getting their new Hornby versions in their 7 car packs next week I thought it high time I made one to go with my 1980 set
looking at the tgs it seemed that with a few cuts the under frame could be fabricated from two examples, kinda like this
so out came the razor saw
and they go together like this
The body shell was used to hold the under frame in place and
So another stay in hospital gave me the time to get the lining finished on the 9MT so here's the right hand side completed.
Only thing left is weathering, glazing and real coal added to the bunker.
Loco is now back together and sitting in a modified Triang 9F box for safe keeping until I can find the time to fire up the airbrush.
This has been bugging me for some time. The loco has been running a triang princess one with current spec standard 4 4-6-0 wheels. Main issue is those LMS footsteps. Also there was no representation of the sliding plate between the wheels.
I had a spare 9F front bogie left over from a previous project and of course a couple of the GBL rears from the donor 4MTs. So here's the bits.
After a quick go with the hacksaw
And I
Nothing else for it, the lining had to be started. Ease myself in, do the boiler bands first
After this the problems started. I had forgotten that the HMRS/PC Models sheet 22 was originally drawn for LNWR locos not BR standards. The shapes really do not match the later locos. To compound this I'd used most of the useful bits off the two spare sheets I had on the last loco, which would have been the 2-8-2 Neverwazza. An order in is with Wizard Models for a couple more she
Things have moved on a bit since the last update. The body fabrication has been completed and the base coat of satin black applied. Buffer beams repainted (which are Hornby class 31 for info) and the body fittings replaced. Nothing left now other than tackle the lining
The chassis has also had black paint applied to the fabricated bits and so I could do an (almost) final assembly the cylinders had their red lining applied and satin varnished. Just need to get a Zimo sound decoder an
I know it's been a while, but the weather has been good so gardening and mucking about with my car took priority.
Finally I have made the extended tank tops and filed them down to fit. First photo shows the tops glued together and a card template I made to help with the fitting to the much wider 9F boiler.
A large file was used to knock them down to size - not one of those tiny little things that we modellers mostly prefer. Here's a shot of the body
As I've mentioned before, I bought the 9F donor knowing it was on the Mazak rot list. It was sold without the tender so there was a good chance that the tender chassis had suffered, but I might have got away with the motor fixings.
No
The tell tale signs were there and so I ordered a few sets from Hornby for a couple of quid each. This is what I found when I took the front one off
As I said, expected and a cheap fix thankfully. They were co
Once the bunker was fixed in place the underside of the loco needed to be sorted. Main problem is that the main body fixing on the 9F is through the bottom of the chassis into a boss under the cab floor. A floor that is no longer there as we are using the 4MT cab.
After a lot of thought the following pic shows what I came up with
A section of 4MT floor under the cab area with the 9F boss turned down in height and bonded on, with extra sections from the
A class 9 loco with class 4 coal capacity was never going to work, also the twin axle rear bogie kicked out beyond the rear buffer beam. The end of the bunker was cut off where the footstep indentations were on the bunker tops and then slits cut to separate the sides from the coal load and supporting structures. Two scrap bits of plastic were cut to the right size to splay out the sides so they were parallel and more supports glued in to hold them. A steel rule clamped to one side helped to get
So, one loco drive Hornby 9F, plus two GBL 4MTs were attacked with a razor saw.
There's a lot of bits....
Here's all that is left of the 9F body
And I've cut and shut two sections of tank and cab from the two GBL Class 4s to make this
Also been experimenting with a Triang Princess bogie for the rear. If this works ill replace the wheels with larger more prototypical ones and this will set how long t
A spoof photoshopped photo posted on Facebook has coincided with me having a Triang Evening Star with a disintegrated tender frame going for spares. So ladles and Jellyspoons, we have the BR Standard 9MT Tank Engine
Black outline is the stock 9F, red the 4MT Tank. Green is the extended tanks and bunker (well it is a 9F) which also moves the rear pony to a more suitable place. The blue line is where the bottom of the tank front needs to be raised to clear the weighshaft a
This week I have been looking at a NRM Limited Edition Schools class 925 Cheltenham. It was sent to me along with several other DCC locos as a non-runner and the body fixing screw was loose. Problem being it had been packed inside its box without the inner tray, wrapped in a small amount of bubble wrap. Clearly it had moved around in the box quite a bit during postman's playtime (sent Special Delivery) and this is what I found when I unwrapped it ...
After a
What to do when your 13 year old takes a shine to an old Atlas loco at the Mansfield Model Railway show. Prize out the Kaydees and glue in some spare NEM pockets. He likes the big old style couplings so we have standardised on them. Plenty of spare small Bachmann style ones for me 🙂
Well, you'd have thought I'd have spotted that there was a short circuit way before I got to wiring up the turntable - HND Electrical & Electronic Engineering pah!
Of course having the two entries to the turntable and the desk permanently live means a dead short when you align it to one or the other entry roads. Something had to be done, I thought about insulated joints etc but decided to remove the problem altogether by making the longer curved entry into a siding and removing t
