Bill_9B

I am amazed it is two years since I posted on here about my old models and my idea of making a 7mm model of a Fowler tender as an experiment to see if I could still make them after so long. In the meantime I've been busy with home improvements (including a 'storage room' in the loft ) Had an operation on my hand and other diversions, but I fished out my model again and have just added a few details to it. Everything on it is paper, wood and card. I'll probably keep adding detail when I feel like it - stuff like handrails, lamp brackets etc - not forgetting the under-frame detail has not been even started. But I doubt it will ever be part of a 7mm finished model with its loco, I prefer 4mm and will start a layout at some time in that scale.

Lovely job.

An update to my last post. I finally got around to making a new model this time in 7mm scale to see if I still had the 'skills' of decades ago Since I had a drawing of it I decided to make another Fowler tender. After two evenings work the tender body is assembled. This is constructed around a 1.5 mm plywood 'box' with card lamination to form the body. This is the basic model to which detail will be added in the form of paper and card overlays (the same method used in the 3F model). And of course there are still things like the vents, dome, steps and handrails (some being 'delicate' when handling the model while under construction, so I'll leave to last). All the card sealed with a coat of paint as each stage of construction is completed. Materials used. Card from document folders, 'King Edward' cigar packets (provided by a friend of mine who is a smoker). Tesco's photo printer paper (really thin card). 1.5 mm (or whatever its imperial equivalent was) plywood. Super Glue to fix it all together. Matt black aerosol paint (still a bit wet and shiny here and there when the photos were taken). Photos. Coal space is a complete guess, but better than just leaving it as a flat area. When finished and filled with coal it should allow 'part full' representation instead of the more usual full load seen on models. There's a couple of views of the underside where the ply construction can be seen. The old and the new a comparison.

I'm glad people have found my posts interesting. Please feel free to ask questions about anything to do with the models or my methods. Now I'm going to have to show I'm still capable of producing them. I like the idea of 7mm, So I think once all the festivities are out of the way I'll start on a tender body. I have already scaled up and printed the drawing from a 4 mm one I have. The wheels will have to wait a while - I did not realise they are so expensive in O gauge!

Another old scrap model found in another box! Battered and with some bits removed/missing. One of my first attempts, a 3F tank I'd forgotten about. Boiler bands are from paper attached with paint. A view showing the paper tube construction of the boiler I mentioned and where it had been cut out with a razor saw to clear the motor. Buffer beams are plastic, probably robbed off an Airfix kit. Dome carved from balsa. Some more 'close up' shots. I thought at first I had made it to fit a Triang jinty chassis, but it does not fit the one I still have, so there was a home-made one for this which must have got a better replacement body as my 'skill' improved. Perhaps some rivet detail can be seen here

Thank you for the kind comments, much appreciated. The trouble with the springs and axle boxes was in making even just two that were actually the same when finished let alone three on one side so they all matched up! Any difference between them at all sticks out like a sore thumb. Also my idea of them was mostly gleaned from photos in magazines, although there were a few examples of these sorts of tenders still around at the time so perhaps I should have paid more attention to the real thing. The springs in the photo were made by carving them out of a balsa type wood used by aero-modellers If I remember correctly there were different grades that could be obtained, the one I used was fine grained and good for 'carving' detail. The roughly triangular shape of the spring was cut into the end of the block of balsa, the 'leaves' were represented by carving or actually more like scraping away the wood with a pointed craft knife blade. Starting at the longest (top leaf) then the next leaf was shorter and made very slightly narrower than the first and so on until the bottom shortest and narrowest one. The vertical 'strap' or whatever it is called is actually a thin strip of toilet paper (the old shiny type) built up and stuck in place with paint. The real thing had about fifteen leaves I think, my springs probably only had six but it gave the 'effect'. They were then thoroughly soaked in thinned down Humbrol matt black painted on with a small brush and allowed to dry completely before being cut off the block, or if you like, the section of stock balsa with a razor saw. When treated with a coat or two of this and then finally painted the wood takes on an almost plastic like quality, because of all the paint it absorbs. Finally sanded down on some wet or dry to the correct thickness which was then stuck in position on the card overlay on the dummy ply tender frames. The mounting were made from bits of fuse wire with a little blob of solder on the ends in an attempt to represent them. (Again I should have had a better look at the real thing). The axle boxes were carved out of balsa it is not actually that difficult to get detail like this, but again it is glaringly obvious they are not quite the same details on each one or the exact same size! Castings are the way to go with this, but in those days they were far too expensive for me. I'm drawn now to making some 7mm models using card and ply wood (I just checked the thickness, it is about 1.5 mm and not 1 mm as I previously said) with my tinplate or probably now brass frames. Perhaps start with a Fowler tender if I can find a suitable set of wheels?

