It's been a while since the last blog entry and part of the reason for that has been my having to devote time to a fairly major DIY job at home, which is thankfully now more or less completed.

The previous entry had concluded with a virtually operational chassis, which required detailing.

The brake gear was indeed added at this stage:

By this stage, all the work involved in modifying the Hattons/DJM body to fit the (also modified) Perseverance chassis had been done and in many ways, this now just became another routine chassis building project.

The loco was then given extensive testing on the rolling road:

However, even after all that testing and 'running in', I still wasn't satisfied with the running qualities and I spent a lot of what modelling time I did have, looking at pick up options.

I was also concerned that, having build the chassis 'rigid' (ie. without compensation or springing), I had compromised on the running qualities. It was evident that some kind of springing (or at least adjustment) was required for the rear pony wheels. I also wasn't satisfied with just one set of pick ups on each wheel.

A fairly major problem at the same time was the fact that I had inadvertently got some flux on the 2mm steel shafts that carry the plastic gears in the High Level gearbox. I had thought that I had been sufficiently careful to avoid this and had cleaned them up at the time. The outcome of this error on my part was that the High Level gearbox 'lash up' driving the front axle more or less seized up and was really straining the motor just to move the loco along slowly (and annoyingly jerkily).

As such, the whole motor/gearbox was removed and dismantled and a replacement High Level LoadHauler+ (still at 90:1 gear ratio) was installed on the rear driven axle instead.

By angling the drive extender round behind the gearbox 'tower', I could still keep the motor in more or less the same position and retain the small flywheel. I made sure this time that the previous problem with the steel shafts would not recur.

There was still an annoying and mysterious tight spot, which I eventually traced to one of the brake shoes being too close to the wheel, which with a slight 'wobble' that isn't uncommon with this kind of wheel, was causing the wheel to rub slightly on the brake shoe. A gentle tweak with a small pair of pliers sorted that matter out.

The new motor/gearbox combination now ran nice and smoothly when directly wired to a power source. Pick ups were fitted and tweaked and still I wasn't quite happy with the way the loco ran. It was, by now, considerably better than the original Hattons/DJM chassis, but still not quite what I had hoped for. The problem seemed to be exacerbated with the loco body attached to the chassis, so I felt that more lead weight over the two driving axles might help.

More lead was added to the front of the inside of the side tanks:

I also added a small 'cube' of lead between the frames, located mid-way between the two driven axles and glued to a piece of copper-clad paxolin, glued to the underside of the chassis:

The top-of-the-wheel pick-up arrangement seen in the above two photos proved to be unsatisfactory and has since been changed, whereby the pick ups on the leading driven axle have been removed and that on the rear driven axle and the pony wheels modified to act on the flange, rather than the wheel treads.

The loco was run-in some more on the rolling road and then tested on the layout. Finally, finally I have got it running to my satisfaction and it 'passed the test' of running nice and slowly over all parts of the layout:

The next jobs will be to sort out a few minor things on the loco body, such as permanently attaching the replacement nickel silver front step, removing the Hattons/DJM number plate, putting a thin piece of plasticard to bring the numberplate depression to the same level as the body and then attaching a replacement 247 Developments number plate for 1458 in its place.

The chassis will then be painted and weathered and the loco body weathered.