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After much debate with myself I have decided to abandon my build of my chopper tank.

I have come to realise I will never make a loco builder. Also I have made bad decisions in choosing kits that were inaccurate. So far I have gone through two complete kits and two sets of wheels to end up with a scratch built model that is 90% complete and it still doesn't satisfy me. 

Perhaps I should have planned the build better from the start. After nearly twenty years of messing about I don't think I have the heart to try again. I will stick to building wagons and buy in locos when I can.

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1 hour ago, airnimal said:

After much debate with myself I have decided to abandon my build of my chopper tank.

I have come to realise I will never make a loco builder.

I think most people will look at the photo and join me in wishing that weren't a loco-builder of your calibre, either.

 

Can you now get someone within S7 circles to finish it off?

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Jim, 

I was brought up going to the Manchester show from a very early age. I marvelled at exquisite models in brass and nickel and wondered how they were made. It never left me. I later met Sid Stubbs and visited his house and was enthralled at his fantastic loco's which came apart in seconds and went back together the same way. The chopper tank when I first made it worked just as well as the loco's I had seen at Sid's house but due to using a drawing that was wrong I tried to improve it with disastrous results. A lot of my disappointments have been with other people's involvement. People turning the cast wheels wrong several times was a major set back. Etch kits with the smoke box the wrong shape, the tank top with both sides the same when one side had a dip on one end and the cab side's in one piece when they overlapped. This is just a small amount detail  of this build. I could go on but I think you know that I am not prepared to accept second best. I am prepared to pop my clogs without achieving the standard I am hoping for. I don't think this is what most people want today but then I probably live in a world that no longer exists.

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Hi airnimal I 've liked this rather than offer sympathy as you clearly know what you want to achieve, don't want to compromise and are willing to accept the consequences of this. We are all driven by different motivations. Once you understand your own then you can focus on what you derive satisfaction from.

 

Probably getting too deep now, your modelling is always inspiring.

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Argos, good to see you yesterday as always. Below is a couple of photos from this weekend at the Wigan show.

One is of the part built dock tank with some of the parts laid out. The pile includes 18 cab sides which may give an indication of why I am not going to build any more locos. The other parts here are only a small part of the total I have made and discarded. The time has come  when I realised that I and not going to be the next Beeson.

I will stick to the things I can do to a standard that satisfies me and obtain when I can the things that I can't  do.

it seems a sensible thing to do in my own funny way.

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Planning a small shunting plank layout with a LNWR flavour has thrown up the problem about trackwork.

What do you do about the chairs ? 

LNWR chairs have one square bolt and one coach bolts on each side of the chair. Nothing as far as I'm aware is available on the market to model the correct type of trackwork. How do other people model the correct track for this railway. 

I have been playing about with modifying a standard Midland 4 bolt chair by removing the slight web and cutting off one of the coach bolts and replacing it with a 30 X 30 bit of Evergreen milled plastic. I did look to see if MasterClub did any square bolts without success. I am not sure if this is going to be a runner or not untill I make up a small length and to see what it looks like. 

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Obviously it will only be a small bit of track. I can use the 2 bolt chairs for sidings so I only need a small amount of 4 bolt chairs elsewhere. I put this out to see if other people would come out of the woodwork with a solution. 

I'm going to get flack if I use the wrong chairs to model a LNWR section of track so this is an attempt to try and make it right. 

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Chrisbr,

many thanks for the kind offer of help getting LNWR chairs 3D printed. I am afraid I don't know enough about 3D printing to make a judgment about the suitable of making chairs with this method. 

Would 3D be strong enough for track parts ?

I have been going through all my books and journals to see if there is any articles about LNWR trackwork. 

I am very surprised about the lack of information on this subject or am I looking in the wrong place.

I don't have indexes to look up where important articles are, I am not that organised.

I have found one photo of a chair with not a square bolt but a large hexagonal bolt. But the shape at the base of the chair hasn't got the curved parts as on the Midland chair. For this reason I don't think method is going to be a runner. 

 

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Hi airnimal,

From memory (I'm away from home at present). The best detail of LNWR track is in the livery book.

 

I did worry about the chair detail when I started building track in 7mm but decided it wasn't that noticeable and life was too short. 

My standards are lower though!

 

3d printed chairs are available for more modern track so it does work, albeit it is an expensive solution.

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seems a bit odd to me to have different bolt heads when 1 would be fine because that means having 2 tools or 2 socket heads for the tool for tightening/loosening and you would have to keep changing between them on every chair. and you have to have the set up of producing the 2 different types of bolt. its no wonder why every other company (i assume) sticks to one type of bolt for standardisation of parts.

 

is there any known reason for doing it this way?

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Thanks to all who has added information about this subject. I now realize the the second bolt was not square but hexagonal and I could use items from the  MasterClub range but because the base was different I have decided this way is not going to produce track that is accurate enough.

Not having a great deal of interest in track doesn't help but I don't want to produce something that is so obviously wrong.

I may put this to one side for the moment until I can find a way around this.

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6 hours ago, airnimal said:

Not having a great deal of interest in track doesn't help but I don't want to produce something that is so obviously wrong.

I do have an interest in track, but this was not as obviously “wrong” as you seem to think. 
The hexagonal bolt head would have more impact than the shape of the base.

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I should think the relatively high cost of 3D printed chairs is not really a problem unless Mike's concept of a "small shunting plank" is. like the rest of his model making, of a higher order than ours. Edge Hill perhaps?

 

Choice of material might be important though...

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 While I decide what to do about trackwork I am going to build a few more wagons. 

First up is a LNWR Dia 1 ex dumb buffer wagon that has been converted to parallel sprung buffers.

i struggled to set the wheels so that there wasn't any side play. After playing about for about an hour, i did what I should have done first thing and checked the axles were both the same length. Sure enough I have a rogue axle that is .5mm shorter that all the rest. It may not bit a large amount but when you try to get zero tolerance side play it was enough to make a difference. 

I want to build a couple more dumb buffer LNWR wagons along the same lines as this one. They may be a bit mundane for most people but I find them attractive. 

 

I went to the Keighley open day yesterday and they was a very nice little NER small layout there with some early rolling stock on it. The locos were battery operated and were very smooth runners and the layout had some beautiful early period buildings on it. Overall I was very impressed and I should have taken some photos of it but I was distracted by meeting lots of people I wanted to meet and forgot the name of the layout.

Anybody who is a gauge O modeller and lives in the North, the Keighley open day is a good day out with lots of interesting things to see and the food is amazing. All home made by the local scouting group.

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3 hours ago, airnimal said:

 I went to the Keighley open day yesterday and they was a very nice little NER small layout there with some early rolling stock on it. The locos were battery operated and were very smooth runners and the layout had some beautiful early period buildings on it. Overall I was very impressed and I should have taken some photos of it but I was distracted by meeting lots of people I wanted to meet and forgot the name of the layout.

Anybody who is a gauge O modeller and lives in the North, the Keighley open day is a good day out with lots of interesting things to see and the food is amazing. All home made by the local scouting group.

 

It will have been 'Hope Street', a very nice layout, well, it is North Eastern... I spent quite a while watching it at Shipley last month, there's a couple of photos at the bottom of this post - https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/146870-shipley-model-railway-society-2019-exhibition/&do=findComment&comment=3672881

 

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