snitzl

Hi Regularity, Really sorry about that, I misunderstood.

Hi Regularity, These controller's were developments of Stuart Hines original Pentroller, I've substituted and added extra components. Built 7 or 8 of these and given a few away, but they've never been made commercially, if you think there's a market, then please feel free to use them.

Hi Oldddudders, I was a big fan of Allan Downes and found his work very inspirational back in the early 1980's, I'd like to think that perhaps just a little of his unique skills rubbed off. In one of his earlier article's , he used computer chats for the bricks ( because scale wise, they were the same size ) and stuck them on one by one, inbelievable.

First of all, thanks all for the kind words, much appreciated. A loco is required for "Fun Town", something small and unusual to shunt the market stall wagons, browsing the web I came across a vertical boilered De Winton from the 1870's which had the right appearance, but I wanted if possible to include the transverse cylinder of the Albion, a locomotive built in 1848 for the South Yorkshire Railway. Another feature that I hope will be possible to include, is the curved footplate of the L.S.W.R Class 460 : 4-4-0 by William Adams. I've not actually attempted this type of modelling before on a locomotive, all loco's I've built in the past have been based on prototypes, I usually find a locomotive that appeals to me and search out the drawings, but with Fun Town, a different approach will be taken. This just might be a total disaster, we'll have to wait and see. Just to make things a little more interesting, the loco will also run on standard gauge P4 track, Protofour profile wheels, run on DCC with DCC uncoupling, Sharman's flexichas system built into the chassis and for character, the loco will be heavily distressed. De Winton from the 1870's. Transverse cylinder of the Albion. Curved Footplate of the L.S.W.R Class 460 : 4-4-0 by William Adams. Time to make a start.

Thought about starting a workbench type thread for quite some time, up until now, all of my posts have been in the blog section of RMWEB. My main obsession at the present time is a project I've called Fun Town, an imaginary place were most of the scratchbuilt models are based on pure imagination. What I would like to do before settling down with the next scratchbuild, is present a few images of Fun Town to show some of which has been achieved so far. Railway Market Stalls outside the Stone built Terraced Shops. Next door to the Stone Terraced shops is The Mart, a stone building based on The Mart, Lower Parliament St, Nottingham. Fun Towns overhead Tram. Sharmans Steam Traverser located inside the Market Warehouse. A birds eye view on the walkway that links the Marts upper level to Verne's tower. Verne's flying machine on the workbench, the flying machine is DCC operated and has 3 motors and LED lights. Snitzl.

As Anglian has suggested, you have to try the different construction methods available, whether it be card , plastic or plaster, there's plenty of detailed information on RMweb on how you go about it. Failing that, look into kit bashing, that might at least get you started.

Hi Mikkel, I totally agree with you, Blogger just seems to be out there, on its own, just a little isolated.

Hi Mikkel, I've discovered that I can't retain enthusiasm for railway modeling without some contact with other railway enthusiasts, so glad to be back and I've also missed some of you guy's. The lattice bridge you speak of was built for kimberley, but I also made a second bridge for Snitzl Town, there is a blog that covers the build. Regards Snitzl

Part 2 continues modelling of the market stall wagons for Fun Town. If you've already read part 1 of Market Stall Wagons, then please skip past this intro text to the images below. Searching the web for market stalls that actually ran on tracks and existed in our historic past proved fruitless, I've no doubt that when this blog get's published on rmweb, dozens of examples will turn up, if so, they might inspire further models. The type of market stall required for Fun Town did exist as a road type vehicle and was available in model form as a plastic kit by Wills, therefore the Will's model was used as a dimensional starting point. Although the model from Wills is based on a prototype of timber construction, the model presented here is all metal. Raw materials for the stalls included 10thou brass sheet, brass tube, brass wire, steel for the wheels, aluminium foil for the canopy and a little solder. During construction of the stall's, a few other possible projects sprung to mind, perhaps a stall replenish vehicle, steam tram for the customers and market stall holder's during a market stall relogation. What is Fun Town ? : Fun Town is a small table top module that can be used alone or form part of a larger unit, it fit's like a jigsaw piece to the Walls Traverser Cover to create a small 36" x 18" layout over the top of Snitzl Town's traverser. Done so far : Overhead Tram, Jules Verne's Flying Ship, Steam operated Traverser and Market Stall Wagons. Still to do : Steam Tram, Market Stall Engine with DCC uncoupler, Stall Replenish Wagon, Animated Figues, Hot Air Balloon, Interior racking & goods for the Warehouse and anything else that may be appropriate, in other words, a bit of fun. Snitzl

