HeatherKay

Another quick sit rep on 4250. Having almost finished the frames, but reached the milestone of getting the beast running through collecting current from all wheels, I felt I needed something more interesting to do. Making and fitting the roof seemed like an idea. There's nothing clever here, just careful use of my RSU. The cab side sheets were also taken off. It'll be easier to paint the loco and fit the correct larger sheets at a later stage. I also tidied some of the beading, helping it nestle down in place better, as well as rivet strips that go at each end of the buffer planks where they join the hanging bar. The roof will be detachable in the end, because no-one wants to be fishing about inside the cab if a crew member decides to have an impromptu lie down! At around this point one of my desk lamps blew a bulb, and as lumens dropped markedly, I called a halt for the day.

It lives!

I may be mistaken, but it's worth checking whether the vans you modelled all had the tie bar. Memory may be rusty, but I recall a pattern to whether bars might have been fitted. If the van had eight-shoe clasp vacuum brake, no bar. If it had fou-shoe brakes that only pushed out, then a bar was fitted. Of course, there will be exceptions to the rule!

You have the wrong heads there. Somebody wasn't paying attention in the packing department at Slater's.

Another progress update on 4250. Work has been progressing towards fitting the motor to the chassis. Before that could happen, the monster had to be adjusted in order to squeeze the frames round my minimum 5ft 6in radius test track and not derail. To allow the rear driven axle plenty of swinging space, some etched bolt detail had to be sacrificed. You can see the outline of the wheel, and everything within that arc was likely to cause problems with catching in the spokes if a tight curve was encountered. Although you can see the detail is missing, it's mostly hidden by the cab steps and other sundry details in the vicinity. I think that's a compromise worth pursuing. I needed to test if further modifications were required, so now seemed a good time to sit the bodywork in place. However, because I have chosen not to trim the crankpins back at this stage, they catch on steps and slidebars, so this ungainly situation had to do! The good news is the chassis rolls through the minimum curve dead slow. The bad news is the rear wheels might still touch the frames, but that can be dealt with by a thin strip of styrene glued up near the top of the wheel arc. After I fitted the motor and gearbox and found it ran fairly nicely, it was time to contemplate pickups. I was considering wipers on the tops of the wheels, but since Chris had already opened out holes for plunger pickups I decided to go with that. As Slater's pickups have nylon bodies, I therefore needed to finish most of the hot soldering work before fitting them. That meant the brake rigging. I like to be able to extract the brake rigging where possible. To aid this I use 14BA bolts soldered into the holes in the frames. Short brass tube spacers are then fitted so the brake shoe assemblies always slide back to the correct place. They are retained by 14BA bolts. This shows the idea. The pull rods and cross shafts underneath will hold the assembly together so it can be unbolted and gently prised away if future maintenance requires dropping wheelsets. The brake shoe assemblies are made from three lots of etched parts. A half-etched back, centre and half-etched front. Looking at the real thing, the hangers have a characteristic recess between front and back, probably because they might well be fabricated around the shoes. To simulate this I filed away the centre part to leave a recess when assembled. I use black styrene sheet superglued to the shoe face and rear to try and eliminate the chance of metal contact with tyre and flange, and avoiding shorts. Because JLTRT used the correct locations, this meant a bit of gentle carving to avoid the brakes being on all the time. A finished pair of shoes, showing back and front. Black styrene is chosen because if wear occurs due to contact it won't show. I haven't taken photos, but I've more or less finished assembling the rest of the brake rigging. I'll hopefully remember to show it in the next update.

True enough. You can't beat a good quality soldering iron - preferably temperature controlled.

I wish that some of Humbrol's recent offerings would be useable when brand new! As for resin cored electrical solder, it's what I've always used for the basic brass construction. I do use a flux with it, and can say I've never had a problem with anything falling apart. Yes, some cleaning up is required to get rid of excess resin that doesn't get burnt off when making the joint, but if you do it properly this is minimal. Lower melting point solders from the likes of Carrs/C&L are used for detail work. Oh, and you can't use electrical solder on whitemetal. But we all know that, don't we!

Chris did all that. The leading axles are beam compensated, third (motor) axle rigid and trailing one sprung. I'm going to need to experiment with sideplay to see if it might be possible to squeeze round a sub-six foot radius - early indications are not good, though, so if it will negotiate six foot without climbing into the four foot we shall be happy.

With Chris's blessing, here is an occasional update in progress with 4250. Work has progressed with the cylinders. The detail castings have been fitted, though I need to find a source for valve chest covers. This morning saw the motion brackets fitted. The whole cylinder, motion bracket and slide bar assembly is removable, which is useful as I have to be able to remove the driving wheels quite a bit before things are running nicely. The next stage will be to motorise the chassis. Then I can fit the details like sandboxes, sand pipes, brake gear and so on.

