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David Andrews Princess - Princess Marie Louise 6206


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It's time for another weekend project to break cover.

 

Another of my outstanding jobs is the build of a David Andrews LMS Princess Pacific kit. The Loco is to be 6206 Princess Marie Louise depicted in the late 1930’s.

 

I was pleasantly surprised upon examining the box contents, that the gent that I am building it for had ordered all nickel etches.

 

6206 was slightly unusual in that for much of her life she was attached to a tender equipped with a coal pusher. The additional parts for this have been supplied by Finney7 from their Duchess tender.

 

The box also contains a lot of additional extra castings to upgrade the kit parts.

 

 

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The wheels are Alan Harris castings turned by the gent that I am building it for.

 

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When I started on the brake pull rods and fitting the water scoop, I quickly realised that the kit is very lacking in detail underneath the tender.

After being kindly supplied a drawing that showed the detail of the inner frames of the tender, I started to add some additional details. My spares box yielded a couple of balance weights which I added to the linkages supplied in the kit. Not perfect but better than nothing. This is still a work in progress.

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As you can see from the photos it does all move at the minute but I may need to solder it solid depending on how far I can go with the remaining linkages and how controllable they are.

 

I also started work on the brake linkages adding a bit of 3D detail to the joints using scrap etch and brass rod.

 

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The next interesting bit of the build was when I came to look at fitting the brakes. The kit provides etched brakes for the tender in the usual dual layer fashion. I had some nice casting from the Hobby Horse Reynolds range. They were the ones that I was drilling out when I showed my use of pliers to clamp them for drilling a short while ago.

 

When I put some rods through the chassis in the holes provided and dry fitted the Reynolds castings to the stretchers and pull rod frame they wouldn’t fit because they were not long enough. After a bit of head scratching I checked the drawing and sure enough they are to scale length. However when I checked them again the etched ones provided it all made sense.

 

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The answer to this little dilemma was to re-drill the holes in the frames 1mm lower down. There was just enough frame depth to do this without having to resort to adding hanger brackets.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

With the brake hanger height sorted it was time to fit them. Because the wheels are on telescopic axles, they need much more wiggle room to be removable than the Slaters et al, types. It’s actually quite surprising how little room you need to remove a Slaters wheel.

The lack of space around the brakes meant that for the wheels to be removable the brakes need to be removable too. I did this by adding a collar from microbore tube over the .9mm rods that the brakes hang from on the frames. And at the moment the cross shaft at the front of the tender is removable but I am sure that if this were fixed the brakes would pivot out of the way to get the wheels out.

 

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Just to prove that they are removable.

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I also made the two quite hefty support rods for the water scoop.

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Plus, a Blue Peter moment in that here’s one I did earlier. I fitted the brake cylinder that I turned when I first got the Unimat 3.

 

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A few general shots of the inner chassis, for no other reason than I got a bit carried away with the camera.

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Further progress on the tender has seen the basics of the body put together.

 

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So far, the only issues have been some bowing of the half-etched sheets which has taken a bit of work to get them soldered up straight. The worst being the rear sheets with the steps and the coal door.

 

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In the end I added a second sheet of 10thou nickel to back off the coal door.

 

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I still have more detail to add to the coal door.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

 

Although the gent that I am building it for doesn't want full inside motion. One thing that is quite visible through holes in the front frames, is movement of the crossheads. I was asked if I could add some element of movement using the spare outside motion bits from the kit ( a set of Premier rods etc. has been supplied for the build). Having started to think about it long before getting to the actual start of the build I realised that with the axles being hollow I couldn't use traditional cranks to make the crossheads move (or rather I wasn't comfortable that I could make it work without ruining axles wheels). So I thought that a pair of eccentrics would impart movement while being able to be attached to the hollow axles without having to cut them.

