Nick Mitchell

I haven't posted much about anything here for ages - mostly because I haven't been doing much of anything. However, after leaving it to languish for a year, I recently revisited the L&Y-built Rectank. Having solved most of the problems with this model (at least in theory) I found myself contemplating the lovely Stephen Harris designed bogies: The one problem I had left un-solved was how to fix them to the wagon with the brass drive bushes that they were designed for. The hole in the bush is a nice fit over a 12BA bolt, so I needed to contrive a means of connecting one of these with the underframe. With an appropriately sized drill bit twiddled by hand, and a lot of care, i opened out the hole in the wagon bolster to accommodate a 12BA nut: The nut was screwed onto the end of a cocktail stick and soldered in place. The cocktail stick both prevented solder entering the threads, and acted as a handle to make sure the nut was at the correct height and also that the bolt would end up perpendicular to the chassis. Because the brass bush is quite chunky, it allows a lot of vertical movement of the bogie. I added some bolsters from Nickel Silver rod for the top of the bogie to rest on, and set the ride height of the wagon appropriately. With the bush screwed up tight, there is still just enough clearance for the bogie to rock fore and aft... almost as though it was designed to be the perfect size and not requiring further washers/packing. On the track, I found that the wheel flanges were just rubbing against the chassis cross members nearest the bogies. in the picture below, which shows one bogie bolted in place, you can see where I had to file notches in the cross member to guarantee free movement: The wagon can be seen below finally sitting on its bogies. It rides very nicely. Amazingly, considering the passage of time, the little collars I'd made to centre the buffers in their over-sized holes were still in the Pringles lid on my workbench where I'd left them, and I was able to fit the buffers and three remaining brackets for the screw jacks as I'd previously worked out. But what about the screw jacks themselves? The etched fret contains very tiny hand-wheels, which looked as though they would be useable. I found some 16BA bolts which, incredibly, were able to be screwed into the holes in the brackets! Perfect. In my watchmaker's lathe, I turned down the bolt head in both diameter and thickness (removing the slot) to represent the feet, and at the other end formed a 0.3mm diameter spigot on which the etched handwheel could be fitted. Here the handwheel is loosely placed to test the fit: These are really small! Obviously the screws had to be fitted before the handwheels could be soldered in place, which was a rather ticklish operation. I ended up managing to place the handwheels on their spigots with tweezers, then gently wedging them in place with bits of wooden coffee stirrers while I added solder from underneath and behind. They seem to have turned out okay: The next parts I added were the tool boxes, which had rivets to punch out before folding up. I had to guess as to the designers intention regarding how to fit these. In some photos, it looks like they are resting on a planked floor, but the kit has no provision for this. Either the top or bottom (depending which way up you put it) of the box has little protrusions - wings? After trying it every which way, the position that looked most plausible to me was to hang the toolbox by its wings from the cross-girders. If need be, I can slide some plasticard "planks" into the small gap between the bottom of the box and the tie rods. Thee are more screw jacks in the centre of the wagon. The kit provides brackets for these, which fold up and locate in half-etched grooves in the bottom of the girders. I used the left-over lengths of the 16BA bolts for the screws, and filed them flush with the bottom of the queen posts. This still leaves them nearer the rails than the feet of the buffer-beam screw jacks. I'm undecided about soldering feet on these screws, which I would make from etched crankpin cap washers. Without shining a light under the wagon, they are almost impossible to see, and I'm worried about clearances. I've been adding the securing rings (some in the "up" position ready to secure a load) with two still to go. The photo below is where I'm up to. I need to add some planking to the sloping ends, which I will do with plastic strips, and also do something about couplings. i think I'll get away with soldering bearing tubes for Electra couplings to the underside of the buffer beams. Having fussed over the screw jacks, I have looked a pictures of wagons in railway company service decades after the war (as opposed to those which remained with the MoD), at least some of them seem to have had the jacks and associated brackets removed. Did this apply to all of them? I'm wondering now how to finish the wagon in c.1950 condition. I've seen some photos of these wagons with chunky bolsters fitted, and I was thinking along those lines - painting it LMS grey, and having a load like old rails chained to it. I'm not planning to remove any of the detail I have added (besides the time it took, they give the wagon most of its character) but would that leave me with an implausible model?