Modelling the Market Stall wagons for Fun Town. Searching the web for market stalls that actually ran on tracks and existed in our historic past proved fruitless, I've no doubt that when this blog get's published on rmweb, dozens of examples will turn up, if so, they might inspire further models. The type of market stall required for Fun Town did exist as a road type vehicle and was available in model form as a plastic kit by Wills, therefore the Will's model was used as a dimensional starting point. Although the model from Wills is based on a prototype of timber construction, the model presented here is all metal. Raw materials for the stalls included 10thou brass sheet, brass tube, brass wire, steel for the wheels, aluminium foil for the canopy and a little solder. During construction of the stall's, a few other possible projects sprung to mind, perhaps a stall replenish vehicle, steam tram for the customers and market stall holder's during a market stall relogation. What is Fun Town ? : Fun Town is a small table top module that can be used alone or form part of a larger unit, it fit's like a jigsaw piece to the Walls Traverser Cover to create a small 36" x 18" layout over the top of Snitzl Town's traverser. Done so far : Overhead Tram, Jules Verne's Flying Ship, Steam operated Traverser and Market Stall Wagons. Still to do : Steam Tram, Market Stall Engine with DCC uncoupler, Stall Replenish Wagon, Animated Figues, Hot Air Balloon, Interior racking & goods for the Warehouse and anything else that may be appropriate, in other words, a bit of fun. Snitzl

Verne's Tower - Flying Machine. As part of Fun Town, I was thinking of modelling a hot air balloon that revolved around the large tower, but in the previous blog on Mike Sharmans vertical boiler steam traverser, Mikkel commented that the traverser was very much in the stye of Jules Verne in appearance. This got me thinking about maybe modelling the hot balloon baised on something Jules Verne might have designed, a web search was done and after browsing through many images a completly different approach was chosen. A small version of nautilus would be constructed that would be crafted from a super light weight cast iron and also include an helicopters rotor to enable flight. What is Fun Town ? : Fun Town will be a small table top layout that will include a market stall railway, overhead tram, animated figues, rotating Jules Verne flying ship, hot air balloon, steam operated traverser and anything else that may be appropriate, in other words, a bit of fun. Snitzl

Fun Town - Sharmans Traverser. Mike Sharmans vertical boiler steam traverser appears briefly on a Railscene 2 video that features one of Mike's earliest multigauge layouts with some of the most unusual locomotives, rail stock and features history has ever produced. I remember reading in one of the monthly magazines that lack of information would not prevent Mike from a loco build if one took his fancy, building a scale model from a single photograph was quite acceptable to him so I've taken his concept a step further and built a model of Mike's model. When it came to the finer modelling details, searches made online provided a few details but on the whole, very little exists on vertical boiler steam traversers. The finished traverser is set up for DCC and runs as you would run an ordinary loco, speed of the traverser is much much slower than expected, so alignment of the tracks is not the problem I thought it might be. What is Fun Town ? : Fun Town will be a small table top layout that will include a market stall railway, overhead tram, animated figues, rotating hot air balloon, steam operated traverser and anything else that may be appropriate, in other words, a bit of fun. Snitzl

Fun Town - Monorail Part 2. In this, part 2 of the monorail tram design and development, a lot of effort has been put into reliable running and how it was or was not acheived. A decision was made in part 1 of the design, to keep areas of development that didn't work out in the blog, this was so that we can see how the final design was arrived at. Normally, when ideas don't work out, I'll delete all the unwanted material, go back a few pages and hide all evidence to give the impression that all was plain sailing, but for me, this is rarely the case. Although the tram featured in this blog is not based on a prototype, once this monorail system is complete and running is reliable, a search will be made for appropriate prototypes. What is Fun Town ? : Fun Town will be a small table top layout that will include a market stall railway, overhead tram, animated figues, rotating hot air balloon, steam operated traverser and anything else that may be appropriate, in other words, a bit of fun :- after the demise of Kimberley, I need it. Snitzl

