Delph - Other stuff
Entry posted by Dave Holt
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Progress on my Standard Class 2 tank is at a temporary standstill, awaiting the final etched components. In the meantime, I've been fitting the injectors to a model Crab belonging to a good friend.
What I anticipated being a very straight forward detailing exercise proved to require rather more tricky and extensive work to achieve the required outcome. The loco consists of a Bachmann body on a Comet chassis, built to P4 standards. Interestingly, its one of the rotary cam poppet valve fitted examples but I'm not sure whether it's the Lentz or Reidinger type.
The original chassis construction is beautifully neat and rather better than I normally achieve, but lacked the injectors and any of the underneath piping which I normally include. Furthermore, when I got down to it, I found that the brake arm supports under the cab had been fitted as per the totally wrong Comet kit instructions (located just inboard of the main frames instead of close together near the centre line), which resulted in one of the brackets being just where the exhaust injector should fit. The pick-ups on the rear wheels are also rather close to the injector and piping positions but I managed to live with that.
Anyway, the first thing was to move the brackets inboard to the correct spacing (whilst still leaving access to the rear body fixing screw). Easier said than done. The brackets were found to be "L" shaped and soldered into the chassis side frames and what appeared to be a frame spacer was just fitted between the brackets. As a result the whole assembly came away from the frames in three pieces upon unsoldering. Definitely not what i expected. So, a new, full width frame spacer had to be made and fitted, to which the slightly shortened brake support brackets could be fitted.
Of various options available, I opted to use Brassmasters lost wax brass castings for the injectors.
The exhaust injector, together with all its associated piping (various diameters of brass wire) was mounted on a removable base plate which is attached to the new frame spacer with a 14 BA screw.
The live steam side was a bit more tricky as the injector and overflow are fixed behind the cab steps (part of the loco body), whereas the piping is attached to the frame spacer, again using a 14 BA screw. Unfortunately, the Brassmasters casting is the opposite hand to the type normally fitted to LMS locos, so the positions of the steam supply and overflow had to be reversed by cutting off the existing flanges and providing new parts on the other side of the body.
Getting are the bits of wire bent to the right shapes and correctly located whilst soldering in position required quite a few abortive efforts before final success was achieved. Praise be to Blutak!
Here are a few photos showing the end result.
Three shots from underneath, showing the two injectors, pipes and representation of the water hoses from the tender,
And a side-on shot of the fireman's side, showing the exhast injector.
Thoughts now turning to completion of my Ivatt Class 2 2-6-2 tank, also a Bachmann body on a Comet chassis. These locos were the basis for the later BR Standard versions, so lots of similarity to the loco recently featured. Plenty to do on it to keep me off the streets and out of pubs - well, some of the time, anyhow!
Dave.
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