I use one of these for locos: https://www.plazajapan.com/4957265125220/ No idea about current shipping costs from Japan. You can buy the identical item in the UK with a Gaugemaster sticker on it for 4 times the price: https://www.gaugemasterretail.com/gaugemaster-gm47.html Gaugemaster also do a version of the Minitrix brush @Caley Jim mentioned: https://www.gaugemasterretail.com/gaugemaster-gm59.html I also use an unpowered version of the Japanese cleaner for stock: https://www.plazajapan.com/4957265125237/ I don't suppose it would be too difficult to make something similar to this. Nick.

Traditionally I have used Precision 2-pack etching primer, sprayed from a single action airbrush, and following Ian Rathbone's advice of thinning it with cellulose. Like the little girl with the curl, when its good, its very very good, but when its bad it's horrid! Recently I tried UPOL Acid8 from a spray can (bought in Halfords), and am happy with the results. I'm not convinced it is quite as smooth as the Precision primer at its best, and spraying from a can always feels more fraught somehow - especially outside when the wind always seems to know what I'm about to do and comes from nowhere!!

Hi Angus, I acquired mine privately from @CF MRC many moons ago. My understanding is that the N Brass ones are a slightly larger scale.

4' 8 1⁄2" gauge is where it's at! And for anyone else crazy enough thinking about modelling it in 2mm scale (oh, yes he is!!!) - I'm oiling round some Joy valve gear. This is the view in the other direction:

Sorry, @65179! You're absolutely correct about 18" - a typo I'm afraid.

There's not been a lot happening on my workbench of late, however back in the summer I was persuaded to start building a OO gauge loco for my eldest son as a side project. The loco he asked me to build is an LNWR 18" goods (a.k.a. Cauliflower) from the London Road Models kit. It occurred to me that I had been keeping a set of "shot down" etches for this self-same kit in the "too hard" section of my gloat box for over a decade... and being in a position where I have five almost finished (bar final details and painting) locos sitting around, but none at the head-scratching stage, I thought it might finally be time to dig it out. Having gone mad some time ago, I decided it would be a good idea to try and build the same loco in two different scales. At the same time. This might not be as crazy as it sounds? Despite the old adage "never model a model", I've often looked at 4mm models to get a 3-dimensional sense of the details when building a 2mm model that drawings and photographs can't always convey. My idea is to build the 4mm model (which must surely be easier) as a learning exercise for putting together the 2mm version. Here are the etches, side by side for comparison. The brass for the 2mm version is 8 thou, which is more than half the thickness of the 4mm version, which has already brought some challenges in getting things to fit. I started with what I thought would be the most tricky bit, which is the boiler. As you can see above, the 4mm kit comes with the boiler cut out and ready-rolled, just requiring the seam along the bottom soldering. I imagined I would need to use a length of brass tube for the 2mm boiler, with the etch perhaps as an overlay, but I was able to roll it up and form the firebox, and it seemed to be okay! The comparison photos of the boilers above looked odd until I realised the 4mm version was designed to be paired with a Belpaire firebox. Unfortunately the rest of the kit was for a round-top firebox (like the 2mm version), but John at LRM was able to quickly furnish me with a replacement. The second-most tricky part looked to be the characteristic wavy footplate. Here the kit provides a fold-up frame to attach the valances to the footplate and keep everything straight. The photo below is the 4mm version, with red marks where I've needed to filed the footplate back to accommodate OO gauge wheels. I had the opposite problem on the 2mm version, where the width over the outside of the wheels was too great to fit between the splashers. I'm trying to progress the two locos step by step. Here they are with the boilers (4mm one with firebox this time!) places inexplicably back-to-front on the footplates. After 20 years, I'm starting to realise just how small 2mm scale is!!! I deviated from the instructions in the order of construction, adding the cab sides to the footplate, but the cab front to the firebox. There is a nice half-etched line in the cab front showing where the firebox should fit, and it felt much easier to fit the firebox to this line with the cab front flat on the bench. I could then line the cab front up with the sides, and file the firebox sides to be a nice fit to the footplate before fixing the boiler/firebox unit in place. While I was working on this on the 4mm version, the 2mm boiler decided to burst apart at the seam... Below you can see the boiler repaired, with the beginnings of the smokebox in place, and the footplate ready to accept it. As mentioned above, it was necessary to move the splashers out in order to accommodate the 2mm wheels. After soldering the cab side sheets in place (there were slots in the footplate to locate it), I filed the footplate away right up to the inside of the side sheets, and measured the gap. I opened the gaps for the splashers to match this dimension. When it came to adding the two layers smokebox wrapper, the 4mm version was much easier. There are holes for handrails (or something!) in the boiler and the wrappers, so I could thread a small broken drill through these to get the layers perfectly lined up. The inner wrapper goes flush to the front of the boiler "tube", then the smokebox front is soldered on, with the outer wrapper overlapping. On the 2mm version, because the metal is proportionally thicker, the holes in the wrappers didn't line up, and I had to adjust them with a broach. You can see in the photo below how the hole has become more of a slot so that a 0.3mm drill could pass from one side of the smokebox to the other. The other side (below) is a similar mess. I used a larger drill down the hole where the chimney will fit to keep everything lined up in the other dimension. With the boiler unit fixed in place on the footplate, it is starting to take on the basic shape of the loco... lots of cleaning up to do however... Below is the view from below. I soldered a 14BA nut onto the footplate before fixing the smokebox saddle in place: Here's the 4mm version built up to the same state. It is absolutely HUGE! Before I go any further with the loco body, I need to work out the chassis arrangements in such a way as the top and bottom will fit together. The firebox is roughly the same width as a standard set of 2mm frames, so I'm thinking about using the kit frames, with an inner layer added to form a gear tower. Below is a sketch of how things could be laid out, driving on the rear axle, with the worm and first stage reduction gear hidden in the firebox/ashpan. The cab has a false floor. Raising it a fraction should clear the gear on the rear axle. The universal joint housing will fit between the cab inside splashers, and should be reasonably discreet. The 4mm kit comes with a set of lovely castings, which are handy because I can measure them and halve the dimensions ready for making my own...

