PDK 47xx part 1
Entry posted by The Fatadder
776 views
One of the last few major locos that I will need for Brent is a 4700, this is intended for use on the perishables express freight, the milk train and the odd passenger train. In other words of the 3 remaining missing locos which are required to perform a full operating cycle, this is the least important (vs the 4300 and Bulldog which are used on far more workings.) The plan had been that I would buy one of the soon to be released Heljan models, however seeing a partially built PDK kit on eBay at the weekend I figured it was worth a shot (and would be a lot more enjoyable than just renumbering the RTR.)
It arrived yesterday, the original builder has done a good job with the build so far (and methodologically crossed off the instructions as he went along making it easy for me to pick up.) The chassis frames (ridged) have been assembled with Markits wheels that run very freely, while the cab and footplate have been soldered together well. I really like this design of kit with a resin cast boiler / firebox taking care of the hard to form parts and etched brass everywhere else, a shame they don’t make a Bulldog or I would be placing an order now.
After studying the parts already completed and having a good read of the instructions I set to work. The first task was to work out how I am going to power the model, the high boiler is a little limiting as to just how much motor can be fitted. Certainly the motor and gearbox which came with the kit were far too long to fit in without losing the lower boiler (a compromise I am not prepared to make), instead they will power my Saint which has a lot more space. After asking for advice on here I have settled for a 14:24 Machimia powering a High Level Roadrunner+ gearbox, both of which were pinched from my Mitchell 43xx which will now need a new gearbox ordering when I finally source a new chassis for it. With this tested, a couple more fittings were needed on the chassis. For some reason rather than use the supplied parts the builder added brass bars fore and aft of the driving wheels. One of these aligns with the mounting nut and needs to be filed and drilled for fitting the body. At the front of the loco there was nothing between the frames by the headstock, neither was there a fitting under the cylinders (lining up with the other fixing point under the steam chest). Fortunately the etched spacers were still in the box and soon soldered in position, I think from the instructions the intention is to solder the cylinders to the chassis (it refers to the lead wheel being inaccessible once slide bars are fitted). Instead I used the part from the rear soldered in place under the cylinders, test fitting the bolt held it all together nicely (and the single bolt between body and chassis appears to be adequate as I had expected.)
I will now paint the chassis before refitting the wheels and gearbox, in preparation for the completion of the cylinders / sidebars. The kit has the standard solder fitting crank pins that I am much less keen on, so I am debating whether I buy a pack of “deluxe” pins as a replacement.
Now it was time to move onto the body, as previously mentioned the cab, footplate and boiler were already built, just leaving one side’s footplate valance to add. I started by removing the remaining footplate fretwork before sweating the valance into place onto the side of the footplate.
With this in place the next job was to glue the boiler into position, this was secured with superglue at one end (and pins at the other) before reinforcing the joints with 5 minute epoxy.
While this was curing it was back to the soldering iron to assemble the cab steps, eventually soldering into place under the cab. The final bit of soldering for the evening was to add the reverser and sandbox linkages. These had to be soldered up from two parts, then soldered onto the footplate. The sandbox linkage was a perfect fit, but the one for the reverser took a lot of fettling in order to get the tabs in the slots.
The plan for this evening is to get most of the details fitted to the loco body, before I make a start on building the tender over the weekend. Of course this means finding some suitable photos to work from, and choosing a locomotive to model. My intention was always to model 4703 given it was a Laira loco, and hence presumably more likely to be seen thrown in on a passenger service during the day. At this point I noticed that 4703 has the shifting valves on the cylinders, while the model has been built with them on the smokebox saddle (and I cannot see any alternate parts in the box). I have so far only managed to find two 1947 images of 47xx, one of 4700 with G W R on tender at Old Oak Common (colour rail) which is no use as it has the same cylinder mounted snifters as 4703, and 4707 with G Crest W at Dawlish (saved from RMWeb and the source photo for Heljan’s model of 4707 in this livery). I may still have another look at the model to see if I can work out how I would attempt to add the snifters to the PDK cylinder wrapper, else it will end up as 4707 I think.
-
5
1 Comment
Recommended Comments
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now