45609

Surely a piece of turned bar (brass or steel) inserted into the boiler cavity would do the job? Or alternatively, if not a lathe owner or friendly with a lathe owner, the rolled up lead sheet mentioned above would add sufficient mass? As Graeme rightly points out a piece of thin walled tube would not really add much mass. If you were to make it of sufficient wall section it then become very difficult to drill small holes through for handrail knobs etc... The resin boiler approach is well proven and as Graeme's excellent master is tubular there is plenty of space to add the necessary weight. The one thing I was going to ask, about the thickness and shape of boiler bands, if any, has been answered. I'm pleased to hear they won't be too obvious. Well done sir. It is little things like this that count. Cheers....Morgan

Of course you are talking about the Thompson B2 (B17 rebuild). The original ex GCR B2 (B19) was also once available from Modelex. My recollection is that this might have gone to Phoenix too? So, probably non existent now and while it is possible to build one from this kit, as the saying goes... "If I was going there, I wouldn't start from here" Lots wrong with it which needed to be put right and I mostly documented it in a workbench thread on another forum here Cheers...Morgan

These.... https://www.modellingtools.co.uk/little-lenses-26-c.asp

No one ever asked me for a price..... ....too late now as that ship sailed long ago. I'm now doing the same sort of butchery to Hornby BR std 4 wheels.

Looks nice Dave. Regarding Lentz or Reidinger valve gear. If the cardan shaft universal joints have shrouds then it is Lentz. If joints are exposed then it is Reidinger. All the Crabs fitted with rotary valve gear (42818, 42822, 42824, 42825 and 42829) were converted to Reidinger in 1953. I still haven't finished my model of 42825. It stalled as I wanted to make better looking UJs for the Reidinger valve gear. The Comet UJ castings are very overscale. Morgan

Nice video Robin. You have the 8F parentage correct

You don't. It is a 60ft turntable.

'tis me.....45609.....Gilbert and Ellice Islands, obviously or perhaps not. Which Jubilee is 45537 then JW? I think you've been sniffing too much of the Doncaster green paint again It's actually a Patriot. Private E. Sykes V.C. cheers....Morgan

Something like this? They were included on an etch I drew for Graeme King about 4 years ago.

Good grief that's a relief. I can also stop looking over my shoulder all the time now It will be nice to see the results John. W.r.t. your GW press I presume you have adjusted the spring tensions on the plungers as best as you can so that they are matched? Having said that it would be very hard to verify that they are correctly balanced without sensitive measuring equipment. Also I suspect my manufacturing tolerance and the friction resulting from very slight surface finish changes in axle/bore contact will also be a factor. It sounds like you have found both a practical and pragmatic way round it. It's exactly how I would have solved it. Cheers....Morgan

The reverse Stanier is a brake van you don't often see. The Chivers kit?

