M Wright

Hi, well that has been a long break from this blog. It has all been real world problems 30 year old kids' careers, mum in the nursing home, most of you will get the picture. I have found time to nearly finish the Lochgorm fish wagon. I think it will be in olive to match the other one. I am not too sure if they were even painted. There is a photo of a line of them on the dock at Kyle. None of them have any inscriptions and most look to be in bare wood, Hi Ho we will never know now. The business side of the workshop has been pushing on, a batch of 5 Baldwin Gas Mechanicals in 16mm scale is nearly done. They look quite nice on the bench. It has been interesting following the Neil Sayer kit build of the same loco in O scale on this site. Talking to Neil he said his kit had been partly inspired by seeing one of my BGMs some years ago. I wish I had had the sense to cast the bonnet and gear box in resin rather that make all those patterns for ABS to cast for me! The last photo is the first one finished ready for painting. Another 4 following on.

Hi, I thought it might be more interesting to show you what I am doing now. I will return to the Skye Bogie later. Over the last few months in odd moments I have been building a HR goods train. A couple I made earlier I decided to clear out my projects box so have just started to build the second Lochgorm Kits fish truck. It is amazing how fast you forget how you did something. In this case I did'nt make a note of the problemsencountered and their solution. This is an interesting prototype but my it takes a lot of work to build. The sides fold over themselves to give prototype thickness and forming the solebars in the multifold operation. The designer used a perforated line rather than a half etch for the solebar and half etch for the folded over body sides. The ends are folded over too, this time the fold is at the bottom rather than the top. Side view , not too bad, the perforated fold line just visible. The problems of this construction are the sizes of the formed components do not necessarily match. Also it is difficult without bending bars to achieve a clean form for the solebar edges since the gaps in the bendline bend differently from the strips of solid metal of the perforation. The problem only shows up when you assemble the body. The buffer plate base is not level with the solebar base. Filing the sole bar ends not too obvious? Resolving this is not simple since there is a detailed overlay that after embossing attaches to the solebar. This and the solebar are deeper than the buffer plate. My first solution was file the solebar at its end. To start with this looked OK but as the kit proceeds it gets better and better looking becoming a lovely model and the bodgers solution of filing stood out more and more. My solution was to shear some thin brass into a 2mm strip and solder it onto the solebar end to look like the thickness of the buffer beam. I will post this photo next and seek opinions. To my mind these kits are so worth the effort. Mr Copp of Lochgorm Models is to be praised for making such characterful stock available. There don't seem to be many kits arround that capture the late Victorian design era so well.

Hi, again. I live in NE Scotland our tap water is about pH6.5 ie soft water very slightly acid so I use that as the solvent. If you can be bothered good sources of "distilled" water are, condensate from the tumble drier or de-humidifier, melted ice from the top (to avoid dead spilt frozen peas etc) of a freezer, If you ever need to dilute solder paint any tap water is a bad idea, it seems to quickly destroy the properties of the inbuilt flux. So that always gets distilled water. Regards

Hi, being a cheap skate and doing a very large amout of whitemetal soldering in my business I have always used 10% (roughly) phosphoric acid. The phosphoric acid is Kurust gel from Halfords ( I regard this as 100% phosphoric acid for the purposes of dilution, (before anybody tells me I know it is not, but I like to keep things simple) It does not cause rusting of tools and any residues are easily washed off. For your Health and Safety wear eye protection and use surgical gloves when working to protect your hands. I wear glasses but not gloves since my hands are long past ever looking good. Phosphoric acid at these low dilutions is not too dangerous on the skin, just wash off any splashes. Dilute Kurust gel is very cheap and causes very high penetration into the joint by the solder. For nickel silver or brass work I use solder paint with a RSU. when using a small solder iron I use Powerflo or any other self cleaning flux from the plumber's merchant. The latter fluxes will quickly damage your iron's bit and need very good cleaning from the job. Powerflo (yellow tub) in particular whilst being a super flux will rust everything within a foot and and little spots on tools will be rust the next day. I have used most of Carrs products. They are all excellent in use BUT the childproof bottles are a pain to open without splashing yourself and being very light dont last long on the bench before getting knocked over. So if you use them make a heavy wood block to fit the bottle in to try to minimise the risk, and also the expense of a spill. Cheap brushes for flux- Ikea in the kids section usually has a good selection, Remember some of the brush ferrules are Aluminium that can react quickly with some fluxes and in doing so reduce their activity.

