3 Dumb Questions From An Amateur

[niteshadex]

Please don't beat me up for these dumb questions, i'm still young and dumb.

 

Question #1----- Hornby and Dapol both make 7 plank wagons.  They appear to be RCH type but they are 17'6 long with a 10' WB.  I own a few of these Hornby & Dapol 7 plankers and had a little fun with them.  I separated the body from the underframe and transferred the body to a very detailed brass/whitemetal 17'6" underframe.  They look alot better now but my question is did RCH (or whoever) build these 7 plank wagons this size?  And if they didn't, would it be stupid to keep the few that I already own and leave them on my layout, pretending that they are some kind of 'experimental' design?

 

Question #2----- When BR absorbed all the privately owned wagons, they were given the prefix 'P' followed by a number.  My question is did British Railways ever order / have built any of the RCH or Gloucester wagons new, to be added to their fleet and given the prefix 'B', and if so which numbers followed the 'B'?

 

Question #3----- I just got finished building 2 Cambrian kits, one an LMS 12t goods van with 9' WB (D1664), the other is the same van but with steel ends.  For some reason the buffers sit much much higher than all of my other wagons.  I doubled checked if the floor was positioned correctly and it is.  Is this normal for these vans?  I really do not like the way they looks so i replaced the wheels with 10.5mm lowmac wheels and they looks much better, buffers are now only slightly higher than the rest of my wagons.

 

Some answers will really be appreciated, thanks!

[Nicktoix]

RCH stands for Railway Clearing House who set out specifications for wagons rather than building them.

If the were built to that spec the railway companies accepted them on their system.

Nick

[wagonman]

Question 1: No. The Hornby and Dapol 7 plank mineral wagons are fiction.

 

Question 2: No again. Though some of the wooden wagons acquired at nationalisation were comparatively new they had short lives being swept away by the tsunami of 16 ton minerals.

 

Question 3: I'm not familiar with the actual kits but if the buffers are too high when the correct wheels are fitted then there must be a mistake somewhere...

[brossard]

For Q3, wagon wheels at that time were almost all 3' 1" in diameter or 12mm in 4mm scale.

 

Agree with Richard, if the wagons are riding high with the correct wheels fitted, there must be a mistake in the build.  I've done Cambrian kits and they are accurate.  Check the distance from the bottom of the solebar to the bottom of the W irons and compare to your other wagons.

 

John

Edited May 30, 2020 by brossard

[rab]

Can't help with your question, but one of the first things

I learned when I joined this forum was, there's

no such thing as a dumb/silly question.

[57xx]

One of my recent builds is a Cambrian D1664, i've got no issues with buffer height so unfortunately there's an error in the build. It's the one of the left of these three. I can take more pics of it in isolation if you require.

 

 

The only dumb question is the one you don't ask.

 

[niteshadex]

On 31/05/2020 at 16:19, 57xx said:

One of my recent builds is a Cambrian D1664, i've got no issues with buffer height so unfortunately there's an error in the build. It's the one of the left of these three. I can take more pics of it in isolation if you require.

 

 

The only dumb question is the one you don't ask.

 

 

Thank you all for your answers and not thinking my questions are dumb.  Can you take a pic of it next to a RTR wagon? Buffers touching?

[niteshadex]

Heres my build next to a parkside insulated van.  I cannot pinpoint where i went wrong

[Grovenor]

In that picture the gray van is riding low, looks like it needs bigger wheels, or the LMS van is high. Don't check buffer height against other vehicles, check by measurement or against a gauge. Buffers centre height should be between 13.5 and 14 mm above rail. to make a gauge just cut a strip of thickish plasicard 14 mm wide. Laid across the track at the vehicle end no more than half the buffer should be visible. You need to check before fitting Kadees or cut a notch in the strip to allow for them.

[Guy Rixon]

Looks to me like the bottoms of the axleguards are higher in the Cambrian van than the Parkside one, suggesting that the bearings in the former are lower in the axleguards. Are the bearings mounted in moulded axleguards or did you fit metal ones?

[niteshadex]

4 minutes ago, Guy Rixon said:

Looks to me like the bottoms of the axleguards are higher in the Cambrian van than the Parkside one, suggesting that the bearings in the former are lower in the axleguards. Are the bearings mounted in moulded axleguards or did you fit metal ones?

I just popped in Wizard Models top-hat pin-point bearings into the hole in the axleboxes with a drop of cement.  I made no modifications.

