billbedford

Mmm <cough>

The 1 plank has the brake gear the wrong way round

Have you seen the Proto-87 streetcar system?

I'm sceptical about this technology for wheels if the design axle bore tolerances are in the order of 0.1mm or greater. FUD is quite brittle though, so an attempt at an interference fit might result in too much stress and possible breakage.

Interesting -- The original meaning of FUD was Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, and you do it so well.............

Don't use whitemetal. It has been tried and bends if the loco is not left upright. You can use FUD to cast in brass, if you can find a caster to do it for you. I suspect he will insist that you fill one of his flasks before he'll agree to do it.

Bill Bedford has never done a CCT underframe etch, so where your fantasy of my think came from I have no idea.

If you are going to use a transverser mount it on good quality drawer slides.

If you weren't fussed about the the floor of the wagon you could have just turned it upside down and saved your self some work..........

The buffer height once everything is finished should be 14mm +/- 0.5 mm.

Gauges for buffer height etc. can be found here

Seems like I'm on the right track then. :)I didn't expect the creator of these etches to suggest I batter one into pulp! Guess it's a good way of saying I messed it up.

I think you just had an interesting learning experience........

There is one difficult lesson that everyone who wants to do quality work must learn at some stage and that is about not being 'precious' about your work. You are likely to send more time, effort and heartache trying to repair pieces that have gone wrong that the piece is worth. It is usually better to scrap the wrong piece and substitute a new one. Try it. Do another w-iron and see if it looks better when you've finished.

As for the splaying; there is a machining tolerance on both the axles and the bearings so a small amount of splay is possible.

Now...........

Take the wheels out of this etch, take a large hammer and crush the etch completely.

When you are satisfied that the piece of brass will never produce anything remotely interesting, take another w-iron etch and repeat what you have just done, but this time folding it up so that all the fold-lines are on the inside.

You should find the the second one will work much better than this one, and you will be left with a spare etch that can be hammered to pulp in a moment of frustration, or set aside in case you ever want to build a six-wheeled wagon.

I don't think the footplate is the only problem. I think the frames and /or footplate is about 1mm too long at the rear end.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Panic not, I have before me not one, but three GAs, all be it, all with round topped boilers. The position of the cab is not likely to change with other boilers because the splashers for the rear wheels were built into it's base.

First, the distance from the end of the frames to the front axle is 5'5" and from the end of the frames to the rear axle is 4'3". Note that 1" should be added to both these dimensions to allow for the thickness of the buffer beams.

The length of the lower cab side sheets was 5'8.75", so your figure of 23mm on the model is about right. There is no dimension for the position of the front edge of the cab, however there is a space of 3" between the rear edge of the cab and the centre of the handrail pillar and a similar distance between the pillar and the end of the frame. This should mean that if your cab is placed about 2.3mm forward of the rear face of the drag beam the front should be in the right place.

On thing to remember is that the chairs hold the rail at 20 degrees to the vertical. If the rail is pressed tight against the gauges then it can twist and become vertical, the upshot of which is that once the gauges are removed the rail springs back to 20 degrees and the track will be under gauge. Ideally the both rail head should just touch the gauges.

Obviously the more complicated the the contraptions people try to sell you the better the instructions need to be.

Always beware of buying things whose instructions are bigger than themselves.

The easy way to do six-wheel carriage underframes

The splasher was fitted to the main frames....

Looks as if the screws have been painted over, so a little touch of your favourite paint remover should free them.

I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to make simple thing complicated. Don't you use straight solebars on your wagons? If both w-iron units are square to at least one of the solebars won't the axles be parallel? There is a jig for fixing the wheelbase , but sometimes it's better to match the w-irons to the pattern of bolt-heads on the solebars. The jig will accommodate wheelbases in 6" steps.

Dave, I think you have your 'D's and 'E's mixed

Toad D were the ones with platforms which BR built lots more

Toad Es were bigger versions of the NER V3s without platforms.

Seems far too tidy -- you'll never find anything................

The coaches behind the diesel were the ones that there were HO brass kits of.

Don't thing the barrels would have been loaded like that. There are a couple of photos in Tatlow's LNER wagons that shows barrels loaded on their sides, with sacks full of straw to stop them moving around. These barrels are admittedly much bigger than the ones you have, since there are only 6 in the wagon, so they must have been c. 4'6" high and about 3' in diameter.

There were some HO brass kits produced for the FGC coaches in the early 90s

Yep, have fun building 'sculptures' before you start on anything that costs you money.

For flux I would recommend 'Easyflow' or any other 'plumbers' flux. However if you don't clean it off at the end of a session the your model with go green within a couple of day. Cleaning off Easyflow is dead simple -- you just put your model in a suitable sized container and pour boiling water over it. The flux has its active ingredient dispersed in semi-liquid soap, both are water soluble, but hot waster works a whole lot better.