Follow the development of a monorail for Fun Town in this part 1, Is it a bird, is it a plane, or is it just Snitzl Town's overhead tram. To be honest, didn't know whether to call this project an overhead train, engine or tram, technically its not yet a train, so I opted for tram. It's actually been eight months since my last blog, the main reason being that development of this overhead tram system has had a few major setbacks that caused me to take a three month break to sort out my workshop, replaced my old Southbend Heavy 10 lathe with an even older pre war Boley & Leinen LZ4, made new countershafts for a couple of Pultra lathes and then constructed new work benches. Enough of the excuses, this blog starts with the development of the monorail and ends with the archway supports for the rail, there's still a little more to come in part four of Fun Town. Snitzl

Fun Town Micro Layout - Part II. Here's part 2 of a small fun type layout which will also be my first venture into DCC. The main feature of part 2 of Fun Town Micro Layout has been the construction of wrought iron railings from 10 thou brass sheet and 0.5mm dia brass wire. Never tried this before, so there was a little learning curve in the initial satges as the process developed. Before starting the job, I purchased 20 x 0.5mm dia twist drills from the bay, expecting to break quite a few of them but only broke one, just lucky I guess. I decided that part 3 will cover the developed and construction of a mono rail and I'm quite looking forward to that. For now, here's part II, hope you enjoy. Snitzl

Fun Town Micro Layout - Part 1. Here's the humble beginnings of a small fun type layout which will also be my first venture into DCC. The layout will eventually include led lighting, traverser, animated room interiors, animated figures, overhead transportation and a market train that will consist of an engine and market stalls ( running on rails of course ). Snitzl

Continues with the development of an analog Pentroller type. This blog brings to an end the development of an analog Pentroller type controller with a couple of versions that have turned out rather well. The blog also includes a shuttle circuit that is designed to be used in combination with the controller in a future fun type layout with automatic trains, automated chimney sweep brushes, people waving, light flashing and whatever else that springs to mind. So, while browsing the rmweb DCC section of the forums, I discovered Arduino, the fact that I've only just discoverd Arduino when its been around for donkeys years, shows that I've lived in blissful ignorance. Snitzl.

An investigation into Stewart Hines Pentroller. This blog investigates Stuart Hines Pentroller and presents a layout of the board, identifies components, includes schematics and presents various oscilloscope captures of the pulse width modulation and timimg pulses in an effort to understand the function of the design. Last night, I was a pleasantly surprised to receive a telephone call from Stuart, granting permission for details of Pentroller to be presented in this blog, however, during our conversation, it became obvious that I had made quite a major error in my thinking with regards to the function of the pulse presented in the ' Experimentroller Blog ', for this I apologise, the blog has now been deleted, modified, and included here. Back in the late 1980's when Stuart Hine was technical boffin at Pendon, it was realised that the life of the coreless portescap motors could be shortened drastically with extreme slow running with conventional pulse type controllers. Stuart Hine consulted with the manufacturers of Portescap motors and discovered that the pulse generated by a conventional pulse controller was such that the coreless motor would continually start and stop, iron core motors on the other hand had enough inertia for continual running. It was also discovered that the maximum current a motor was allowed to draw was a problem and also that the non replaceable brushes in the coreless motors lasted only about 200 hours or so before becoming erratic when used with a conventional pulse controller, thought to be mainly due to the number of stop / starts when slow running. Before we begin, I must mention that I'm no electronics wiz kid, the aim of this project is to make a study of Stuart Hine's Pentroller, an analog controller from the 1990's, learn just enough about electronics to understand the circuit, make an experimental controller and maybe later in another blog, create a new analog controller baised on Pentroller. The idea behind this experimental controller is to have a controller that functions in the same way as Pentroller, but gives a certain amount of control of the back EMF sample time, length of DC period, set current limiting and adjust the amount of feedback so that ideal settings can be found by experimentation through use of the controller, note that although these variables alter the motor speed, actual speed adjustment on the Pentroller is controlled by a variable amplitude DC generated by the SG3527 pulse width modulator control circuit and controlled by the throttle and back EMF circuit. First of all, the new experimental controller replaces the LM393 comparator timing circuit with an alternative NE555 integrated circuit which allows adjustment of the sample time period from 140uSec to 1.8mSec and also allows adjustment of the DC ON period from 2.1mSec to 11.4mSec, the potentiometer positions have been high lighted in one of the illustrations below. The next alteration to the original circuit was to replace the virtually obsolete SG3527 pulse width modulator ic with its more common and extremely cheap SG3525, the only difference between these two chips is that when the SG3527 chip is shut down via pin 10, the outputs are high, were as on the SG3525, outputs are low, for this reason, an LM393 comparator was set up as an inverter and is connected to the PWM outputs of the SG3525. Testing and Trials. Although the experimental controller was intended to run from a 16VAC supply, the SG3525 pulse width modulation chip got far hot for my liking, therefore the controller was tested from a regulated 12 volts supply under which conditions the chip was warm to the touch. I found that the torque generated by both coreless and iron core motors with the original 2.2ohm resistor to be far to weak for my taste and substituted this resistor for a 0.33ohm 1/2watt value. Under the suggested settings, coreless motors ran cool, had plenty of torque and ran very nice indeed, on the other hand, iron core motors, had a cogging effect that could be controlled to some extend by reducing the current control. I must thank Stuart Hine for getting in touch and allowing this blog to procede. Snitzl.

