5" Gauge L&Y Aspinall Class 27

[kipford]

This thread is going to be occasional, about the journey I am going to take into the world of model engineering and I thought some of my fellow smaller scale modellers may be interested in what is going to be an interesting journey.

So to start few points that help provide an insight into how I started this thing off:

.

After 25 odd years of EM gauge modelling I have decided to add an extra dimension to my interest, large scale live steam. I have always been tempted to have a go and nearly started about 11 years ago. Anyway with the possibility of retirement coming early in a couple of years time plus too many cyclists around where we live to make driving my hooligan car safe, I decided to take the plunge. The hooligan car was sold and the proceeds transferred into a new war chest.

 

I had a well equipped workshop, but no machine tools.

 

I am an engineer by profession but have not twiddled any machine tool knobs since my undergraduate days in the late 1970’s.

 

5” gauge 1/16” scale is the chosen size, because it is still manageable on your own, you do not need a trailer to transport the loco and generally the machine tools do not need to be so big or expensive (although no doubt someone will come along to prove me wrong).

 

The 5” gauge ground level society activities appeal and I also wanted to build a prototypical loco not a freelance look outline or narrow gauge

.

THIS IS NOT A CHEAP WAY OF ENJOYING YOURSELF. My initial budget is around £5500 to get all the tools and build the loco all myself. It assumes I will build my own boiler, as a commercial one will eat too much of the war chest.

 

So how far have I got?

 

The Workshop:

Before I could start anything I needed to revamp the workshop. In fact I ended up using the garage as a second workshop because my other one has a suspended floor and will not take the machine tool mass without substantial strengthening. So with the hooligan car gone the garage was cleaned and tidied, the floor repainted and the search commenced for a lathe and a mill. Basically buy the biggest most expensive you can fit in the space available. So what did I get:

Lathe:

Warco WM250, this is a Chinese lathe basically the same size as a Myford ML7. It was second hand, 18 months old and bough off E-Bay. The owner had upgraded to a very large Harrison and it was surplus to his requirements. However it had been completely rebuilt with ‘proper bearings’, had high quality aftermarket chucks, Quick change tool post, full range of Glanze indexible tooling, stand etc etc. It has proved to be a great buy.

Mill:

Suitable sized mills second hand seem to be as rare as rocking horse! So this ended up as brand new purchase. Again it was Warco, the WM16. It was bought at one of their open days. You do not get discount as such but they threw in the machine vice, a basic set of collets and end mills etc.

Bandsaw:

Not necessary, a nice to have but it takes the pain out of sawing up bar stock (up to 4.5” diameter) and also allows you rasher things quite small to maximise the bar usage.

So that is the basics, working with machine tools is like opening a bottomless pit in your wallet as tool porn comes into play and you suddenly find all these extras that make life a lot easier. So additonal things I have bought so far include. Collet chuck holders for both the lathe and mill plus collets, DRO’s for mill, rotary table, boring head, extra tool holders for the lathe, DTI’s, digital micrometer and so the list go on! Oh plus building a new bench and buying a new vice for the garage workshop. The picture below shows the garage with the new toys installed. By the way management brownie points were greatly increased when the new toys were used machine new parts for a worn out door latch for the house that we had been unable to replace.

 

 

The First Locomotive:

Having never done anything like this before the first loco was going to have to be built to plans and preferably with castings available for the major parts. I wanted a tender engine and my original choice was going to be a standard class 2 designed by a gentleman named Don Young. As you get into this part of the hobby you quickly found out that some loco designs leave a lot to be desired having errors in the design etc and Don Young designs appear to get less flack than some other peoples. Anyway after talking to various people in the know the standard class 2 was ruled out because it has a tapered belpaire boiler, not the easiest of things to build on your first attempt. Being involved with a large EM LNWR layout, Hope–under-Dinmore and having produced the artwork for the L and Y societies 4mm loco transfers, the choice narrowed down to the Aspinall Class 27 L and Y to a design by Don Young. It is an elegant loco, has a parallel boiler, easy access to the controls without having to chop bits out of the cab, there is one in preservation and not too many about.