So, after 2 months of silent spanking both John and I have sore hands and Mike hasn't been able to sit down for weeks without wincing. Apologies for the lack of updates from my side but today has some significance. This evening John will be taking delivery of his wheel set. My last post mentioned the manufacture of the axles and, in all honesty, compared to the previous work these have been quite straightforward to make. They were also done quite a while ago. All are made from precision ground 1/8" steel bar stock. AFAIK you can only get this from Ultrascale. It is a free machining grade and as a result is very easy to drill and face off. The process for each axle is to first saw blanks off the bar. These are slightly over length to allow for cleaning up each end face in the lathe. The first facing operation is very quick as there is no real need to measure anything or pay attention to how much is being removed. Enough to fully clean up the face squarely is sufficient. The axle blank is held in a collet chuck to ensure it runs true as the next step is to drill the axle end. The 9F wheel is distinctive in that the axles have a large hole in the end faces so this has to be replicated on the model axles. For this operation I use a stub drill with a "four facet" or "split point" tip. What the hell is one of those? I hear you ask. A couple of images for comparison are probably better than my words. Drills mostly come with a chisel point geometry as they are cheaper to make, especially for small sizes. They are good for general work, however, they have a tendency to wander when starting unless a centre point has been drilled beforehand. A split point drill has two additional faces ground onto the tip of the drill that brings the tip to a true point rather than a chisel shape. Even down to diameters as small as 0.3 mm these drills start precisely and do not wander. However, I must stress this is when drilling with a machine (lathe or mill). The stub length also adds rigidity to the drill and adds to the precision. You are unlikely to find this type of drill from your typical model railway tool supplier. You must go to an industrial tool supplier. The photo below shows my 1 mm split point stub drill in action. The axle end has been faced off square with the turning tool and then the drill is pecked in to depth. A drop of oil on the drill tip also helps things go smoothly. This is the result a clean, round and concentric hole. I don't drill all the way through. Instead I just go a sufficient depth, 3 mm or 4 mm, to give the impression. The final step on each axle end is to touch a piece of 800 grit emery on the axle end to just break the edge and remove any burrs. If your turning tools are sharp the burr should be hardly visible. I find the tip of a finger tells you more than the eye can. This process is completed on one end of the axle and then it is turned round in the collet chuck and done again. Before re-chucking the axle has to be measured carefully with the micrometer so that the right amount of material can be removed. I'm aiming to get the axle length the same, to within 0.02 mm, of the width of the wheel set when measured across a back to back gauge. Cheers....Morgan

John, from my point of view that is the understatement of the week! Nice work, by the way. Morgan

Perhaps John but I didn't really think so. It is something that you would walk / stand on. Maybe I should have said "foot plate" rather than "footplate". I hope Ivan isn't still scratching his head with a dismantled 9F in front of him. Anyway, it is all academic now as Dave has guessed correctly. It is a master for one of the Barrow Road turntable kerb castings. There are 24 of these that, as Dave rightly points out, go in the 4 foot. There are two further kerb masters to make. One goes in 20 locations in the narrow gap between roundhouse roads and the other, the largest of the three, goes between the roads that have a roof support column. I'll draft a new blog posting when I get more time to explain how I made them and how I intend to make the replicas. Cheers....Morgan

Give that man a prize! Well done Dave you are on the right track. Can you be more specific? Cheers....Morgan

Instead of spending a nice afternoon in the garden soaking up the sun I decided to hide in the workshop and remove the flanges from the middle driving wheels. Earlier on I deliberately left some material on the rear face of the wheel centres so that I had something to mount onto a step mandrel and keep things running true. I had the foresight to not remove, from the Unimat chuck, the mandrel I turned up for machining the wheel centres a little while ago. So, after putting a small step onto the end of this mandrel, I was able to mount the wheels and secure with a nut and a washer. Obviously all of the flange has to come off but I didn't want to turn too much off the diameter and make the wheel undersize. For the first wheel I took a little off at a time until the flange was just cleaned off and then moved the cross slide in less than half a division on the handwheel. (One division on the Unimat handwheel is 0.05mm). This essentially leaves the original coning of the tyre just on the front edge. This cross slide position was then locked for the remaining five wheels that needed the flange taken off. The photos below show the work in progress and the result. Step 2 is to now remove the redundant extra boss on the rear of the wheel centre and get the wheels down to the finished width. I had previously said that the soft jaws in the Myford had been finished with and in a way they had. The previous recess diameter was of no use because this was sized to grip on the tyre flange outer diameter. A new setting was needed so I faced back the soft jaws and machined a new recess to grip on the slightly smaller flangeless outer diameter as shown below. It was then a relatively simple job to face off the boss to be flush with the rear of the tyre. A little clean up and deburring after machining has now seen an end to this part of the work. Every wheel has now been paired and bagged up following measurement across the outer faces whilst the pair is held over a back to back gauge. The measurement is required for each wheel pair as it is used for making the axles to the right length. Only 15 of those to do..... Morgan

No

Ivan, it's not a press tool but you are slightly warm with the footplate comment.