Hi, very interesting to hear how another modeller (Portchullin Tatty) tackled the louvres on the chimney. Your method sounds a lot simpler. If I ever buid another Jones engine I will give your method a go. Although I might take another route. An old friend was telling me about 3D printing. Until recently he would sit down , or if busy would hire model makers to make the masters for his loco kits. His kits are fantastic with lost wax casting counts into the hundereds. He said at least £15000 would be invested to make the masters or a couple of months of his time, if he did it. Clearly this level of upfront cost limits the kits you can produce to those you know will recover your investment risk. Now he has tremendous skill at CAD so some years ago he took the time to learn 3D software and used a bureau to print the masters in wax that he has draughted. He now gets all the masters for under £2000 (not forgetting his time at the screen) It seems the way forward, especially if you produce models commercially as I do. Malcolm

Hi, I make boiler mounted details using the formed flange method. Turn the end of brass rod to a bell shape. The main diameter being the diameter of the dome / chimney etc. The skirt of the bell being at least the diameter of the base when viewed from the side. The inside is bored out to leave at least 1/16" wall on the main part and the belled part has its wall tapered to about 10 thou. The whole thing is then heated to red and quenched. Then the saddle is formed by sqeezing the bell down onto a steel rod the diameter of the boiler. Then it is back into the lathe to turn the skirt circular and profile the rest of the rod to shape. If the part is to be a master for lost wax make it 2-3% larger and solder the feeds inside. Some masters for a new Lochgorm kit This way the flange is not damaged and if it is riveted they stay nice and crisp. The Jones dome on 86 was made in four parts- base ,chimney inner and outer, and top. The louvers were produced in my first attempt at etching. The louver slots were protected with tiny rectangles of tape. The inside and outside was painted with enamel, After a couple of days the tape was removed and I put the part into warm Ferric chloride soln.after half an hour the slots were etched though. my first go at etching After this etching became more used by me. However to be really useful I had to wait 10 years to get my first Mac and a drawing packeage- Freehand. Since then I have used etching in pattern making and in production for the plate work for my 16mm locos. If is amazing what is possible with etching. This is coilliery headframe kit that I designed using Freehand a few years ago. I cannot think of another way to replicate such a structure in 4mm or 2mm scale. Malcolm.

Hi, a bit more about building No86. Some of you have commented about tight clearances on these locos, they are. The loco as I said in the intro is fully beam equalised and sprung. The bogie is like the real thing in that it has sprung side control. It can rotate on its kingpin by less than 10 degrees without hitting something but can displace sideways by about 2mm. None of this was calculated I am not that sort of modeller. I make something to the drawing and if it works in scale fine, if not I remake it with some new idea (usually a poor one) and go on until there is some sort of solution. The driving wheels have little or no side play, so I thought. I had realised by this stage of the build that squeezing in a crank pin was going to be tricky. However the loco runs through 6 foot radius points and can manage about 5 foot 9inch as its minimum radius. Not much space The bogie really does pull the loco into the curve. The loco is on the american principle. The loco is live to one rail, the tender to the other, i e no pickups. The downside is one side has wheels insulated at the hub and the crankpins are in insulated bushes. Not one to take chances the piston rod runs in a tufnol bush and tube. The crankpins themselves are silver steel pins 10BA theaded for the hub. The rods are bronze bushed but not to the full thickness of the rod, The pin makes up the rest of the bush with a shoulder plus 10 thou and provides a thin head to retain the bush and joint. The heads started off as 15thou thick but running on a real railway showed there was side play in the drivers and the heads have been thinned to about 8 thou now. They are put in with a little tool that has two short pins on it. The crankpin The crankpins are retained in the hubs with a bit of loctite (yes, one did unscrew, 20 minutes with a magnet found the bit!) The last bit today is solving how to fill in the space between the front cylinder covers and the frames. I tried cutting and forming but every atempt looked untidy. My wife solved it by putting the cats bell on the bench and telling me if I cut it it would give me the panels. I did what I was told and it worked. The cat was pleased too. His kill rate lept up. The cat's bell made four sements Next time the chimney, cab roof and some bits and bobs, and I discover etching. Malcolm.

Hi, it is great to have such kind replies. I have followed Portchullin Tatty and Sandy Harper on these pages with great admiration for the atmosphere captured in your models. Gerry Beale great to be in contact with you again after at least 35 years!(I have seen your name frequently in MRJ linked to some stunning bit of stock) I have been busy in research then in education, tertiary and secondary before retiring in 2006. We moved back up to our Scottish roots in 1990. While working and now in retirement we have operated a business that makes fine scale steam locomotives. We have been at that for 40 years off and on. I will share a bit of that on this post from time to time too. It might interest some to recount the learning curve of etching, tool making and mastering parts for different types of casting. Tomorrow when I have a bit of time I will post again with some more about making No 86. Like you too ,since last Tuesday I have been wondering if I will have to post in the Continental Modeller! Malcolm.