Using a laser printer to create printed circuit boards ?. Stumbled across the method of using a laser printer to create printed circuit boards on the internet and thought I'd present my experiences with this method as a blog. Not having the appropriate software for creating circuit board artworks, I actually photographed the trackside of a now discontinued controller from the 1990's, made a few alterations, coloured the track in black, mirrored the artwork and then printed nine copies of the artwork onto a piece of A4 gloss photo paper. Having cut out one of the circuit board artworks, a piece of single sided copper clad board is cut to size, rubbed with fine emery paper and given a scrub with hot water and Vim, when dry, the artwork is then placed face down onto the copper surface and ironed with a clothes iron on a full heat setting. It turns out that the print produced by laser printers and photocopiers, is styrene, the same plastic stuff that most of our buildings are made of, therefore the clothes iron generates enough heat to actually melt the plastic which then adheres to the copper surface. Next, the circuit board and artwork are given a bath in warm soapy water, and after a few mintues, the photo paper can be pealed away. The first circuit board attempt turned out well and needed no further work, however, the second board showed signs of artwork movement during the ironing stage and on the third attempt, three tool makers clamps were used to hold the artwork firmly in place. Another noticeable problem was that tiny areas of gloss laquer from the gloss photo paper had also adhered to the copper surface, these were easily removed with a gentle rub with a soft cloth and T-Cut. Other thoughts : Not tried this yet, but the same method of artwork heat transfer might be possible with a controller facia, with the facia in aluminium. Snitzl.