Just to add to the previous post. I have been rooting around in some old boxes in the attic and found a 4mm scale card tender I made for the for either the 4F or 7F. (Actually thinking about it, it would have been the 7F) It must have been languishing here for the best part of five decades. There is a little damage here and there from being knocked about but generally it has not fared too badly. There is certainly no damage from dampness as seems to worry many people about card models. It would have been one I was not happy with and was never actually 'finished' and ended up in the scrap box. Which is why I still have it. I have made an attempt at photographing it. This shows the details (as far as I got) including card and balsa springs and axle boxes, terrible hand painted lettering (to be fair this would have been an experiment as I used transfers for my models) Looking on top. The coal is glued on to hide airgun pellets which were used to balast the model and would have been 'topped off' with another finer sifting of (real) coal. I also used paper overlays on my models with rivet an other detailing all absent on this tender, so again this makes me think I must have binned it and decided to start again. You can possibly see the 1mm ply and card outside frames which were in this model just 'cosmetic'. The wheels ran in slots in the tinplate inner frame and were held in place by two 'keeper' wires (possibly 10 amp fuse wire) running on each side along the length of the chassis. I removed the centre wheel so the arrangement is a bit clearer (hopefully). The wheels were fully insulated types, and I had shorted one wheel on each axle making the frame 'live' (the opposite side on the loco frame) giving reliable pick up without anything rubbing on the wheels. It really does all look a bit crude, I was perhaps 14 years old when I made this. I like to think my models were much better than this abandoned attempt, especially in the later years until I got married and forgot about modelling. Hope this is of some interest.

