A tale of a Terrier

[burgundy]

Towards the end of the last millennium, I was at the Bristol show and spotted some Dapol Terriers in Brighton livery which were going relatively cheaply. In one of those moments of optimism, I bought a Stepney and a Boxhill with the intention of building EM gauge chassis for them, as a way to produce a couple of “quickie†locos, that would be “good enoughâ€. This note records how, 12 or 15 years later, one of those locos is now finished (nearly).

 

Back in the days when Andy Mullins owned Branchlines, he produced a page of notes on “Improving the Dapol Terrier†(the copyright date is 1989), to support the range of bits that he produced for just that purpose. These included not only an etched chassis, but salter balances for the dome, a smokebox door is mentioned and there was a rather nice set of nickel silver wheels, which were designed for the split frame system. Given that I was starting with a plastic loco body, it seemed a good chance to experiment with split frames. I did make a start on the axles, which came in two pieces with a jig so that you could glue them together but maintain the insulation between the two ends. It worked for two, but the third axle ended up “unsplitâ€, with no insulation and I never quite got round to buying a replacement. This was partly because I was also struggling to work out how I would attach a gearbox to a split axle without it bridging the split. If someone can explain how to do it, I should be very grateful and might even give it another go as all the bits are still sitting there (along with the second body). The axles for the wheels were also 2mm diameter, which started to lead down a path of non-standard hornblocks or similar complications and in the end, I simply put the whole lot on one side to see whether time would make the whole process any clearer.

 

I imagine that it will come as no great surprise that when I next looked at the bits, it was no more obvious and, since Andy Mullins had sold the business, it was not possible to ask him whether he had had a cunning plan to get around these problems. So I adopted the line of least resistance and bought a set of conventional Alan Gibson wheels, which solved both the split frame and 2mm diameter axle issues at the same time. It would be a slight exaggeration to say that the chassis went together without a problem, as I was experimenting with a simple chassis jig that I had not used before. The thing about a jig is that it produces a consistent result. Unfortunately, if it is not set up exactly correctly, it guarantees a consistently wrong result. It took me a little while to work this out and I hope that I have now sorted it.

 

Turning to the body, it immediately became apparent that my effort to buy bodies in the Brighton livery had been a complete waste of time. The front of the side tanks was painted green, looked very odd and highlighted the rather bilious shade on all the border areas. The boiler feeds and associated pipework are moulded and as a minimum the pipework would need to be cut away and replaced. And the area under the boiler needs some fairly serious surgery to remove and make good some of the less prototypical bits – including filling in the inexplicable hole in the footplate. It may be possible to deal with all these by judicious touching up, but, by this time, I was beginning to recognise that I was probably in for a complete repaint. This at least saved me from having to try to match the shade of khaki that had been used in lieu of Improved Engine Green. With hindsight, it would have been a lot more sensible to have rescued a couple of those unfortunate Terriers that are condemned to a life in Brunswick green, with a shirtbutton logo.....

 

Pulling the body apart is fairly straightforward. The cab unclips from the footplate and releases the piece of ballast that lives in the toolbox. Removing the smokebox door exposes the piece of ballast in the front of the boiler and that is released with a screw. Salter balances, whistle, tank fillers, tank domes and condensing pipes respond to a little controlled violence. The bars over the rear spectacle plate need to be carved out and the cab glazing is surprisingly resistant.

 

Andy Mullins’ list of suggestions for other improvements is pretty comprehensive and, for the most part involves the bits that can be pulled off – rather than carved - but the buffers and boiler feeds require simple amputation. Since I was building a Terrier in original form (rather than rebuilt to A1x), the ring for the extended smokebox could be thrown away, the sandbox on the leading splasher was correct, but I needed to add a wingplate with the interesting reverse curves to provide the appropriate front view. The smokebox door then fits directly to the wingplate. Other bits to add back were

 

• Salter balances on the dome, taking care to relocate the holes for the balances so that they stand parallel and just touch the base of the dome;
• boiler feeds and pipework – I took off the whole lot and replaced it with spares off a D tank;
• condensing pipes – fabricated out of brass rod, which then has to be painted copper;
• tank fillers and domes – the base of the fillers is very thin and the instructions suggest adding a slice of suitable tube. This rather assumes that you have something the right size in the scrap box. The domes were shortened slightly by drilling out the locating hole so that they sit a little deeper;
• buffers – Alan Gibson. The critical bit is trying to get the height correct so that the top of the casing sits just a tiny bit higher than the footplate. In later times the buffers sat even higher. The suggestion in the instructions to centre the hole 3mm above the bottom of the beam appears to be wrong;
• handrails and knobs. Initially, I decided that it would be too difficult to fill in the craters on the loco boiler that Dapol had created and then to drill them out again in the same position for something more elegant. Some while later, I discovered that actually Dapol have located the handrails too high and they should sit on the top of the sidetanks, not on the boiler. By that stage, I am afraid it was too late and I have made the best of the Dapol handrail knobs, drilling the holes out so that they sit slightly deeper. The rails are very thin tube, with a piece of rod inserted in the end to represent the actuating rod that ran to the two fixtures on the sides of the smokebox and finally
• lampirons were added out of black plasticard which I figured would be at least as secure as trying to superglue something in etched brass.

Two slight oddities emerged from the repainting and lining process. The tank lining should run along the line of the rivets that hold the tank sidesheets on. Following this rule seems to have left the top olive green area slightly too deep and the sidetank panel too shallow. This only became obvious when I was trying to line up the condensing pipes. The other emerged when I was applying the lining to the valences and it became obvious that Dapol's Terriers have a much longer arc to the ends of the valences; on the prototype, these curves are actually quite sharp.

 

Which gets things to the state shown on the photo below.

 

However, since this was a quickie, it seemed like a good candidate to try out a weathered version of Mr Stroudley’s livery and that story must therefore pick up in a new thread on the appropriate section of the site. See

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/41402-more-of-the-tale-of-a-terrier/

Eric

[burgundy]

As a brief postscript to this saga, I have become aware of a further issue with the Dapol body, as a representation of a Terrier in its original form. The dome is located a bit further forward than it should be for the original Stroudley boiler for an A1 class. I suspect that the tooling for this loco was based on an A1x rebuild, which had a boiler designed by Marsh, with the dome located slightly further forward.

In my case, I am afraid that it is just going to stay like that!

Best wishes

Eric