An experiment with full panel decals as an alternative to traditional lining methods. The idea for this experimental blog came after a second attempt at lining the Beattie Well Tank. I've often heard it said that lining rolling stock takes practice, practice practice, but I didn't want to spend the rest of my life re-spraying and lining a Beattie Well Tank, I'd sooner spend that time building, building, building, also the Beattie Well Tank required bespoke graphics that would be impossible for me to achieve with a ruling pen or brush. Commercial screen printed / tampo printed decals have been around for a very long time and in my mind provide an acceptable alternative for the likes of me that lacks the skill of the pen, but that wouldn't overcome the issue of bespoke graphics. A short while ago, attempts to produce decals with an ink jet printer with replacement cartridges gave unacceptable results and the cost of original cartridges was enough to put a stop to investigating further. Recently, I made a purchase on the bay for a second hand HP laser jet Pro 300 colour printer with non original toners, which will be used to produce decals in this experimental blog for a variety of models, first of which will be the Beattie Well Tank. Artwork. It is intended to produce the artworks for the decals in the same resolution as the printer, the printer is 600 dots per inch ( DPI ), so initial artworks will be 600 pixels per inch, if in practice, this resolution is to low, then the resolution will be doubled to 1200 pixels per inch. It is hoped that doubling the size of the artwork can be avoided, because scaling algorithms can produce unwanted dithering effects, for instance a line that is 3 pixels in width does not divide by two, so pixel colours are substituted to give the impression of correct width. Using Adobe Photoshop, presuming that 600 pixels per inch is fine for the artwork masters, with an image loaded, select 'image' > 'image size' to open the dialog, deselect 'Resample Image' flag and set the 'Resolution' to 600 pixels / inch, the image will now print to the correct scale, another tool used when creating rads and curves was the pen along with one of its associates, 'Add Anchor Point'. Two types of decal papers for use with a laser printer were purchased, one of these was clear water slide ( transparent ) and the other was white backed water slide. Both types of paper have a white backing sheet so at a glance, they look identical. The reason for the white backed decal paper is that most printers do not print white, if the colour white is required in your decal design, then white backed decal paper would be required unless you paint certain areas of your model white. It became apparent during the initial decal printouts that by selecting different print paper types in the printer options dialog box, it was possible to alter the amount of heat used to fuse the toner to the print media, if not enough heat is applied, then the toner has less adhesion, two much heat and discolouration of the toner is visible. 'Colour Laser Transparency' paper type option was selected for the clear decal paper which turned the black borders of the decal a dark brown, adhesion was very good, while 'envelope' paper type option was selected for the white decal paper and although the colours were very good, adhesion was poor and toner could easily be removed with a finger nail. After a little trial and error, acceptable adhesion and colours were obtained with 'Opaque Film' paper type, the full settings were, Paper Size > Envelope No 10, Paper Type > Opaque Film, Orientation > Landscape and under the colour tab : Colours Themes > PhotoS. Some Weeks Later : With the Beattie and Coffee Pot complete as regards to this experiment, an idea of lining the printed decals sprung to mind, using the existing artwork as a test, thin yellow lines were drawn in Humbrol Gloss 7 using a ruling pen over the artwork printed on clear decal paper. This worked out better than expected, being able to draw lines on a flat surface with the aid of a rule helped a lot, corners were cleaned up with a small brush dampened with white spirit, the paint took to the printed surface very well and did not smudge or damage the underlying artwork, with this method, multiple copies of the panels could be included in the artwork, in case of mistakes. Another option that might be worth considering is to spray the decal paper in the required livery and then laser print panel guide lines / borders for cutting and lining, this is an idea that I may try in the near future. Next in line came an incomplete scratchbuilt Manning Wardle 0:6:0 loco which needed a few minor modeling details adding before it could become the next victim for these trials. A decision was taken to be a little more adventurous with the artwork and add quite a few full panel decals for the boiler, sandbox's, tool box, bunker sides and back, cab sides and saddle tank. As before, artwork was first printed out on plane paper, the decals cutout and checked against the model before printing the actual decals on white backed decal paper. One problem that became evident when fitting the decals was that if a decal was cut slightly oversize, it would not sit tight in the corners, so checking the actual decal with the model prior to fitting is also important. Colour matching. A simple test was done using a scratchbuilt sign board from a previous layout of Wool Station, the sign board was first sprayed in white primer followed by a coat of Revell 56 matt blue. The camera was set for internal lighting and the resulting photograph was imported into adobe photoshop were the medium tones of the image were sampled with the eyedropper tool. A second colour sample was obtained by searching google for Revell 56 matt blue and the third sample was a colour used on the Charles Rhodes horse drawn cabs, which when making comparisons between the printed decal and the newly printed sign board, looked pretty close. The three sign board artworks were added to the Charles Rhodes cab artwork and labeled 'EYEDROPPER', 'REVELL SAMPLE' and 'LOOKS CLOSE'. Final Thoughts. Although the results obtained were satisfactory, there are a few points worth mentioning, the printer used in this experiment had a 600 dpi resolution and pixelation was slightly noticeable to the naked eye and very apparent with a magnifying glass, there's no doubt that the latest printers with typical resolutions of 1200 dpi would make pixelation less obvious, for me, the second downside was the lack of strength or vividness to the colours. That aside, I will continue to experiment along these lines and blog anything that might be of interest. Snitzl.

Adding details to the chassis including springes, valves and lots more. History. Joseph Beattie was one of the old school locomotive designers who believed in a low centre of gravity for his locos. Boiler centre line was kept naturally low, while well tanks between the frames were employed rather than the higher side or saddle tanks. An whole series of boilers and smokebox's were designed for burning coal instead of coke. The last six and the Nine Elms locomotives had square splashers reminicent of short side tanks and the safety valve mounted on the middle ring of the boiler, instead of the first. The last six locomotives built by Beyer Peacock also had larger bunkers. Drawing Information. The Beattie Well Tank is a very interesting loco to model with many physical variations made over its 120 year life span. Drawing details for the model were taken from an article by D Hughes, entitled ' Build a Beattie Well Tank ' in Model Railways - May 1982. This article is mainly about the construction of a Jidenco kit, but includes drawings for three variants of the Beattie and a few photographs. Second source of information came from an article by C.J. Binnie in Model Railway Constructor - February 1970 which also includes a 7mm scale drawing and a few photographs. Project History. The Beattie Well Tank is yet another one of those incomplete projects from many many moons ago, it is hoped that when complete, this little loco will become part of the 'Snitzl Town' stud and will be privately own by Charles Rhodes Textiles. I usually model locos on a single prototype, but in this case, a large portion of the model is based on No 33, the ' Phoenix ' , with the crossheads and crosshead guides taken from No 247. Modelling starts with the coupling rods, connecting rods and crosshead guides, all of which along with gardening breaks and decorating, took what seemed like an eternity. Front wheels were destroyed when the chassis was partially stripped down so that additional details such as ashpan, well tanks and wheel guards could be added. Snitzl.