 

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We agreed this as the way forward and I ultimately bought castings for the slide bars/crossheads and eccentric straps from Laurie Griffin. I was also going to buy some eccentric sheaves too until I recalled Nick Dunhill finding the new cast versions very time consuming to prepare. Further thought made me also realise that the LG cast ones wouldn't really work anyway. This is because in a 'normal' inside motion set up the eccentric sheaves are trapped between the cranks so the eccentric straps cannot slip off the edge of the sheaves. Of course, I planned to use them as a single eccentric so they would need to be restrained at either side.

 

Instead of ordering a set of cast eccentrics along with the other parts, I bought a length of 12mm round brass bar instead.

 

Initially I was going to offset in the lathe using a four jaw chuck to offset the bar but having done a bit of research online, most machinists were of the view that you could but if you had a mill it would be far easier to drill it in the mill. Not being as proficient with my mill as I hope to be in time I did use the lathe to put a small centre mark in the end of the bar before transferring it to the vice in the mill.

 

Then using a centre drill inserted into my centre mark to centre it quickly, it was easy to plot the offset (2.4mm, more on this later) and then drill it out to 4.5mm. I then took it to final size with a reamer.

 

Transferring it back to the lathe I took a skim off the outside and marked up for the first sheave. Some time later we had this.

 

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I tried the eccentric strap for size and found it was just a little too wide for the strap to close completely around the sheave.

 

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It was at this point that I noticed that the depth of cut of the groove to accommodate the strap was such that it was very close to breaking through into the offset hole. It seems that in setting my offset hole at 2.4mm from the centre to gain the maximum amount of movement was just too much.

 

You may be able to see the mark where it’s just about to break through in the image below. This was made worse by having to apply a second slightly larger reamer than 3/16 (4.74mm) to get the axle end into the offset hole

 

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The plan is to start again from the other end with a 2mm offset hole and see how I get on.

 

To be continued…

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I went through the process again this time drilling the offset at 2mm which proved to be perfect for this particular application.

 

I had been using a very thin cutting tool which someone had ground (not very well it turned out) which came in the box of bits with the lathe. After cutting the first one I thought that I would examine the tool to see if I could improve it or at least rub it on a stone to restore the cutting edge. When I looked closely at the cutting part I noticed that the bottom of the tool was wider than the top and although there was some rake away from the cutting edge the fact that it was getting thicker couldn’t be helping to make an efficient cut.

 

This is a sketch of what the tool looked like originally albeit the bottom of the wedge is somewhat exaggerated.

 

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I have watched a few Youtube videos on sharpening lathe tools recently so I had a go at grinding the tool to take off some of the thickness towards the bottom making the two sides parallel.

 

This improved the cut and I successfully cut the groove for the first sheave. Then I parted it off but I was a little too close leaving a very thin edge. During the parting off, the parting tool moved slightly in its holder which pushed over the thin rim of the sheave slightly closing the top of the groove.

 

In the end it was usable but I decided to cut another pair to be on the safe side. It was while parting off the first one that I noted that my parting tool was in fact just the right thickness for cutting the groove without having to move the carriage as well as the cross slide to get the desired cut.

 

Having discovered this the next one progressed much faster and modifying the fixture that holds the parting tool so that it grips the parting tool more securely by squeezing it in the vice made the third one even faster still. The parting tool is one like this albeit mine only has one tool. You will note that it’s a pressed steel fitting that grips the part with the aid of a cap screw. Mine didn’t hold the cutting tool very closely to the holder but it does now.

 

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So here we have the finished sheaves.

 

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This is how they will fit on the axle once I work out their alignment with the crossheads further down the line.

 

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It turns out that I wasn’t far out with my 16mm deep offset hole, I had a measure of the remaining stock while putting this post together, and there is just about enough material to cut a 4th sheave had I needed a full set for a conventional inside motion build.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Modelling time has been in short spells just recently, hence my lack of posts. I have been beavering away at detailing the front and rear of the tender but I haven’t taken any photos yet. However, a discussion on the Guild forum about details of the coal pusher fitted tenders had me looking closely at the drawings of the modifications done to the 9 Ton tender to increase coal capacity to 10 Tons. There are drawings of the upperworks in LMS Profiles no 4.

