Gladiator LNER/BR J6

[Rob Pulham]

Modelling time this last week has seen me back on the J6. I have been making progress with the inside motion starting with soldering the front of the slide bars to the cylinder front and then removing the motion bracket and moving it backwards to match the drawing in order that it would then clear the front horn guides.

 

 

Getting them square to each other was a little challenging so I cut a couple of rectangles of 10thou sheet to set both the distance between the cylinder front and the rear of the motion bracket and keep them square at the same time. I used a couple of aluminium hair grips to hold them in place while I soldered the ends of the slide bars to the motion bracket.

 

I still need to plot out and drill holes for the support rods for the expansion links in the cylinder front.

 

 

I have temporarily assembled most of the motion but I still need to add the parts to the motion bracket which support and operate the valves.

 

 

 

Having extended the clearance between the cylinder front and the motion bracket so that the cylinder front sits in front of the horn guides, I found that the slide bars still fouled the horn guides. T next task was to reduce the depth of the front horn block in the lathe so my four-jaw chuck got a turn. Because I only wanted to effectively face them off. I cheated a little and fitted a short length of 3/16” silver steel into the tailstock, slipped a bearing on and used that to quickly centre the four jaw.

 

 

The next task is to remove a section of the horn guides to clear the slide bars.

 

 

As soon as funds allow, I plan to buy a mill to compliment the lathe and boy would a mill make this task easier. I can see now why Nick plans his inside motion fitting as he builds the frames. A lesson learned for the future! Onwards and upwards as they say.

[Rob Pulham]

I had hoped to make further progress on the J6 motion today but last night my elderly neighbours' bed collapsed. I have spent much of today regluing and splinting the centre support for them. The splints were made from a couple of strips of oak that we had spare from a replacement pack sent for a damaged in transit headboard for our bed. 

The sun was shining and I like working with wood, so what wasn't to like about doing them a favour.

[Rob Pulham]

While I am distracted with outside jobs during the good weather, I have been working on another of the key outstanding jobs that is simple to pick up and put down. The back head/plate, is as I mentioned earlier in the build, a GNR Boiler Back Plate set from LG Miniatures. It wasn’t quite deep enough so I added a strip of thick brass along the bottom. Also missing from the set as delivered, were the injectors. Laurie includes a layout drawing in the set and it showed the missing injectors. An enquiry to Laurie had an apology and a pair of injectors in the post.

I am not sure if they were from the GNR set or another more generic pair but a little bit of scratch building had them looking the part. I had to fabricate one of the levers for the right hand injector from a .9mm rod with one end squashed and drilled out for the pin and then tapered with a file in the mini drill (too small to old securely in the lathe).

In the end I only used one of the hand wheels from the set because they came with cast stems on them and I wanted to fit them to the stem already present on the castings so I used some cast hand wheels from the spares box which had holes in the centres. Had I not had them to hand I would have cut the stems of the castings and drilled them for the ones with the cast stems but it would have been a bit tedious.

 

 

The GA showed some kind of inline valve down the right hand side of the cab at the side of the back plate so I knocked one up from a couple of bits of tube and a cast handwheel from the set.

My apologies for the greenish tinge it’s reflections from the green storage box that I propped it against for the photos.

[Rob Pulham]

Yesterday saw more progress on the motion for the J6, with the valves almost complete. 
I still have the arms to make that connect the valve rockers with the expansion link etc. But I am pleased that I have got this far as I had hit a bit of a mental brick wall with concern that attempts at soldering on the valve rocker supports would result in them dissolving into individual parts again. 

As happens often when procrastinating, I worried for nothing. 

 

 

 

[trw1089]

Loving your work on this Rob, puts my OO ones to shame, but I love a J6 regardless!

 

Cheers

Tony

[Rob Pulham]

Thanks Tony,

 

I am enjoying it too. 

[Rob Pulham]

After spending a week teaching myself 3D drawing, I was back at the workbench today. I had originally planned to just turn a couple of appropriately sized top hat bushes, file some flats on them where they come together and job done. My recently acquired mill offered more possibilities to make something that at least looks like the original even if it doesn’t attach in the same way. This will be soldered to the cylinder front in between the slide bars, instead of being suspended from a substantial bracket between the frames.

