The first new loco on Hafod Las’ roster since the interlude is a Single Fairlie. “Shurely shome mishtake?†I hear you cry, “You’ve already got one of those, and what an unmitigated disaster it turned out to be!†Well, you’d be right, but so am I: the new loco is one of the original North Wales Narrow Gauge Railways Single Fairlies – I’ve diversified from my original Ffestiniog Railway interests (admittedly not by very far) and have started on some of the stock from the WHR and its predecessors.

If I’m entirely honest, the kit was more acquired as a test-bed for my whitemetal soldering skills – having never used low-melt solder before and remembering the hash that I made of brass soldering on my initial attempts, I decided that I should get something rather less expensive than the £120 Parkside Linda kit complete with hand-built RTR chassis on which to hone my skills. The Chivers Finelines kit of Snowdon Ranger fitted the bill of both being inexpensive and something that would have quite feasibly run on my might-have-been NWNGR based layout. An Arnold 0-6-0 chassis was duly purchased from the fount of all tat that is eBay, the loco body kit was bought from Railex 2010, and both then promptly sat in a box for 10 months.

Step forward to March 2011 and the advent of some nice weather (and the impending arrival of Linda). A variable temperature soldering iron was purchased, along with some 100° and 70° solder and the appropriate flux and neutralising rinse. I say ‘nice weather’ as until I was used to low-melt soldering with the associated nasty chemicals I intended to do it with as much ventilation as was humanly possible without having the air intake for a turbojet sat next to me, and as far away from anything on the inventory of my rented house as I could get… well, you should all know how clumsy I am by now.

Reasonable success was, surprisingly, encountered when soldering the combined footplate, tank sides and cab sides together. The Chivers kit required very little fettling to get it to fit well, and the two sides were soldered up quickly (and squarely – rather surprisingly for me) to the front footplate spacer and the rear bunker sheet. The latter did need some filling to give a uniform depth across the back of the bunker (with the centre piece being recessed slightly) but that may have been down to my early ineptitude with the soldering iron.

It took me a couple of attempts to get the measure of low-melt soldering, eventually being solved by increasing the temperature of the iron slightly, using more flux and generally by being quicker. Due to the size of the castings, they dissipate the heat from the soldering iron rather quickly, and as I was reluctant to hold the iron in one place for too long lest I find a molten pool of whitemetal where once a side tank sat I frequently ended up with solder that looked like badly-set icing. I also found that the soldering iron cooled down rather quickly, and rapidly left me with something that was incapable of melting solder unless I let it re-heat for 30 seconds or so – the subsequent problem being that the melting point of low-melt solder increases once it has been fused to whitemetal. The solution which I found to this was to simply tack the pieces in place and then run a fillet along when I was happy with the positioning. However, I’m sure that I’m not the first person to come up with that idea!

With a square(ish) arrangement of tank sides, cab sides and front, and bunker back set up, I then started my inevitable deviation from the original kit. The cast blanking plates in the cab doorways were removed, and possibly I should have done this before soldering up the sides to enable easier access and make the hackery a little neater. However, the remaining thin piece of cast whitemetal that remained on each side attaching the bunker to the tanks had a few hairy moments before the cab floor was soldered into place and, on reflection, perhaps I did the right thing by soldering it up first rather than detaching the rear of the loco accidentally!

The second cosmetic deviation was the removal of the inside of the ‘top’ of the cast coal bunker, leaving only the flared lip around the outside – the piece was soldered in place first before the centre was removed to make sure that I didn’t irreparably damage another bit. This will allow me to give the impression of a hollow coal bunker rather than a few pieces of coal plonked on top of a couple of planks. Of course, this would now necessitate the addition of a lower-half cab backsheet so that it wouldn’t be quite as obvious that the crew should, by all rights, be knee-deep in coal!

The next change was rather more than cosmetic, and nearly resulted in yet another of my trademark catastrophes. The more that I looked at the Arnold chassis with its pizza cutter flanges and no connecting rods, the more I thought “even I can do better than this… probably.†So, without further ado (and a brief hiatus in construction to await its arrival) a Dapol 45xx chassis was summoned to chez Beardybloke. Now, the 45xx chassis is a little larger than its steamroller-wheeled antecedent and a little higher, so some judicious filing, milling, scraping, gouging and praying was required to both the chassis block and the inside of the body kit. Once again, I can’t lay claim to this idea as my own, having acquired it from the Bethania blog. The one disadvantage is that the coupling rod is on the centre driver rather than the rear (and the wheels are spoked rather than disc) but, frankly, I can live with that for now – at least until the misplaced perfectionism kicks in again.

Unfortunately (and predictably) I rather over-thinned the inside of the boiler just in front of the cab and managed to make it look like a well-abused Barry wreck – except shiny instead of rusty. Thankfully, a bit of filler and some filing seems to have hidden this (despite it getting knocked through at one point) but I suspect that a coat of primer will show how bad it really looks. The state that the loco was in at this point can be seen below:

Note that at this point, I hadn’t actually removed the material from the bunker top, but it can hopefully be seen why a backsheet to the bunker will be necessary!

With disaster averted and the chassis fitting inside the body, the boiler and tank-top piece was soldered to the assembly, as well as the tank fronts and smokebox. A very brief test run was undertaken on the one bit of the new layout that was laid at the time and didn’t require any more wiring than a couple of leads poked under the rails – and it worked. Huzzah! As an added bonus all of the weight is carried on the powered ‘bogie’ rather than the trailing bogie, so the loco should hopefully have a reasonable amount of adhesion.

Bearing in mind the rapidly increasing length of this post, and mindful of the fact that you’re all probably falling asleep, I shall leave you here with the mental picture of a chimneyless, domeless, bogieless loco trundling up-and-down a short curve of track on a bare board. Not exactly the first train on the layout, possibly more a well-used contractors’ loco! Still, at least you got to read about another of my numerous cock-ups, and have learned a valuable lesson – if whitemetal looks like it’s bubbling outwards with no heat applied, it’s probably because you’ve made it paper thin…