[niteshadex]

15 minutes ago, Grovenor said:

In that picture the gray van is riding low, looks like it needs bigger wheels, or the LMS van is high. Don't check buffer height against other vehicles, check by measurement or against a gauge. Buffers centre height should be between 13.5 and 14 mm above rail. to make a gauge just cut a strip of thickish plasicard 14 mm wide. Laid across the track at the vehicle end no more than half the buffer should be visible. You need to check before fitting Kadees or cut a notch in the strip to allow for them.

I actually added the Kadees AFTER i put 10.5mm wheels on the van.  They line up perfectly with the smaller wheels installed

[Grovenor]

The Kadees don't look to be lined up! Perhaps a picture with light on the subject would show it better.

[niteshadex]

8 minutes ago, Grovenor said:

The Kadees don't look to be lined up! Perhaps a picture with light on the subject would show it better.

Oh yeah in the picture they are not lined because i was demonstrating how the van sits on 12mm wheels.

 

On a side note, does anyone have any tips on how to line up the w-irons with these whitemetal kits.  Ive built one before, it came out OKAY, but the wheels were slightly off center.

[Guy Rixon]

2 minutes ago, niteshadex said:

On a side note, does anyone have any tips on how to line up the w-irons with these whitemetal kits.  Ive built one before, it came out OKAY, but the wheels were slightly off center.

An axle-alignment jig,  such as the one from from Brassmasters, will make the axles parallel and at the right distance apart. Getting them lined up in height across the vehicle is something for you to solve. 

[niteshadex]

8 minutes ago, Guy Rixon said:

An axle-alignment jig,  such as the one from from Brassmasters, will make the axles parallel and at the right distance apart. Getting them lined up in height across the vehicle is something for you to solve. 

ok so a tool does exist for that.  Thank you

[57xx]

Ah, that's a D1663, no D1664. No matter, it is the middle wagon of the three above. They all share the same chassis also so a moot point.

 

Here' the D1663 with a Bachmann 5 plank to the left, Hornby horsebox to the right:

 

Bachmann LNER Fruit van left, Hornby GWR Toad right:

 

Depending which RTR wagon I placed next to it , I got similar results of buffer levels. The centreline of the D1663 is at 14mm, so the top end of the range stated by Keith earlier.

 

Something I do on all the Cambrian kits is trimming about 0.5mm off the top of the ends of the springs. the main reason for this comes from having issues getting the first few I built sitting squarely on the track. The W iron moulding doesn't fit neatly onto the solebar and without trimming I was finding it was a bit of a force fit and distorting the moulding. Doing this probably also gave me back a bit of ride height (not something I was looking for at the time, but got as a side benefit).

 

 

[niteshadex]

2 hours ago, 57xx said:

Ah, that's a D1663, no D1664. No matter, it is the middle wagon of the three above. They all share the same chassis also so a moot point.

 

Here' the D1663 with a Bachmann 5 plank to the left, Hornby horsebox to the right:

 

Bachmann LNER Fruit van left, Hornby GWR Toad right:

 

Depending which RTR wagon I placed next to it , I got similar results of buffer levels. The centreline of the D1663 is at 14mm, so the top end of the range stated by Keith earlier.

 

Something I do on all the Cambrian kits is trimming about 0.5mm off the top of the ends of the springs. the main reason for this comes from having issues getting the first few I built sitting squarely on the track. The W iron moulding doesn't fit neatly onto the solebar and without trimming I was finding it was a bit of a force fit and distorting the moulding. Doing this probably also gave me back a bit of ride height (not something I was looking for at the time, but got as a side benefit).

 

 

Interesting, I will give that a try with the next one. I just ordered the ventilated version of the d1664 like the one shown a few posts up

[niteshadex]

By the way, just finished the 51L kit I posted above, with nothing but a craft knife, super glue, sandpaper, and tweezers. I am very happy with how it came out. I just ordered an alignment jig to help with future kits

[Compound2632]

That's a very clean whitemetal kit build - I think you've been fortunate starting with a good kit, some of them can be pigs. One finishing touch might be to round off the corner plates a bit (2" radius would be typical on the real thing) which will help close up the gap.

[brossard]

Good point C2632.  If the gap is large, try filling with 0.020" plastic rod and CA.

 

John

[niteshadex]

Will do, i noticed that too, it was a tad bit annoying when i tried to make the ends and side perfectly square w/o having a corner gap

[niteshadex]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

That's a very clean whitemetal kit build - I think you've been fortunate starting with a good kit, some of them can be pigs. One finishing touch might be to round off the corner plates a bit (2" radius would be typical on the real thing) which will help close up the gap.

Thanks it was a very basic kit, and it is now the first wagon i own with an 8'6 WB lol.