This is my first real item produced with the mill and I am happy with how it turned out.

 

 

 

 

 

This is where it will sit in between the slide bars on the cylinder front. I have added some fastenings to make it look as if it should be there, when it’s ultimately lost in the gloom between the frames.

[Rob Pulham]

Although I dressed the backhead a couple of weeks or so ago, I hadn’t managed to get it to fit into the cab before now because the stub of the whistle protruding through the cab roof stopped it from sliding in. One of those little few minute jobs that seem to take forever to get around to…. I finally got to it and the backhead now fits in place as if it was made for it.

 

 

[Rob Pulham]

Wow it's been a while since I looked at this.

Well the tender is now primed along with the back head and I have been finishing the last details on the body to get that too ready for painting.

Getting injectors has been a bit of a challenge and having acquired through the good graces of other and bought a couple of sets none of which are strictly correct I bit the bullet and piped a set up.

 

I also made up the vacuum pipe that runs along under the valence which required me to make some pipe elbows. In the past I have used a square file to file a V groove in some tube and then created the bend. This time I thought that I would have a go at doing it with the mill

 

I set a collet block at 45 degrees using a set square and then used a 3mm end mill to cut the slot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rob Pulham]

The next job was to fit them to the loco body. The vacuum pipe went swimmingly 

 

 

 

 

Then I fitted the injectors which is where it went a little south. I made a lovely job of bending and cutting the pipes to fit to the chassis.

 

 

 

And completely forgot that I also needed to fit the wheels DOH!...

While doing all this I also noted that somewhere along the way I had lost the hand wheels from the lubricators so I found a couple of nice cast examples in the spares box.

 

 

 

[Rob Pulham]

After resolving the Injectors pipe work so that I could indeed fit the wheels I realised that I didn't have a brake cylinder for the loco.

 

 

A look at the GA revealed that the J6 actually had two 18" brake cylinders side by side.

 

A couple of hours later I had knocked a pair up from brass rod.

 

 

 

[Rob Pulham]

Then the world turned black.

 

I had initially primed the tender body a couple of weeks ago when the sun last shone. I took the opportunity of sun here in the dales to get the body primed yesterday afternoon.

 

I am greatly impressed with the finish of the Clostermans etch Primer. I have used it and the cellulose top coat before but only on loco chassis and you don't really get the same effect.

 

It's also an absolute b***r to light properly for decent photos.

 

These are my third attempt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rob Pulham]

The sun shone again over Wensleydale this morning so I took the advantage to get the top coat of cellulose on the J6.

 

This is without doubt the best results that I have ever had from rattle can paints. - 'Clostermann' (Advanced Paints https://www.advancedpaints.co.uk/) Cellulose Satin Black

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Chas Levin]

Yep, would have to agree, that's a very fine finish, isn't it? I've seen the brand recommended before but not seen the kind of results you can get... Might have to try some.

[Rob Pulham]

In between pressing rivets out on the footplates on the Princess, I did more work on the J6 to relieve the tedium.

 

Next task was fitting the brakes. I wanted them to be removable so I turned up some hanger brackets spacers.

 

 

Then I soldered them to the chassis and made up the brakes to hang from them.

 

 

I made similar length spacers from tube to sit on the end of the brake cross beams.

 

 

 

Finally I fitted the brake cylinders which of course meant milling out the centre of the frame spacer. This seems to be the story of my life recently.

The GA showed some turnbuckle type adjusters so I milled some thick walled tube to represent them.

[Rob Pulham]

While working on the brakes I made a small discovery which made things a bit awkward. When rebuilding the springs and dampers from the original Ragstone castings I had set the dampers much too low under the springs. That combined with them being slightly over size and a few of them not quite being round meant that when testing the wheels rubbed on them and the brake pull rods wouldn't seat properly.

 

An easy fix I thought. I will turn up some slightly smaller dampers which will be round and it should be an easy job to pop the dampers off and reseat the replacements flush under the springs.

