jazz

Staring today with making the final pair of valve gear rods. Image 1 shows the components. Image 2 shows them laminated, marked out and drilled. Image 3 shows the crank drilled and taped 10BA fitted to the 10BA repacement bolts. I use these instaed of the Slater's on axles with a return crank. The bolt hole in the wheel is also taped 10BA and secured with adhesive. The pair of bushes are threaded and from The Gladiator range. The crank will be treaded on and nipped tight then soldered. This makes the whole setup nice & solid. Image 4 show a quick mockup of forked rods. These are made by making two sides sweated together, drilled and the parted. The wshers are then sweated over the holes, the fork bent to shap on both sides, cleaned up and resweated. On this mockup I have not fitted a washer to the rear half. Image 5 Shows the rod for the model all finished. The washers soldered on then 20 thou wire added the the top and bottom edge. A small fillet of solder by the washers and tidied up with a smal dentists burr. Choose one that fits neatly between the wire. (I was given a large box of these drills by my friendly dentist.)

Hi Guys. My days of being tied down by kids, work and other distractions is well over at the wonderful age of 65. (Mine you I retired from my main employment at 48, taking an early retirement golden handshake.) Now-a-days I just have to take the wife on various holidays, dragging myself from the WB, golly gosh life is still hard I will do as requested and show today's rods being 'manufactered'.

Now we are rockin' & rollin' Just got the final painting to do, add lettering and balace weights. Not forgetting to make and fit and fit the return cranks. These will take a bit longer than the other valve gear components as the are tapered and fluted. Finally a fair amount of weathering, crew & glazing plus lots of coal stacked up and spilling onto the tank tops as in the photo I am using. Here she is all ready for the final session. The castings were supplied by Geoff from his Deeley/Midland kits with the exception of the s/box door and chimney. The s/box door is an LMS one and I had to shorten the hinge straps, add the handrails, make and add the door dogs and fill in unwanted holes. The chimney is a GWR tapered one. I reprofiled the chimney top and added the beading around the top fron 1/2 round brass. It has turned out the correct height and diameter whis saved a lot of scratch building. Note the floor, this is plasticard, scored and using the Olfa gouged out the grain, when paint in dirty wood it should look the part. (Final photos should be in natural light and much better than these efforts.)

Just waiting for the paint to dry on the Deeley, so here is a quick item regarding fast, accurate cutting of brass sheet with the Olfa. The images show, 1) Mark where the cut is to be. 2) score with the Olfa and steel rule, this took 7 firm passes. 3) clamp in the folding tool with the score line close to the bar. 4) push the waste side up and fully down. Presto a perfect cut. Time 40 seconds.

Thank Mike & David. I appreciate your kind comments and very pleased my thread helps in some small way to inspire others. I used to have a well equiped workshop with lathe etc but disposed of all the large items when emigrating to The US. On our return to the UK a few years back, I quickly learned you can get by without all that expense. regarding the Olfa for cutting brass/nickle sheet, I find it very fast. I score the sheet about 6-8 times, depending how hard the brass is. Then clamp the item you are making in the Metalsmith folding tool, close to the score line, a quick up & down and down and the sheet breaks nice and clean. A quick pass with a 12" file to finish the edge and you have a perfect cut.

Hi Martyn. Well there you go, elimiate the 5 days thinking and just go for it. Two evenings work to produce those parts is very acceptable as they are not easy. David. I have no fancy machines or tools. I use the drill as a lathe running slow. A drill press and a good selection of rolling and bending tool. Cutting is done with the old and trusty Ofla and piercing saws. I do keep all the narrow parrallel strips of brass and nickle from the various kits that abound on the etches sheets. These are extremely useful for beading, valences and, yes, making valve gear. For valve gear, I use suitable nickle stips, I laminate each valve gear part keeping the ends clear of solder. Drill out the holes each end. Unsolder and clean up. I have a large stock of thin 12 BA steel washers, these make nice rounded ends. I then carefully file the ends of the valve gear parts down where the washers will sit and sweat solder them on, running the drill through to clean then up. Finally bending out the ends to create the fork. A mornings work will see all the parts made. Back to the model. All the main soldering now complete and a start is made on the detailoing. Hopefully she will be ready for painting by the end of todays session.