 

The castings and drawings are available from a firm called Reeves and another firm Model Engineers Laser can laser cut the main frames, tender frames, connecting rods and myriad of other sheet metal parts to order. As you will see later and from my other RMweb threads I will always use the easiest method to make things if it works financially and being able to use laser cut parts is one of the positives.

So I bought the drawings from Reeves and also the castings as they had them on offer at 15% discount, this still blew just over £1200.

Having got the drawing I am now completely re-modelling the loco in 3D CAD to check for errors it also helps getting to know the design and sort out some of the ambiguity on the drawings. So far I have finished the boiler, the cylinders and motion and most of the frames below footplate level. So this is a work in progress.

 

 

 

Driving Truck:

A thought came into my head a few weeks ago. I need a driving truck to go behind the loco and if I made one before making the loco I could practise a lot of the same machining tasks and and possibly not mess up some expensive castings.

Being me, I decided to design my own truck. I wanted a truck that could be configured for both ground level and raised tracks and also something that had a bit of a prototypical look to it. The LNWR Boiler Trolley filled that brief, especially as one of its chemical wagon sisters was fitted with a body and seats to transport people around Crewe yard and this set up would provide a seat for the ground level version. So the result is the 4 wheeled wagon shown in the pictures. As I still work for a living I am very lucky and have access to Laser/Punching and CNC bending facilities. So the sheets metal parts were all designed with pre-formed holes that were laser/punched on the scrap parts jobs running through the shop floor. I know it is cheating but life is too short to not use facilities like this. As an aside we use argon as the shielding gas for our lasers which means we do not get the very hard surface on the cut edges.

The following pictures show the kit of parts and then the basic chassis pinned together. No additional holes or fettling has been used it just self jigs. Also shown is the set up for raised and ground level track.

 

 

I started the machined parts last Sunday so the journey begins!!!!!!!!!!!

Edited May 25, 2016 by kipford

[Kempenfelt]

Hi Dave, interesting thread!

 

As a fellow GL5 member and owner of both a Don Young Class 2 and Aspinall, I can whole heartedly confirm that I agree with your choice! I own the Aspinall that was built by Norman Lowe who designed all the backhead fittings and made most of Don's pattern's, he was afterall head of Horwich works pattern school when he retired. The engine is a joy to drive and run, and you may well have seen it at the Bristol Model Engineering show over the past few years, Doncaster last weekend or operating at Gilling if you've made it that far.

 

Just in case you haven't, here's a few pic's for interest.

 

 

 

 

Very best wishes with your project! You've made a great start on the driving truck and I like the look of the CAD drawings!

 

I'll be at Railex this coming weekend on Clutton should you wish to come and have a chat.

 

Paul

[Pannier Tank]

Excellent workshop, look forward to following your progress. I wish I was following in your footsteps with maybe a 5" Gauge Pannier Tank or Jinty! Redundancy / early retirement has financially put paid to that, whether I would have had the necessary skills is another matter.

[kipford]

Paul

Stunning locomotive really gets the juices fired up, I had heard about you loco, but had never managed to find a photo on the web. Being new to the model engineering side of things I have not yet been to Bristol or Gilling. My Son now lives in Bristol and I hope to visit the Bristol show with him in August. At present I do not belong to a society, as my 4mm commitments are taking precedence, but will join one in due course.  I am lucky in have the Portsmouth, Southampton, Chichester, Fareham and Guilford societies all within 30 minutes drive. The Southampton crew were were extremely welcoming when I visited with my wife and as I believe you know, their chairman David Godyer is also building an Aspinall.  I may be cheeky and ask you to photograph certain parts of the loco as I go on, what would be good to start with is some detailed photos of how your cab and back head is configured though.

 

Regards

 

Dave

[Jol Wilkinson]

Hi Dave,

 

interesting direction compared to the LNWR Crane Tank.