This is my first post so I hope it is not breaking some rule or is too long or boring. I have read with interests the comments here about card modeling. Perhaps I can add to them a little. I have been away from modeling for decades, and all the models I made have long since gone, but now I have reached retirement age have a reawakened interest and I am very tempted to start again in O Gauge and in cardboard. D. A. Sackett was mentioned. As a young schoolboy and aspiring 'OO' gauge modeler I remember reading an article of his in the April 1961 Railway Modeller. (Which I still have). This inspired me to make my own locos and stock to supplement the two second-hand Triang Jinty (one broken) and collection of track, stock and other bits I had. His method for loco frames was using 1 mm ply with brass bushes for the axels and the body made from card. I copied this idea in my first attempt to build a 4F tender loco. After several unsuccessful goes at this, the biggest problems concerning electrical pick up and being not being able to find the brass bushes, I modified the idea by using tinplate 'overlays' stuck on the ply frame and making my own bushes (from brass curtain rail drilled and laboriously filed up and then soldered in place) to create a split insulated frame. I'd scraped together enough cash for a motor (Romford I think), axels (and made them into split insulated axels as described below), wheels (all uninsulated type) and gears . After several attempts I had a working chassis which actually ran very well. The body took many attempts but you learn as you go along, eventually I managed a fair representation of the prototype. The tender body was made from card exactly as described in Mr Sackett's article, the frame from the 1 mm ply with some brass curtain rail home made bearings to suit the axels on the wheels- only later did I realise I could have saved a lot of work by making the tender frame from tinplate with a set of insulated wheels to pickup from one rail only and do the same on the loco for the other rail! Over a few years I built a LMS Class 7F 0-8-0 which was really just a bigger version of the 4F - (it is a good job I had only a few gentle curved sections of track I doubt it would have gone around anything less than 48" radius) lots of open wagons and a couple of coaches all from card and had quite a reasonable layout along one wall about 15' end to end layout. The standard of the models I made were even though I say it myself, not worse than most of the commercial offerings of the time. Some of the things I learned also went into motorising a plastic kit. The Airfix Drewry diesel shunter 2/- or (10p) I made a split electrical pickup chassis from ply and my tinplate 'overlays' drilled to suit the diameter of some Hornby (I think) three rail metal wheels which were about the right diameter for the loco's driving wheels. The crank pin holes in the wheels were drilled in a rough 'template' I made to hold them out of a bit of thick plywood. 'Tinplate' was from mainly buiscuit tins which were quite thick compared to those around now, it is very easy to work and solder and I found ideal for my purpose. The axels were a nice fit in some homemade hard plastic 'tube' (knitting needle drilled down the middle and sawn off to suit the space available between the frames (my mother never did find out where she 'lost' them!) to join them back together with an insulated gap when the axels were sawn in half and one shortened by about 3mm to make them insulated. The jackshaft was made from the centre axel of a broken Triang Jinty with the worm wheel and the flangeless wheel filed down to the profile of the plastic part from the kit (well near enough) and drilled in the correct place for the crankpin. I filed up the connecting rods from rail, jointed like the real thing, but I had not learned to make them first and then mark out the frame holes from them, so they needed a lot of fiddling and remaking before they were right. As I remember 'Araldite' type epoxy seemed fabulously expensive in those days and I found a substitute in the 'new fangled' resin body filler my father used to patch the holes in his old Austin. It was a can of resin and a tube of hardener with a bag of powder you mixed in to make filler. I did not use the powder and found it suitable for all sorts of jobs including gluing the wheels in the knitting needle tubes and my crankpins in the wheels, (which were actually large dressmakers pins guess where from?) The conrods were fitted and secured with a blob of solder after the pin was cut to length (which needed replacing fairly often as it soon wore away). The Triang motor was connected with a bits of wire soldered to the tinplate frame 'overlays' and it lay in the cab and part of the 'bonnet' which was a pity because the nice detail of the cab control had to be hacked out to accommodate it. As I remember the rear of the cab had to be 'butchered' a bit to allow the worm to engage with the gear wheel and had a 'toolbox' grafted on the back to hide it. But it did work although it really needed a gear ratio that did not allow it to go at about 80 (scale) mph. Making boiler tube from card was mentioned. I did this by finding a suitable former, a piece of tube or something, about 2 -3 mm smaller than the finished size. Using writing paper soaked in well mixed polycell (or similar and greasing the tube first so it could be removed afterwards) it is wound around the former until the required diameter is achieved making sure no air is trapped in the 'laminates'. This was left in the airing cupboard for several days to fully dry and harden. It could then be cut out as required to clear mechanism/motor with careful use of a razor saw. It produced a strong boiler the overlapping 'end' positioned at the bottom did not show on the model. The tools I had. All basic stuff. Hand turned drill (no power tools) which could be mounted in a vertical stand, I forget the make but was about £2-19-6d or something from a local store called 'Ellis Sykes' very expensive for me at the time. A selection of drill bits, a pin chuck, needle files, soldering iron, craft knife and blades etc. Junior hacksaw, razor saw, small nail clippers an office paper punch and scissors. Card used was from business cards (I had 500 of these given to me when a freind of my parents retired), Kellogg's and Weetabix cartons also some document folders. I did not use shellac very much, I did not find it very useful. Instead I painted the model as it was assembled. At first with Humbrol matt black, later I found car spray can aerosol matt black which is much easier to use and get inside all the nooks and crannies. I never had any problems with damp or distortion. The models when complete were painted with the usual Humbrol railway range of paints. Glues used for card were balsa cement (which shrank slightly when it dried so could distort the components if you were not careful) or the clear solvent 'UHU' type adheasives. Looking at drawings in my old copies of RM to scan and print to 7mm scale....