Nothing like a good challenge to put some spice into your life. This build is becoming a bigger challenge than just the chassis, which I thought was the end of the worst part. How wrong I was. Checking the footplate against the drawing before starting the build and finding that OK. I neglected to check the cab sides in the same way. Only to find they were too short after spending quite a while punching out all those lovely rivets. That was OK as I mention a small infill was all that was required and subsequently fitted. The problems started when I began to scratch build the cab front & rear. This showed the cab sides to be 3mm too tall. Also the door opening was 6mm to high. This meant the smoke box door front was 6mm too high as well. Ho boy, this was not good and a daft mistake by me for not checking first. SOOO. It was quickly decided to make this one of the first five built with flush rivets. (The final batch of five have raised rivets and was my preferred model to build just because of the rivets). So using the cutting disk the top 3mm was sliced off. The smokebox front marked out and 6mm removed from the top curve. The cab opening was also sliced off and 6mm removed from the cab opening. The lower part of the opening then had to be reprofiled with the minidrill to the same height as the tank tops. The handrailknobs removed and the holes filled with solder. The same went for the cutout in the tank sides. Then removal of all the rivets with a disk in the minidrill and a good sanding with a fine sanding disk. All this without having to strip the model. And looks good. The scratch built boiler was no problem. I cut two disks and soldered these, one at the front and the other at the front of the firebox. Cutting the tube where the firebox starts and bending the sides to shape. (This is because of the coal bunkers that are alongside the firebox and acessed from inside the cab.) The boiler bands fitted before assembly onto the model. So this is how it now looks. To add charactor I will probably finish it in a neglected state, ie grimy with a bit of rust here & there. Sorry about the poor photo. Taken this evening in a poor light.

Now cracking on with the body. First thing wrong is the sides are too short, so I will have to fabricate an infill.

You're very welcome. Back to the Deely. Boy has it taken some time to make the motion parts, even though I had the con rod and connecting rod etches to hand. (I Still have the return cranks to make fit and then I can call the chasis done) A lot of time spent on measuring and checking the clearances tne making small adjustments to get everythng to move freely. Here it is so far.

Hi guys, yes, I do like an interesting project that is a bit of a challenge. Not much done today, her in-doors wanted to go over to Anglesey for lunch. Anyway a small amount of progress was made and now I only have the remainder of the motion to cobble up and fit. Also the plastic brake shoes to glue on. The etched holes in the coupling and connecting rods were far too large for the crank bushes. So using brass tube that gave a snug fit over the Slater's bushes I used this to make sleeves to solder into the holes. On checking the rods using the axle jigs all was perfect and runs soothly. (She is riding high at the front due to the springing on that axle. All will be well when the weight of the body is added)

Now for something for myself. This is a bit of a challenge. On a visit to Geoffs workshop i spied a rather grubby set of etchings that looked interesting. Discovering it is the Deely 0-4-0T loco I was hooked. Geoff said it came in a job lot devoid of casting, frames and some body and valver etchings. A small coinage of the realm exchanged hands and here is the result. The first image shows all I have to work with. Drawings were obtained and a start made by preparing the frames from 15thou brass sheet. The frames were cut to length and maximum depth, tack soldered together and carefully marked and fretted out. Using the etched conrods, the axle holes were drilled on the pillar drill. I did have the front and rear etchings for the cylinders, so cutting and making the coveres was quite easy. Rivets were marked out and use made of the rivet press. After seeing the Metalsmith axle jigs on the forum, I purchased a set and this is the first time I have used such an item. Have to say this makes the job very easy to check akk is true. I used to use steel bars and a micrometer. Worked well but slow. Here is the work so far.

The rest of the build went OK. Shame about not being able to see the detail between the frames from normal viewing angles. The firebox is a nice one to build. Starting with an internal 'box', getting this true and squaure makes the rest of the firebox build quite easy. Just needing care with the bending and folding.

Hi all. For the GWR fans, I am building this Modified Hall Class. Only the secong Modified Hall i have ever built, this is a Scorpio kit the previous was a JM kit. The tender I have finished and shown you builds of those in previous post, so here the the hot end. The chassis is quite detailed having dummy inside motion, between frame axle journals etc. It has a beam compensation system on the rear two axles. This all leaves very little room for plunger pickups, so I will be using phosphor strip wipers on all the loco wheels. The bogie is not sprung I have elected to use a lot of lead weight stuffed out of sight under the cross member. this works extremely well. You will note that I always 'decorate' the footplate with as much soldered detail as I can before adding the major components. this, I find, makes the build much easier. The firebox uses a box former. This makes it easy to obtain a square and true unit to attach the outer skins. these are formed with the Metalsmith bending matrix & bars I purchased lase weekend at Telford. In the past I have used my tried and teasted 'old fashioned' method of a bar and peen hammer. The old metal craftsmans way, yes, but rather slower than with the Metalsmith tool. I am very pleaased with the result and feel this will speed up assemblies no end. Also the bends are easier to get exact too. All that remains with the firebox to to file the small overlaps flush with the ends of the inner box and bolt it to the cab front.