 

Your comment about tool lust (rather than porn) is amusing. Many years ago I decided (wrongly and without success) to attempt to build a 3 1/2"  "Jumbo" (LBSC's Mabel design) by doing the heavy work at the local college's evening classes. Everyone else was using the well maintained and expensive college machinery to make fittings and attachments for their Myford ML7. It seemed that machine tools were what counted most, rather than model engineering. I know another EM gauge modeller who has a large collection of machine tools, I wonder if it is a common complaint.

 

The Class 27 looks nice, but how much better a LNWR Cauliflower would be.

 

Jol

[kipford]

Hi jol

There are the drawings and a limited amount of castings available for a Precursor which when making the final loco decision came in second place.  The Cauliflower would be a complete design from scratch job, however I do have plans to quietly convert all my data on the LNWR Crane Tank/Shunting Engine into a 5" gauge version, the short wheel base puts it narrow gauge league for running round tight radii, I also thought it would work well on 5" gauge shunting plank on the drive!

[kipford]

OK some my journey continues. I decided to have a go at the buffers next. The faces of the buffer of the buffer heads are curved on a 70 mm radius. How was I going to machine that repeatably and accurately. The model engineering clearing hoise forum came up with answer, which necessitated the manufacture of a fixture. you soon learn in this sector of the hobby you can spend as much time making jigs and fixtures as making the bits. Anyway the first photo shows a swing link that clamps to the lathe bed under the vertical centre line of the chuck. The other end clamps to the cross slide under the vertical centre line of the tool tip. The link is adjustable length which gives you the radius you wish to machine. The way it works is you move the tool with cross slide keep a very light pressure on the carriage wheel. because of the swing link the the tool is forced to describe an arc of the radius you want, simples when you know. The following photos show the buffer head and the stock as machined and deburred. for a first attempt no bad I thought, gives me confidence for when I do the actual locomotive ones. The stocks were actually a very easy turning and milling job.

 

Anyway 3 more to make and I will be taking a break for a few weeks as I have holidays comming up and more important the first test etches for the LNWR shunting engine I have designed for London Raod Models have arrived and I need to check these out and see if it acually assembles!

Edited June 20, 2016 by kipford

[Guest Lyonesse]

> Size can be scaled, tolerances cannot

 

But how hard it is to make people understand this simple truth.  (Yes, I'm looking at you, people who claim they can run dead scale (S4) track and wheel standards built with hand tools and plastic centred wheels.)

 

 

Loving this thread, btw.
 

[Jol Wilkinson]

> Size can be scaled, tolerances cannot

 

But how hard it is to make people understand this simple truth.  (Yes, I'm looking at you, people who claim they can run dead scale (S4) track and wheel standards built with hand tools and plastic centred wheels.)

 

 

Loving this thread, btw.

 

Not an OO modeller by any chance?

[Guest Lyonesse]

Not an OO modeller by any chance?

P4.  The original MRSG standards have some tight, but achievable tolerances built in.  The dig was aimed at people who think that all it takes to make a workable set of wheel/track standards is to divide a set of prototype dimensions by 76.2 (or whatever).  As the man said, tolerances don't scale.

[kipford]

As I said this will be an occasional thread. Progress is slow due to other commitments and also still learning about using the machines, making bits of tooling etc. I fitted a new DRO system with optical scales. The old system was eating batteries and would randomly reset during use! Despite isolating the scales, etc nothing improved it so I cut my losses. After putting it off for ages I finally machined the horn block guides (after fitting the new DRO's), it was much easier than I thought.

 

