Hello, sorry for the break, been having a bit of a rest.

Much less modelling than usual but the J10 now has its full complement of splashers and the body has been put on one side while further work has been carried out on the chassis.

Before the body was started the chassis had reached running stage but without the CSBs in place. I wanted the wheels to be in their highest possible position in the chassis so that when the body was fitted, clearance could be maintained within the splashers and then when the springs were added there would be good clearance and negligible chance of the wheel tyres shorting to the body, the chance of the axleboxes reaching the top of the slots being pretty remote once the CSBs were in place. That certainly worked but it also threw up two disadvantages.

The first of these to show up was that adding the CSBs introduced some tight spots in the running and I spent several hours tweaking these away. The chassis is now running really sweetly. Forward direction is certainly better than reverse but reverse is still nice and smooth, it does however run slightly slower backwards and also takes minutely more current. I put this down to the motor having rather more armature slop than is usual with Mashimas, this probably causing a minute change in the mesh of the gears as the armature moves up and down its bearings with direction change. However running is good enough as to not merit any attempt to limit the armatures end float.

When I was happy with the running, the body was mounted on the chassis and this showed that I had been much to generous with the running plate’s wheel slots and while this was OK for the main splashers, those troublesome mini-splashers at the cab spectacle plate came to the fore once more. I had found one of the reasons that I could not fit correct sized min-splashers, - the slots in both running plate and in spectacle plate were both much too large. It’s easy to make a small hole larger but not so easy to make a big hole smaller!

I had to add patches of 0.007†brass shim in an ‘L’ shape but with the angle gently curved (around a 2mm rod); the vertical section covered the excess of hole in the spectacle plate & the horizontal bit covered the hole in the running plate, forward of the spectacle plate. Filler was used to regain the front and top surfaces. A trial fit of chassis to body and a run on ‘Bowton’s Yard’ quickly showed sufficient wheel space. The filler presented problems of soldering-on any brass or nickel-silver versions of the min-splashers so I fashioned solid splashers from ‘Milliput’. So the body is looking OK and the chassis is running very well. I need now to start adding the fiddly detail bits but as all these are purely cosmetic progress should be fairly quick.

That said I have decided on a short vacation from the J10 and I have started another batch build of wagon kits; this time it’s five Ratio kits of the BR Banana van. Because these are BR wagons they will normally only run on ‘Wheegram Sidings’ (my EM layout which actually started this blog!!!! Can’t remember when the blog said anything about Wheegram!). However I build all wagons and coach kits to S4 wheel standards. If I need them for EM then most will easily swop wheel sets and if they have S4 clearance then they are OK with EM wheel sets.

The prototype build is almost complete, but as is usual there is a lot of ‘Booth’ added to the Ratio. Because they are likely to be EM only, (my other layouts are late LNER but pre-BR) I decided against springing but I have taken great care to achieve parallel axles and to have slight axle slop. The prototype has literally been thrown through the fairly complicated point-work on Bowton’s Yard without mishap.

More, perhaps with pics next time.

TTFN

Dave