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Recycling.....


Maurice Hopper

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The beginnings of a little something in recycled tinplate.  Well, at least the body will be recycled.   Other stuff has been to hand for sometime including the now rather depleted collection of Golden Syrup tinplate.  Trouble is that I stopped taking it with my porridge to help keep the weight down....  It gets complicated this purchase, use, reuse/recycle ....   did I need the Golden Syrup in the first place?

 

The Golden Syrup tin does not render a plate quite wide enough for the 100mm required for the footplate so it has been made from two pieces of a biscuit tin lid.  Both GS and Fox's use 0.3 mm plate, although the GS possible has more paint on it as it is actually 0.31mm.

 

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Cutting out for the motor and the battery tray.  Same of the printing has been removed to allow the side valance and strengthening plates to be soldered in place.

 

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All the electrical stuff will be mounted on the running gear - batteries in the tray, radio chip on the bracket with the aerial up a plastic exhaust pipe and the on/off switch in a hole drilled in front lefthand corner of the Roundhouse frames.

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Very impressive work Maurice.

 

Makes me think it would be fun to build a loco body from similar materials, but leaving it unpainted. Like African soda can cars (Those are now mostly made for tourists and export. The proper 'wire cars' live on here and there, and are a testament to human ingenuity).

 

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Mikkel,  

 

Strangely enough, I thought exactly that while working on this yesterday.  Perhaps it was inspired by just having seen some pictures of new Stagecoach bus liveries that have bits of the 'beach ball' logo randomly applied to a single body colour.

 

However, I have compromised this idea and will leave the inside of the body unpainted to show it pedigree.  I surprises me how well the footplate looks in the pictures after a clean up with some scotch bright soft abrasive pads.....  almost as good a nickel-silver.

 

Thanks for your wide view and comments.   All part of the human drive to make things!!

 

Maurice

 

 

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Edited by Maurice Hopper
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One could say " Very tasty work" Maurice.

 

Good use of the tins and another interesting project which I will be watching.

 

It reminded me of my old metalwork teacher which asked us to bring in used tins for a project that we had to design and build. Mine turned out to be a tinplate boat hull into which I adapted an old Mamod steam engine to power the tinplate paddles. Such a useful material and very malleable.

 

G

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Anyone attempting a scratch build in brass/nickel silver etc. is always interesting, but to see what you`re doing in tinplate is something else.

I remember my father taking me to a model engineering exhibition put on by Aldershot Model  Engineering Society way back in the 1950`s and seeing a great number of tinplate models on display, quite  a large proportion of them being ships. Seeing that at the age I was fired my interest in model making, settling on railways which is still as strong at 77.

Great to see your progress so far.

Jim

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Jim,

 

Just a little more done over the weekend....

 

I find it very helpful to make card mockups of the different sections before cutting and folding the tinplate.  Here the front bonnet is nearly complete while the card mockup in place for the back bonnet.  The rounded top corners of the bonnet are pieces of 8mm diameter brass tube.  This gives the structure some extra strength and solves the problem of making a tight radius curve in the tinplate.  

 

Of the tools in front, the bending bars have been the most useful on this project.  The plate is marked out and scored with a Stanley blade before being place in the bars and folded using a a piece if ply or a steel ruler to make the fold straight.  After a couple backwards and forwards folds the piece you what snaps off.

 

The piercing saw, with its very fine blade has some uses where a 'folding' is not possible, like taking out the centre of the footplate.

 

I also remember tinplate in the past.  I seem to have a recollection of going to an Epsom and Ewell exhibition (when it was held in the Epsom baths hall out of season) and seeing some Gauge 0 thin walled, Southern Railway Maunsell coaches that had been built of .... you have guest it - Golden Syrup tins.  The maker must have had a sweet tooth or a lot of friends collecting tins as these must have taken at least half a dozen tins for the sides alone.

 

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Edited by Maurice Hopper
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Hi Maurice, Nice to see someone trying the recycle tin can again, I actually tried using tin cans back in the early 1980's after reading an article by iain Rice, who had also used recycled tins in his own loco builds. For me, it lasted only one loco, some tins are produced from very thin material and a good supply of sticky plaster's are required with the very sharp edges produced when cutting with tin snips. On the good side though, you get some natural rusting on the area's of exposed steel.  If it works for you, then that's really great.

 

Pete

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