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About this blog

Reports on my 2mm finescale modelling of the Highland Railway in the Edwardian era. I'm moving over from Blogspot (http://ayeates2mm.blogspot.com).

Entries in this blog

Scrap Tank - cylinders

Today I made the cylinders. Rummaging through my brass stock I found two concentric tubes, one whose inside diameter was a nice sliding fit on the 0.5mm piston rods, and another that fitted around it and had 2mm outside diameter. These two tubes will allow me to make a (coarse) representation of the housing/bearing where the piston rod enters. I had calculated that the whole thing needed to be about 4mm diameter, allowing 0.25mm for an outer wrapper (looking at prototype photos, it look like thi
antyeates1983

antyeates1983

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Scrap Tank - valve gear

This is the first time I've attempted outside motion, so apologies to the experts. I've concluded that it's rather small and fiddly, but no more so than other fine details.   First off, I drilled, sawed and filed up the connecting rods in the same way as the coupling rods, from two sheets of 15-thou nickel silver sweated together. Here you see them once the paper pattern has been removed. They're shape is supposed to be a simple approximation of the real thing. As you can see in this e
antyeates1983

antyeates1983

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Scrap Tank - coupling rods

Having drilled the rods (15 thou nickel silver) at an earlier stage, I then shaped them while still soldered together. For this I stuck on the template with double-sided tape, cut roughly to shape with the piercing saw, then began a reasonably laborious process of filing to shape. Always being very careful not to remove too much material! I find the most useful files for this are a triangular one (to get into sharp corners) and a flat one with one "blind" edge. I held them in the vice for doing
antyeates1983

antyeates1983

3

Scrap Tank - mounting the motor

Having said that the next post would be about the coupling rods, this will have to wait as I have been working instead on mounting the motor. I'm using a 7mm diameter coreless one from eBay, which has no built-in way of fixing it in place. So after some pondering I decided to make a collar that can be tightened around the motor to hold it. This started as a length of scrap 0.25mm nickel silver from the sprue of an etched kit. It was easily formed into a circle using a brass bar in the vice with
antyeates1983

antyeates1983

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Scrap Tank - gears and wheels

Here the gears and driven axle are in place in the chassis. The muff is reamed out to be a fairly loose push fit so that I can test the assembly. The wheels will eventually be glued in after painting etc. Some time was spent filing more metal off the chassis block so that nothing was catching. I've also countersunk the heads of the fixing screws here to make them as flush as possible to the side frames, not least because they will be behind the front and rear wheels. The crankpins had been glued
antyeates1983

antyeates1983

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Scrap Tank - shaping the chassis

Having drilled the holes in the frames, I stuck on a template again and cut around it in time honoured fashion with a piercing saw:   Files were then used to finish the shape. As you can see, these include crude representations of the springs (just shadows behind the wheels, really). Shaping (and thinning) of the guard irons will be left until later. The extra material at either end was to facilitate clamping during the drilling operations but shouldn't be needed any longer.
antyeates1983

antyeates1983

2

Scrap Tank - drilling the frames

Construction began by preparing two lengths of 15 thou nickel-silver for the coupling rods and two pieces of 0.64mm brass for the frames. In the photo below you see the latter stuck together with double-sided tape.   It is critical to get the holes in the rods the same distance apart as the holes in the frames, so I temporarily soldered the two pieces of nickel-silver together and to one of the frames. (I didn't want to rely on two layers of double-sided tape). In this photo I scribed
antyeates1983

antyeates1983

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Scrap Tank - drawings

During the enforced shutdown I've started work on a loco to shunt my 2mm Diamond Jubilee Challenge entry: a Drummond 0-6-0T "scrap" tank, so called because they were put together by Lochgorm works from leftover bits of earlier engines. I decided to "borrow" the wheels and gears that were earmarked for a Barney 0-6-0. That loco will have an etched body and chassis, for which I have nearly finished the artwork. For a change, I decided that this one would be completely scratchbuilt.   My
antyeates1983

antyeates1983

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