I hope Chris doesn't mind, but guess what's moved to my workbench!

Warren Haywood is also a superb painter. http://www.modelrailwaypainting.co.uk/index.html

I guess I'd better crack on with it then, Chris!

There are some other figure makers aside from Omen and S&D. http://www.borderminiatures.com/pages/BMStationstaff.html In the Railway Workers section of that site is a bowler hatted seated gent having a quiet smoke. Although he tends towards historical figures and the whimsical, Andrew Stadden does some nice work, too. http://www.acstadden.co.uk/Pages/Shop.aspx

Damp proof courses are a relatively modern feature, I think. I have a feeling my home, built in 1962, was retrofitted with a DPC much more recently. Which isn't to say such things were never provided, but I wonder if a factory or warehouse had such things if built in the late 1800s or early 1900s?

I'm sure I've seen handrails and stanchions where the rail comes out horizontally and then bends up to the angle of the staircase. Would that be easier than fitting stanchions right at the base/top of each case?

I think I'd be tempted to leave well alone, Chas. the real thing would be caked in that black bituminous paint, so a heavy dose of Matt black when you're finished will probably suffice. I'm looking forward to seeing how this progresses. =o)

If you can buff the shank with a brass or fibre brush, a quick dab with some Birchwood Casey might suffice. It doesn't need to be that clever, and the chemical action will darken the shank enough I would have thought. When I build wagons and coaches, bright metal buffer heads are dunked in a solution. I rarely buff them afterwards, as the mild rusting effect of the chemical looks pretty good to me. A splodge of something black and sticky-looking on the faces of the heads goes a way to represent the grease often applied to the real thing. Of course, that often gets rubbed off when the models get played with, but there you go!

Hang the copyright! This is a snatch of an image from the cover of a Geoff Gamble book (Cheona Publications, "Railways in Profile Series No 1"). I guess the copyright is Geoff's, and I'm posting here for educational purposes. It shows a detail from a rake of Presflos. The wagon on the left has Oleo buffers, giving the shiny shank appearance, while its neighbour has LMS-style self-contained spring buffers.

I didn't mean to make more work for you, Chaz. Invoke Rule One, I think. I think we'd all be quite surprised at how little buffers get compressed in their daily lives. Their primary role was to absorb shunting forces to give some measure of protection to the contents of the vehicle. An average van or wagon might get pushed about by a shunter, but not to the extent that the buffer shank would get polished up. Three-link and Instanter couplings don't really need the buffers to be compressed to drop over the hook of a neighbouring vehicle, unlike a screw link, for example. To save you the effort, I've just flicked through a couple of wagon books here. Even vans and wagons straight out of the works show the buffer shank to be the same relative shade as the head. It seems the practice was to paint the head and shank to prevent corrosion. I'd post some images, but I'm not sure about copyright issues.

I do like your weathering technique, Chaz. I wish was brave enough to do it some of my models! A pet peeve: the buffers on the van. The rods should be blackened. The only buffers that had shiny shanks were those that used oil pressure cylinders to give the buffing force, known by the term "oleo". These were common on many diesel and electric loco classes, and later build BR wagons and coaches. Everything else used a form of springing, and the finish of the entire buffer head casting was uniformly mucky weathered and painted metal. I had quite an animated discussion with Best Beloved regarding whether Mk1 coach buffers were oleo or not. I was quite adamant that they were traditional sprung buffers, and therefore should be painted or weathered metal finish as the head went into the stock. I had to take photos of a real coach before he was convinced otherwise!

Looking very nice. One thing, though. That open door on the phone box would be very unlikely unless the door closing mechanism was broken. I remember when I was a kid that it took a fair amount of effort to open the kiosk doors, and as they were made of cast iron they were also quite hefty in their own right.

Yes, you are probably right. It might well be quicker to start from scratch. It sort of depends on how much time you want to spend on something, and I'm usually silly enough to waste my time resurrecting a bad job like that! The transfers are waterslide. I used them on a loco build a while back, when a casting was so badly made I had to fill and sand back surrounding details. Once applied and painted, you'd never know they were transfers.

Hi Chris I'm afraid I couldn't have lived with the flaws in the tank casting. I would have sanded all the rivets off and replaced them. I was introduced to transfer rivets a while back. http://www.archertransfers.com/AR88105.html While there is a tiny bit of decal film the 3D rivets sit on, it's all but invisible once painted.

The most reliable way, and the method recommended by many transfer manufacturers, is a gloss finish. You'll find plastic kit aero modellers use the same technique. An overall coat of gloss varnish (or Johnsons Klear), apply the transfers, then a matt or satin coat and weathering.

Oh, I forgot the reprofiling cost