Hi A_S. Thanks for the compliment, appreciated. Regarding the camera mounted on a wagon, I have done that many times but with my old video camera which could be operated without the viewing screen in the open postion. I have just discovered my current camera will operate with the screen almost closed so am tempted to see if I can do just that. There are a number of garden layouts in LGB etc on youtube that are really something else with cameras mounted on the train. This being one of my favourites. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMsJ_P6d-zg

Hi Pete. Apologies for the delay, been away again. This is their website. (They welcome visitors the the shop for demos and offer a great service being able to customize the sound to suit you. i.e you could have a GWR 2 clyinder loco with an LMS whistle if you so desired. http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?showtopic=1094&view=getnewpost Regards Ken

Spent yesterday playing trains after installing yet another sound chip. This one is IMHO brilliant. The PC does not do it justice even with the speaker system I have on the PC. The chip is from Oliviers. Their range is superb. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgO3KsyZxvQ&layer_token=79f51a76487db900

Hi folks, been a bit slow here, here is the promised video clip of the Kitson 0-4-0T. The motion still fascinates me. (It does seem a bit growly on the clip but sounds OK on the layout) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r_vSKkGLF4

Quite probably Martyn.

Thanks Martyn. I have the sound, I wish we could also have the smoke/steam & smells. Then that would really be the business, don't you think?

Pressed on with the coach build. Partitions fabricated and fitted. Also I added extra bracings across the body at roof level. I then got carried away and continued the build forgetting to photgraph each stage. What I did do is add gas tanks under the floor and add seat moudlings. Also added kick boards to the lower foot boards and rain strips to the roof. She was then ready for painting. Here she is all finished except for lettering which I will purchase at Telford next month. The last image is this evening at work on the layout.

And here is the start on the LNWR 6 wheel coach. The etches are very nice and an exact fit. I started by adding all the detail to the sides & ends after forming the tumblehome. with the exception of the axle guards all the fittings are brass castings, which is nice. The floor ends are folded up and the ends body ends solder on. The sides are the soldered in place and were a perfect fit. Laminate the soleplates/springs/axleguards etch and solder into the groove under the floor. Again the lenght was perfect. The buffer beams are then soldered across the ends. You get one etched partion you use as a template to make the other two that are needed. (I chose to make these of plasticard. (I also purchased moulded wood seating lenghts to complete the inside) That is as far as I have got today. This build will continue on Thursday.

Here she is ready for delivery. Now for something completely different, an LNWR 30' 6 wheel centre brake coach for my layout. This being built from the Gladiator range and is the ex North Star Design. The Loco in its glory.

Thanks guys.. Yes, the castings are predominately brass. The dome does a have a rather deep moulding joint on one side. Easily filled though and thankfully not neeing to be a polished dome.

Hi Pete. I guess after scratch & kit building over well 400 locos over that 30 years I have the knack of rapid building and problem solving. It have no idea what the gearbox is. I know Geoff has had in his w/shop for a long time. It's a very heavy duty single stage brass gearbox. The motor is Buhler. Todays work still sees a lot of detailing left to do.

Now here is an interesting model I have been working since Wednesday. The Gladiator (Ex FourTrack) LNER G6. Whilst this kit is not cosidered a 'starter' kit, any experienced builder will find little difficulty in the build. The main point to watch for is getting the bends absolutely spot on for the all in one cab sides/bunker to fit in the etched grooves. This is the datum for the whole body. What i do like the is answer to the 0-4-4 balance problem. The drivers are compensated with milled axle bushes sliding in flod up guides. The bogie is also compensated with floating side frames on the spacer. This in turn is attached to the main frames on a fixed height. Elimiates the rear end 'dive' caused by the sprung bogie variety. Thest on the layout made for very soomth running through the crossovers with all wheels firmly on the rails. I used a length of piano wire attached to the main frame spacer and fitting to a small bracket I made for the bogie frame with passes though a small hole. This allows the bogie to be removed and gives good side springing to keep the boies central. There are things like the beading, for instance that you have to fabrcate yourself. (I used 20 thou wire) I also inset the cab floor support as per photos. (The etch is just a fold down job and di not look right) The boiler has been filled with lead. This means she is very heavy and perfectly balanced under the dome. Just where it shoud be. Here is the build in photos so far.