Well the photo posted OK, so now a start. How was the Skye bogie built? A side view of No 86. The model was started using the known dimensions and an old Skinley (I think) dyeline drawing. I had some help. At the time I was a member of the MRC in Oxford and they met at the time behind the OPC shop at Headington. I had just cut the frames out using the technique of making a tracing off the plan and gluing it to two bits of brass strip soldered together when I saw in OPC window "The History of Highland Locomotives" by Peter Tatlow, The second edition had just been published in 1979. Well the drawings were compared and many corrections had to be made to the Skinley drawing. So a fresh start was made. Now the Oxford model railway club was full of excellent scratch builders and talking to them I decided to try to raise my game. So the new spec for the loco was the result. It would be fully compensated and or sprung, all platework to be as close to scale thickness as possible and the simplest way to build it would be to follow a good prototype drawing. Time spent going through drawings in the Scottish Record Office, help from Prof Peter Walker in Edinburgh, a keen Highland modeller in 4mm got me sight of some old drawings from Lochgorm Works so how the Allan front end was assembled became clearer. I felt I had enough to start again. The locomotive is tender powered. The front of the locomotive, smokebox,cylinders, outside frames and footplate and drawbeam is one unit. The rear of the inside frames holding the sprung and equalised driving wheels(grooved square axleboxes, there is a rocking beam between them that is lightly sprung with PB wire) slide freely in slots is a separate unit that plugs into the front. The joint is made by the driving frame front cross member having a rectangular plate that engages with a matching socket in the front frame cross member. The cylinders have twin slide bars attached at the rear to the outside frame. The crossheads were cut from nickel silver and filed to shape. They were soldered to a bit of strip and the slots for the slide bars milled using tiny cuts with a slot drill in a Unimat lathe. The connecting rods were cut from 1/8" nickel silver(NS) strip and filed slowly to shape. The ends were forked by silver soldering on a fork made from NS sheet excess solder was used so that the forged nature could be replicated They were then detailed with brasses ,wedges etc. To the rear of the slidebars is another plate. To erect the assembly the piston rod has to be fed into its bore and the crosshead pushed past the minimal clearance between the slide bar support bracket and the outside frames. I was starting to see why I was told this was not a loco to attempt as a first build. However it was starting to look like an HR loco. Next time I will deal with the other more arcane problems the Jones locos throw up.

Hi, I am new to this medium so I hope you will all bare with me as I find my feet. This is the start of an odessy that began 35 years ago when I collected enough information to start building my first fine scale loco in O gauge. I have always been interested in the Highland Railway its development, its stock, its operation, the scenery it passed through, the economic change it caused to the North of Scotland. So 35 years ago I started to build a Jones Skye Bogie loco. It was not easy. It was built in our first house as our first child was on the way 3 months longer than he took to make the engine was finished. It ran on its 2 yards of track and had a glass case made for it. It moved with us over the next decades and was after a few years joined by a scratch built timber wagon. Over the last year it has escaped its glass cage, been test run, re-built, and after 6 months has finally achieved its aim. It runs reliably on the nearby large layout of a kind friend. I hope what I plan will not bore you but I want to tell you a bit about the loco's build (and re-build) the stock that has been made for it to pull, and the start of planning its eventual home . A bit of the Buckie Branch. Below,( hopefully) is a photo of it pulling its 11 wagon train on my friend's railway. Skye bogie No86 pulling a Lochgorm Sheep Wagon

Hi, just seen this forum. I like you fell for the HR, over 35 year's ago in fine scale O. The interest until recently resulted in a scratch built Skye Bogie No 86 as probably running in 1915. Recently I have found a nearbye friend who has a nice track in his steading (NE Scotland for byre) and meets there have resulted in renewed interest. A model railway is building. Now what might be of help to you. I see someone has refered you to the National Record Office of Scotland. This has proven to be a treasure trove. Like you I wanted drawings of an HR station. It had to be board and batten with a slate roof, ideally on the Buckie Branch. I thought my chances were zero, considering the track was lifted in 1915. However it was relaid by the LMS in the 1920s and thanks to the Record Office online catalogue I found the LMS had re-surveyed it and drawn up plans of all the buildings. The plans I wanted were in their Sighthill annex. This is open on Wednesday afternoon for an booked visit. Joining the oganisation as a reader is simple and the local staff amazingly helpful . After joining the plans I had ordered were produced in a well equipped reading room, they could not be copied by them( copyright issues) but I was free to photograph them as I wished. The archivist helped me in this, she really went the extra mile with lights and rulers to get the best images. Consequently I now have plans for the ground layout at 40' to the inch and plans of Rathven station at1/8" to the foot. (next visit I will get the plans of the two agents houses and possibly the overbridges) The place is a treasure chest of maps /plans and architech plans. The archivist said how much she enjoyed the chance to find this sort of stuff in the stacks, she told me from the record card that nobody had looked at these objects since 1948.(some plans are beautiful, all hand coloured ) So if you can get to Edinburgh, join, and get a pile of stuff ordered up to look at. You will have a day to remember.