The tank vent castings cleaned up quite nicely by spinning them in the mini drill with a bit of scotchbrite and although the water filler was a reasonable casting, when comparing it to the drawing it’s a bit on the undernourished side. So, using the same bar as I used for the eccentrics which was just the right diameter, I decided to make a replacement. I had a look at as many photos as I could find and it seems that David Andrews has the type of hinge mechanism pretty much correct albeit that all the ones that I saw had plain straps without visible fasteners.

 

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After turning, I transferred it to the mill and used a recently acquired edge finder (less than £7 posted from Allendale) to help to accurately position the holes. I then used a 1mm collet to hold a .06mm drill and away we went. Fitting such small drill bits into a collet on the mill is a bit of a fiddle and you could really do with another hand but it’s worth it.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Looking to start adding as much as I could details wise, before assembling the main components. I dry fitted the tank filler and the vent pipe castings on the tank top plate. Although the latter are generally not bad castings, when I opened out the etched holes, they both sat lopsided. I attempted to tidy them up using a square needle file but wasn’t able to correct the lean.

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I decided to have a go at turning them, but gripping them to turn them in the lathe was going to prove interesting. So, I took a leaf out of the late David Smith (DLOS)’s book, and made a split collet from a length of aluminium rod.

I had recently watched a YouTube video of someone doing just that and the guy who made the video had left a collar on his split collet to make it easier to get it in and out of the lathe collet.

 

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This shot shows how the casting sits in the split collet.

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You can see in the shot below how lopsided the base was. The rim of the base plate was so thin that I dare not turn too much off or I would have ended up having to turn a collar to replace it. Which was plan B if I hadn’t been able to get the existing base plate to sit flat

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Thankfully I got away with it and didn’t need to resort to plan B.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

A couple of bereavements since my last post on this have slowed things down somewhat but I have made a little more progress.

Getting the rear of the tender and the tank top square and straight up has been a bit of a struggle.

 

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This has mainly been due to the fact that the rear of the tender is mainly half etched. The half etching process in what is quite thick base material, has made it curl in several planes.

A look at one of the tender sides probably helps to illustrate this better than the photos of the tender rear.

 

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I got there in the end.

 

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  • 5 months later...

Although I haven't posted for a while, the battle with the 4000 gallon tender has continued.

 

The biggest issue has been the coal space and getting it to fit. The instructions rather unhelpfully refer to fettling and filling gaps with coal. Fine if you are modelling a tender loaded with coal but not if you want to see the coal pusher.

 

The coal pusher castings are Finney 7 and as expected just come as a set of castings so I needed to make the push rods from strips of nickel cut with the guillotine.

 

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Although a casting was provided in the set for the vent pipe arrangement Due to the laminated rear of the coal space being quite a chunk I didn't trust that I could successfully solder it on without the risk of melting it so I filed up a replacement from some brass bar.

 

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In order to get the coal chute to sit down properly I had to cut 2mm of the front edge.

 

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While mulling over how to get the fire iron tunnel in place and the left hand side to fit without a gap I decide to make up all the little details that contribute to the whole.

 

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The castings for the intermediate buffers were a little soft around the edges so I turned some from nickel that are a little more crisp looking.

 

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I did the same with the windlass handles for the brakes/water scoop

 

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Next, I moved onto the springs and hangers. Several of the dampers had become detached from the springs. The white metal pins are the vulnerable parts so I decided to replace them.

First, I cut off all the dampers and pins from the springs. Next, I used a burr that came with a set of tools for the Dremel in the mill, to mill out the remains of the pin between the frame of the damper. I had to slow the mill down to 320 rpm in order not to over heat and melt the white metal.

 

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I used a clothes peg to hold the springs to drill them again using the mill.

 

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I cut lengths of brass rod to replace the white metal pins. I made a jig from a piece of ply with a blob of bluetack and a hand vice to help with soldering.

 

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Not the prettiest of soldering but they look a lot better.