Attention then turned to the wheels. These are a representation of a 3 hole wagon wheel and I thought it may be of interest to descibe how they were machined. They started as a 100 mm diameter bar rashered into 15 mm thick blanks with the horizontal band saw. Without that saw I am not sure how I would have done it. Using the 3 jaw chuck, the blanks were faced both sides and the side shapes machined. Finally the centre hole drilled and then reamed to 12 mm. This was all new having never machined a wheel before. Then came the tread. I had already decided the final tread profile will be machined assembled on the axles between centres. However I still need to created the basic profile allowing 0.75 mm for final machining. After a lot of thought and some request for help on the interweb. A piece of 25 mm steel was put in the 3 jaw and a spigot 1 mm thinner than the wheel was turned to a slide fit for the wheels, add an M8 female thread and you can bolt the wheel to it. It stays in the lathe unitl all the wheels are machined to ensure there is no run out.  The Flanges were machined in the sequence shown in the drawing I have got to step 3.  Step 1 is rough turn a square flange. Step 2 using a 6 mm radius tool to put in the the 3 mm radius. Here I met the only problem so far. While the machined spigot works great, it does not fully support the wheel across its face, hence I am getting too much chatter with radius tool when it is cutting at full depth. I will try using a face plate or a larger spigot for the loco wheels. Step 3 uses the button tool again to put the flange and tread on 0.75 mm over size. The final cut for this stage was taken with the tool was set using the carriage and cross slide to the start dimensions shown on the drawing. Then the tool advanced using the compound slide the dimension 3.96 and 10.04 dimensions. The result is shown in the photo.

Next stage is to drill the holes in the axle face, make the axles and fit the wheels, then machine up some HSS to make a turning tool with a 2.4 mm radius to use for the final machining. That will be another first.

 

Hope this is of interest to some

[kipford]

I said this would be an occasional thread. I notice is 11 months since I last posted. A lot has happened this year, Working on the driving truck, taking Brighton to a lot of exhibitions, trying to restart the LNWR crane tank, catching up on decorating and oh and as visitors to my Brighton thread will be aware taking early retirement on the 22nd December and all the hassle that involved at work. The driving truck is basically finished apart from the foot rests and cushions for raised and ground level operations. It all went reasonably to plan with the exception of a couple of reworks on the brake system, due to lack of data on bicycle calliper dimensions requiring a couple of reworks. So here are a few photos of work so far.

First couple are of the finished truck before I finish painted it (these will come in the next update), sat on piece of 5" gauge track. The proximity of the bench shows the scale of it.

The next few show some of the component parts needed, plus the bike brake caliper and its associated disc.

 

I mentioned taking early retirement, well my retirement present to myself from work (not the official one) was around 200 laser cut parts for the Loco. Earlier in the year I finished the 3D CAD model in sufficient detail to think about what could be laser cut. There are a lot of laser cut parts available from Model Engineers Laser but not on the level I was thinking, plus I they would be gratius. I spent about a month going through every part on the loco including fixtures for the boiler, to see what could be laser cut to give a finished part or at least give a good start. Some small modifications to the way parts are assembled provided some very useful returns. While I was at it I also redesigned the ash pan. As Don drew it the ash pan is fixed which makes dropping the fire and cleaning the grate more difficult. Putting a simple drop grate system in was a no no as it would have meant dispensing with the prototypical centre pull brake rods. The ability to laser cut parts has made the execution of a solution quite simple. These parts arrived on trolley in two big boxes in my office on 21st December to all sorts of knowing  looks from collegues. I have yet to sort them out but I am very pleased with the results and will  post some photos when I have. The frames, running boards, valences and cab structure look very impressive. I will have to by some laser parts from Model Engineers Laser as we do not use brass and were out of 6mm material.

 

Before I can do anymore though I have to get my lathe back up running. I said in earlier post I fitted optical scales to the mill, which are very good. Well I have since bought a 3 axis read out for the mill and fitted a new Z axis, as the built in one I was unhappy with a two decimal place read out for metric dimensions. The two axis read out has been transferred to the lathe and I am fitting optical scales to the saddle and cross slide. As with anything it is not just a case of fitting them, you need to machine mountings as well. Anyway that is it for now hopefully I can put an update up next week. Happy new year.

[kipford]

Some photos of the painted wagon with transfers

Edited January 5, 2018 by kipford

[Bucoops]

Love it

 

Your procurement process reminds me of when I used to work for an engineering company as a designer. Every now and then a part wouldn't fit the machine. But somehow, as if my magic, it would fit my car 

[Beatty 139]

Out of interest what 3D cad software are you using?

[kipford]

Beatty

Until 3 weeks ago I was Chief Designer for an Aerospace company, so had access to the industry standard CATIA (you cannot afford it). Now I am retired I am still using CATIA but from a source I cannot reveal  

[Beatty 139]

I fully understand as I am the same with AutoCAD!