Hi @Izzy (and anyone else interested), I found some 16v 470uF tantalum capacitors on eBay recently in the same case size as the ones you're using. You might get away with a single one of these. Happy Christmas, Nick https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/394539153359

2323 found its way from Gwynedd all the way to York (via Manchester) this afternoon... What a beautiful layout this is - brilliant in both concept and execution... enhanced further by a splash of crimson and those three letters L M S...

I'm waiting for somebody to model something like this in T gauge:

Judging by your results, @Klaus ojo, I'd never have thought of you as a plonker!

Here's a final post to complete the story of this locomotive. I didn't want to post any pictures of the loco in its final weathered form here before the AGM photo competition - keeping my powder dry, so to speak. This is the first pass at weathering. A sprayed-on mixture of Humbrol Matt Leather and Matt black enamels, with details brushed in, and then streaking added by pulling a damp flat brush over the paint: I added a second mist of the weathering spray to tone down the streaking/detailing, and sealed everything with a waft of Testor's Dullcote before adding coal to the bunker and a set of etched fire irons to the tank top. @65179 wanted it covered in grot, and I think I achieved that... But... As soon as I'd submitted the photos for the competition, I noticed something was missing. Fortunately most people who voted overlooked the absence of two footsteps on the front vertical section of the footplate! Once I'd noticed the omission, however, I couldn't un-see it, and remedial action had to be taken - with grateful thanks to @Nig H for sending me some spare steps, and also reminding me to fit them "upside-down" I think I've got away with the repair without causing damage to the rest of the loco, and the touch-up paint job doesn't look too terrible. Last weekend she headed down to Aldershot to compete for the Groves Trophy, and I took the two photos below of her sitting on the competition table: I was privileged to be allowed to give 2323 a run on Drws-y-Nant as part of the competition judging. This is such a beautiful layout, and really showcases the way 2mm scale is able portray the railway in the landscape. The scenery and lighting really showed the loco off to best advantage. Nigel had a lovely rake of LMS carriages for her to pull. In fact, this is the first and (so far) only train she has pulled! With lead in the boiler, tanks and bunker, the loco weighs approx. 65g, which seemed to be sufficient. (I really ought to get on and build some carriages... And a layout...) I managed to take a few pictures of the excursion passing through Drws-y-Nant station: And the return journey: This isn't a particularly exciting video, but it captures a smooth and slow departure...

This looks very good, Tim. If the chunkiness was an issue, given that the functional part of the wheel is brass, I'm wondering if it would be possible to thin the front of the tyres and 3D print a replacement insert with shallower spoke detail and balance weights?

The balance weights moving up and down as the driver operates the steam reverser will definitely catch the eye...

The intention was to paint the raised beading black with a fine brush - but not before I've decided whether I need to remove the transfers and try again. Sorry I didn't make that clear in my original post. But you've got down to the root of my problem - will the thick black line along the beading look ridiculously thick. Oh! I had completely misunderstood. And now I'm feeling stupid for not having looked more carefully at the real thing rather than the Bachmann model.