Here's a little design and development work on Flexichas Motor Bogies. Been thinking for quite some time about modelling a couple of motor bogies with Sharman type suspension and although the idea I have in mind is new to me, I wouldn't be overly surprised if the idea had already been done. Some years ago, scale flange wheels were fitted to all snitzl rolling stock, which in turn made all of the fixed chassis locos unreliable due to derailing. Presently, with the exception of two motor bogies, all rolling stock has been modified to include the sharman type suspension system. This new motor bogie project will be modelled as if by a deveopment engineer, components will be made from scratch, assembled and modified as required, to overcome the unforseen problems that will probably arise due to lack of initial design input. Starting point for the project will be to construct two enclosed gear box's as described in the "Gearbox Madness" blog, one of these will be fixed to a chassis, while the second is allowed to rotate about the worm shaft. The worm shaft will require some support at one end of the bogie by some sort of bearing and we also need to attach outer frames to the main chassis. Motor will be mounted above the worm shaft and drive transmission will be through spur gears. A second bogie, although of similar design to the first, will have much smaller worm and wheels due to the small diameter of the driving wheels. Lets see how things progress. Snitzl.

Brief Prototype History for the T14. The LSWR Class T14 was a class of ten 4-6-0 locomotives designed by Dugald Drummond for express passenger service for London & South Western Railway, built at Eastleigh between 1911 and 1912. The T14 was not one of Drummonds better loco designs, they suffered from heavy coal and water consumption and the axle boxes ran extremely hot. Later modifications included removal of the paddlebox type splashers, raising the footplate and forced lubrication on the axle boxes. Maunsell modified the boiler and installed a superheater, however, the locomotive still used a lot of coal and water. In 1940, No 447's chimney required replacing due to wear and condensation and with no replacement available, a short stove-pipe chimney was substituted, there was a marked improvement in its steaming ability due to improved draughting and the same mod was carried out on the rest of the class. Livery under LSWR was sage green, with purple-brown edging and black and white lining. Under Southern Railway from grouping in 1923, the locomotives were Maunsell's darker version of the LSWR Sage Green with yellow lettering on the tender and black and white lining. Project History. The T14 was built to EM gauge and actually ran quite nice, but was missing its walschaerts valve gear. The problem with the walschaerts valve gear on the T14 model is that a pair of cylinders are located above the footplate and a pair of cylinders below the footplate, this means that when removing the chassis, the walschaerts valve gear has to be partially dismantled. Thirty years ago, this problem was given some thought and with a solution in mind the model was partly rebuilt, but now some 30 years later, I havn't a clue as to what those modifications were. Unless there's some hidden mechanism to remove the chassis, which is securely soldered to the body, I'm at a total loss as to what the next step was. After sleeping on it, a drastic dismantle with a large soldering iron produced three sub assemblies and work then turned to rebuilding the chassis with it's sharman type suspension system. On inspection of the incomplete mild steel valve gear, it was decided to start again in nickel silver, the grade of mild steel used on the original valve gear was very soft and the amount of time spent finishing the job may be wasted, therefore, a large section of this blog covers the making and assembly of the walschaerts valve gear. Conclusion It is not intended to run the T14 on Snitzl Town other than to test its running and valve gear mechanism, this loco is destined to sit on the shelf and wait for a more suitable layout to materialise, at which point the loco will be finished, painted and lined. Snitzl.