[kipford]

I said I would post some photos of the laser cut parts for the loco when I started sorting them. The following is a selection of about 30% of the parts!

 

First typical 20 swg parts, these include frames to form the beading on the splashers, trying to fret these out of sheet would have been a horrifying thought. The edge finish is very good because the laser used uses Argon rather then CO2 as the shielding gas which eliminates the hard surface often found on laser cut edge.

 

 

Close up of the splasher beading

 

 

Typical 3mm steel parts

 

 

The small parts are nested so I do not loose them or for ease of carrying out future operations

 

 

Stainless steel parts for the grate

 

 

Reach Rod etc

 

 

Tender Frames

 

 

Main frames, foot plate, valence

 

 

Detail of part of the main frames

 

 

So onto a construction. In time honoured way I will start on the tender, that's all for now folks.

 

[kipford]

Spent a couple of hours this afternoon, deburring all the holes in the buffer beams and tender frames, part of the deal with them being gratius is that they come straight off the laser so there is often a little bit blow through on one side, plus there is the odd cusp where the beam starts and stops which needs to be removed. Anyway I could not resist doing a quick trial assembly. I need a few more 3/32" Clecko pins as most of mine are 1/8". So here are a couple of pictures of what the tender chassis will look like minus the drag box.

 

 

 

 

 

[Jol Wilkinson]

Spent a couple of hours this afternoon, deburring all the holes in the buffer beams and tender frames, part of the deal with them being gratius is that they come straight off the laser so there is often a little bit blow through on one side, plus there is the odd cusp where the beam starts and stops which needs to be removed. Anyway I could not resist doing a quick trial assembly. I need a few more 3/32" Clecko pins as most of mine are 1/8". So here are a couple of pictures of what the tender chassis will look like minus the drag box.

 

 

Dave,

 

I've seen Cleco pins used for car body restoration, great idea to use them here,

 

I've sent a PM  re some (possibly) new  information on the LNWR Crane Tank.

 

Jol

[kipford]

Finished the high level track version of my driving truck this afternoon.

Sad what!!!!!!!!!!

 

[kipford]

Update time. Retirement - how did I ever find time to go to work? The arrival of a our first Grandchild, a little engine driver, last week will only make things worse. Anyway when not working on the LNWR kits I have been steadily working on the tender for the Aspinal. I started making the axle boxes from the castings bought from Reeves. However I have scrapped these and started again. Reason, well for a start the casting are too small to make the axle boxes in accordance with the drawings. The horns had plently of meet on them and I initially reconfigured the horn/axlebox dimensions to allow for this. However it was very tight and some of the castings did fully clean up although they could ha ve been used. I was not happy with the finish I was going to get so bit the bullet, scrapped them and redesign the axlebox to be made in steel with needle roller bearings. So far I have squared up the steel blocks using the mill and lathe (four jaw), they are now ready to bore the holes for the axles. However first I am machining the horns, photos to follow. I suppose I should have complained to Reeves, but I had had the castings over a year and  could not be bothered. At the same time I have silver soldered the tender drag box and dummy assembled the tender chassis. I also assembled the majority of the tender body. Now most model engineers make the tender bodies from brass. I have done mine in the majority from laser cut steel parts (same as the protoype), brass for the tender coping and tool boxes. Why? Simple, cost. Laser cut brass parts would have cost in excess of £200, the steel parts were free from my old place of work, so it was no contest. Also there is no problem with modern paint finishes keeping the steel from corroding. So a few photos to show progress.

Coal shute bending jig

Coal shute bent to shape

Initial assembly of tender body

Water filler assembly

More tender assembly, getting ready to do more silver soldering

Machining tender coping

Dummy assembled chassis

The results so far!

Edited June 17, 2018 by kipford

[Coal Tank]

Very very nice

[Wizard of the Moor]

Where do you get the clamps that you use in the water filler assembly pic? They look very useful.

 

Lovely work, by the way

[PenrithBeacon]

Wow!