Liking that very much Dave. I hope it is heavy and has a big motor. I went round to Robin's last night and we were discussing requirements for loco hauling power. 11 coaches pretty typical up Fishponds bank. Cheers....Morgan

Not really in the mood to write much tonight but I have been busy this afternoon making something. The question to visitors of my blog is a very simple one. What is it? Cheers....Morgan

So I have remembered where I was up to. To be honest, I hadn't forgotten but it has been a long time since I last looked at them. The task today was to bore the axle holes so that they will be a press fit on the 1/8" axles. As a brief recap I have done all of the concentricity critical machining of the wheels and tyres in a set of soft jaws in the lathe chuck. The jaws were machined right at the start to a fit on the steel tyres and have not been disturbed since I commenced work. The axle boring operation consists of two steps. Step one was to clean and true up the original holes in the Bachmann wheel centres. A smaller boring tool than previously used was ground up from some High Speed Steel (HSS) and fitted into a new tool holder. This boring tool is only about 2.5mm wide as the bore it has to fit into had previously been measured at 2.8/2.9mm. The set up is shown in the photo below. Before taking a cut I had a rummage in my box of drills and found a 3mm diameter stub drill. I intended to use the shank of this drill as a simple gauge to check the hole post machining. As I said I only wanted to take sufficient material out to true up the bore. Machining out to a snug fit on a 3mm drill shank would leave just enough material for the second step of axle boring. The photo below shows a wheel after boring. The axle hole looks shiny and this task was done 29 more times (3 sets of wheels) before moving on to the next step The second step is to use a 1/8" hand reamer in the tailstock to produce a very gentle taper on the bore so that the axles will go about half way into the holes before biting and locking the wheel to axle when assembled and quartered. This is a highly critical part of the process and more than a little nerve wracking after having put so much work into the wheels. The technique is to feed the reamer into the bore just a little bit at a time, back it out and keep checking with a test axle that I machined and polished before hand. Getting the right setting was easy enough to achieve, and subsequently repeatable for the other wheels, by using the digital read out (DRO) that I made for my lathe tailstock a few years ago. Each time, before I decided to back out the reamer and check the size, I zeroed the DRO. By doing this I would know, when feeding the reamer back in, that I had reached and, if necessary, gone beyond the last in feed position to cut a bit more metal . Once happy with the fit of the axle in the bore the DRO zero position was not touched and each wheel could be done identically to the previous one. In the photo below the DRO is displaying -3.58mm which means I have 3.58mm to further feed the reamer to reach the set position. Another 29 wheels later I had all of the boring done, and it does get a bit repetitive and boring, but it is not really a job where you can let your concentration lapse. The final photo for tonight is a shot showing and axle inserted into the wheel. I've also added a crank pin and one of JD's coupling rods for extra effect. The soft jaws are now finished with. I can move on to making the axles and doing the last job on the centre driving wheels. Making them flangeless. Cheers for now....Morgan

I got the broad gauge tank back from Warren Haywood a couple of weeks ago and have been steadily working through the list of finishing off jobs. This afternoon I was satisfied that all was done and so a couple of photos were taken for the records. Time to now start thinking about Xmas shopping. Joy of joys! Cheers....Morgan

Nice! Crafty work there John and without the aid of machine tools too. You really need to join me over on the dark side of the workshop. I'm sure I could help you find suitable equipment. You'll be needing those wheels soon. Now trying to remember where I got up to with them. Cheers...M

ZAMAC / Mazak casting are also usually full of voids when you get under the skin. http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/82059-worseter-update-time-for-a-9f/page-23&do=findComment&comment=2254217

Not necessarily all new technology. So far I have done a 3D model of one of the kerb stones but it is my intention to try and make this on a new CNC 3 axis mill that I have access to at work. I need to wait for a few bits of tooling and engraving cutters I have ordered to arrive before trying it out.