This project is to try and do as much as possible to finish off an L.S.W.R. class F9 4:2:4T. Brief Prototype History for the Bug. The bug was Dugald Drummonds inspection loco built by L.S.W.R. works at Nine Elms and completed in april of 1899, numbered 733. Original livery for the loco was apple green edged with chocolate with a black line edged either side by white. The saloon was painted dark green / brown with the upper recessed panels in salmon pink, lining for the saloon was venetian and gold. The roof when new was painted white which very soon became grey. In December 1924, the loco was repainted / renumbered by the Southern Railway to 58 S. Wheel splashers for this loco were attached to the main frames. The Bug, besides being Dugald Drummonds own personal inspection locomotive was used by Drummond, to travel to and from work, withdrawn in 1940. This Project. This project is to try and do as much as possible to finish off an L.S.W.R. class F9 4:2:4T , Drummond's Bug. The story sofar : Model was scratchbuilt to EM gauge standards and while the chassis was virtually complete, the main body and attached saloon were missing a few details, interior of the saloon had zero detail and no glazing, why I'd painted the model before some of these details were added is beyond me. The saloon section was cut down from a previously etched southern elec fret and is not quite correct to prototype. These frets were etched in an home made etching tank which was nothing more than a wooden box lined with glass fibre, a horizontal paddle ( also of wood ) and a motor mounted on the outside. Artwork was drawn overscale on a drawing board with ink pens in the old fashioned way. The resulting frets were a little uneven with regards to depth of cut, some edges were undercut and in the case of the bug, an area had not edged at all and needed machining which caused a small hole in one of the lower panels. Chassis was later stripped down, rebuilt to P4, and included Mike Sharmans Flexichas system and split frames on the bogies to improve electrical pickup. This project starts with a dismantling of the chassis into its main components and a study of a 7mm drawing by Ray Chorley in a copy of Model Railway Constructor dated August 1968 which also includes a couple of BR photographs. During the models reconstruction, details are given on how Sharmans Flixichas system were applied to this model and is explained with a simple schematic and a look at the relevant features on the chassis components. I must make a point of thanking members of rmweb for enlightening me with regards to the boiler injection system and its relevant components with a special thankyou to gz3xzf ( Bryan Hardwick ) for annotating a drawing with the information required ( topic can be viewed here ), therefore, a good chunk of this blog is devoted to the machining and building of, these very small components. Once the chassis had been rebuilt, only the rear bogie was wired as an electrical pickup to the motor because wheel splashers on the front bogie looked to be a potential short circuit with the cylinders when negotiating curves. The rear bogie proved to be unreliable and was modified to include additional wires sprung lightly on the axles. A very basic interior for the coach section was modelled, the coach was stripped of its paint and the missing roof lights and water tank filler added. The boiler also needed modifying due to a small error with the steam valve positions and this was also stripped of its paint. Painting and Lining. Painting and lining are skills I've yet to master, I find them difficult, fustrating and the fact that my hands are unsteady dosn't help. After many years of modelling L.S.W.R and Southern, a decision was made that Snitzl Town would be free from such regional limitations and would not belong to any given region at all. Snitzl Town would be a private concern able to purchase rolling stock from any of the regions and repaint them in Snitzl Town liveries. Therefore, in the world of Snitzlshire, we will assume that at great expense, Sir Archibald Snitzl purchased the bug from his best friend, Dugald Drummond and had her repainted in the workshops of Snitzl Town, Dugald Drummond will now have to find other means of transport for his 60 mile journey to work. Snitzl's bug will now be used to run Archibald Snitzl to and from work, as did the original bug for Dugald Drummond. Snitzl.

Here's a couple of methods you can use for making replacement coupling rods. Its not unusual when scratchbuilding a new loco chassis to make the rods first and use them as a jig to drill axle bearings holes or holes for axle bushes, but there are times when there's a need to make replacement rods. Here are a couple of methods that may be of use. The first method is the simplest, but requires the use of either a milling machine or compound slide mounted on a bench drill. For those that don't know what a compound slide is, a simple miniature version can be found on the GW rivet press, one slide moves the workpiece in the left /right axis, and the second slide moves in the forward / back axis, the workpiece is moved by turning calibrated dial knobs on each slide. Compound slide tables can be added to any bench drill, you could even use a single axis slide from a lathe and bolt it to the drill table. This enables you to move the workpiece a precise distance, so that one crankpin hole can be drilled, workpiece is moved a determined distance, second hole is drilled. Second method requires the use of a lathe to modify a couple of axles that are turned down at each end to the same diameter as the crankpin bushes. A third method not illustrated below is to use the loco's chassis as a drill jig. Clamping the chassis to some rod material and spot drill through the bearings to leave a tiny indent as a drilling guide. Problem with this method is that some bearing material will probably be removed unless an 1/8" dia shaft was used with a smaller drill force fit in the end of the shaft. Snitzl.