 

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Pretty much all of the external detailing is now complete. Studying the only photograph that I have of the rear of the tender (LMS Loco Profiles No4 Page 84) I noted that there was a small fitting with what initially looked like a single outlet pipe which is how I fitted the small casting, that I found tucked away in the corner of the castings bag.

 

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However, having checked the Finney Duchess instructions and then looking at an a scanned and enlarged view of the fitting it seems that there is indeed a second pipe so I will need to revisit it and fit a second pipe, if I can.

I have posted elsewhere of the lamp irons that I milled from recycled plug pins but I haven’t showed them fitted.

 

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I forgot to add that, for some reason probably oversight, there were no castings for the steam heat pipes. I had a look in the spares box but the casting that I had wasn't very good so I made one up from rod, scrap etch and fine wire.

 

I also made the vacuum pipe removable (screwed on from underneath by a 10 ba screw) to ease painting.

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A few good sessions at the bench over the last couple of days has seen the tender finished, aside from one remaining task. I have made the cross frames which fit between the wheels removable via some brass angle soldered to the inside of the outer frames. One of them needs to be cut to fit around the scoop operating mechanism.

 

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Despite having built several Stanier tenders now, this one has been the most challenging to date. Some of that has been due to the large half etched panels and straightening out the bowing of them brought on by the etching process. The remaining fight has been with the fit of the coal space.

 

Not that clear in the photo below due to all parts being nickel, but in order to finish of the left side, I had to cut a triangular strip 3mm wide tapering to nothing over 55mm

 

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Here we are with the axle box/spring castings just rested in place for the photos. They will be fixed in place after painting.

 

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If you zoom into the photo below you can see that I did revisit the second feed pipe on the coal pusher mechanism.

 

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Usually when I start a loco build, I start by making up the coupling rods in preparation for aiding with the assembly of the chassis. On a whim, I decided to build the trailing truck and the bogie first.

 

First the trailing truck.

 

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The truck is in two parts an outer and an inner which holds the axles/wheels. As it comes in the kit it's a fold up frame with the front yoke as separate etches that you assemble to create the I frame.

 

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I am working from the Wild Swan Loco Profile book N0 4 The Princess Royal Pacifics and aside from photos and historical information about the development and changes to the locos over time it also contains a number of General Arrangement Drawings. One of sets of drawings is for the trailing truck and shows the differences between the first two and the main production batch. 6206 is from the latter. What is clear from the drawings but not from photos (because you only see the sides not the ends) is that the front and back of the truck is also I beam type construction. I decided to add this from 10 thou nickel sheet cut with the guillotine. You can see the first piece in place on the photo above.

 

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The inner truck is a basic fold up box that you add a couple of nuts to and then fit bearings. Although it cannot be seen from any angle unless you turn it upside down the drawing shows that there is some kind of side control mechanism so I decided to turn a basic representation of it from a couple of pieces of brass rod.

 

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Lastly the truck assembled and ready to fit to the chassis at some future point.

 

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The additions have also added a little more weight to the truck so with luck I may not need to try and find room for some lead later on.

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The bogie as supplied is a fold up box to which additional end pieces are soldered. I forgot to take a phot of this so I include a snip from the instructions to show what it consists of.

 

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I have some very nice castings in place of the etch parts B6, but sadly as you will see not much of them is visible on the finished bogie.

 

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I built up the bogies frames to create the I section where needed, as with the trailing truck. I also added some rivet strip along the top. Parts 164 are white metal castings which were passable, but I chose to remake them from brass

 

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You will also note parts B10, this is where period photos are essential because these were not fitted until the 1940's which is later than this model is to be depicted (around 1938). There were location marks half etched into the spring plates so I reversed them to hide the marks.

 

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I have also elongated one pair of holes so that I can provide some basic springing of one axle.

 

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Once it's all assembled you can see what I mean about the visibility of the springs.

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It was only after taking the photos above and preparing them for upload I realised that I hadn't fitted the guard irons. So that was a quick task this morning. As supplied the slots in the bogie were much wider than the thickness of the etch so I beefed them up with another layer and then shaped them to suit.

 

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Edited by Rob Pulham
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