 

Oh no when I tried to get the dampers off I ended up pulling the whole thing apart

 

 

Replacements duly turned I also decided to add the quite prominent nuts on the bottom

 

 

I decided it would be easier to just assemble the dampers onto some new pins and then fit them to the springs and hangers

 

 

 

[Rob Pulham]

During the week in between other things I got the rest of the dampers refitted to the springs and then tried the brakes again. A much better fit.

 

 

 

I still need to sort out the cross rod and the levers to the brake cylinders.

[Rob Pulham]

This last week also saw the transfers applied to the J6 a Job I always dread...

 

Not the best photos in the world but you get the idea.

 

 

 

 

I also got some paint on the plates and the buffer beams

 

 

The loco is to be weathered so I wasn't too fussed that the cover of the white on the numerals isn't perfect.

[Rob Pulham]

Since painting seems to have been the order of the day I also managed to fit in painting/weathering the back head too.

 

 

 

Nice and grubby for the depths of the cab.

[Rob Pulham]

Still making slow but steady progress in between with the J6.

 

The tender is now coaled and ready for weathering. I plan to weather the loco and tender at the same time so that I get them looking the 'same'

 

 

 

 

 

I almost forgot, I dropped the LG Miniatures fire irons in some dilute metal black which has given them a nice 'rusty' appearance.

[Rob Pulham]

This week has seen more work on the J6 most of which isn't really photogenic as it's been to do with assembling and fitting the inside motion which isn't quite there yet.

 

In order to assemble much of the motion I needed some pins so I decided to turn some taper pins from 0.9mm nickel rod.

 

 

Having touched up the tool on a stone and got myself into a bit of a rhythm, I soon had a dozen or so ready. I only remembered to take a picture after I had fitted most of them...

Whilst pondering on aspects of the fitting of the motion, my thoughts turned to the remaining jobs to be done and one of those is sand pipes.

 

A quick check on Laurie Griffin and Ragstone site's didn't reveal much in the way of sand pipes so I decided to make my own.

I started by checking sizes on the GA and settled on some 0.8mm rod for the pipe itself. I had a length of microbore tube that fitted over it and used that to make the body of the fitting where the steam pipe attaches.

 

 

I started by filing a notch in the pipe such that with a slight bend to the remainder I could feed the 'pipe' through the sort end giving me an angled branch.

 

 

Next I filed an angled flat on the end of the tube to create the other branch of the fitting.

 

 

Some home made nuts/unions and 0.45mm beading wire for the steam pipe, completes the job - x four of course

 

Edited May 22, 2022 by Rob Pulham

[trw1089]

Rob, I continue to be amazed at your workmanship on this loco, it is looking absolutely superb and you must be very happy with it.

 

Well done!

Tony

[Rob Pulham]

Thanks Tony,

 

I am thoroughly enjoying it, I do like the flowing lines of the former Great Northern Locos.

I have a few more in the pipeline.

[Rob Pulham]

A bit of a milestone was reached in the Pulham household last night. I have been tinkering for a number of days with the inside motion, getting it all to fit in the frames. I had to mill the inner side of each crosshead to clear the eccentric straps etc. so they are now handed and I also had to enlarge the centre section of the motion bracket to allow the assembled eccentric rods, expansion links etc to pass through it. Then came the final job of determining the length of the connecting rods and cutting them to length. 

 

Once they were cut and tried in place the length was right but they wouldn't fully rotate because I hadn't made the slots in the motion bracket deep enough. Much filing and testing ensued but I didn't seem to be getting anywhere and then I realised that because of the constant assembly/disassembly for testing, I had the frames upside down. What I was viewing as the top was in fact the bottom so I had been adjusting the wrong side. More filing and test ensued and I got there in the end.

 

https://youtu.be/dK2cuyRbb9w

 

Having tested the pistons successfully with the valve parts resting outside the motion bracket I put it all together inside for a further test.

 

https://youtu.be/njuSUQVBkjc

[Chas Levin]

Nice work Rob, the films are strangely fascinating, I think because you seldom see working inside motion.

 

How practical is this for 4mm, do you think? It looks like a very pleasing thing to model...