Nick Lawson

Jol, I know nothing about this, but is it not possible these days to scan the etch tool and reverse engineer a cad file? These days I almost expect there to be an app on my phone already...

You're on! See you tomorrow.

@ikcdab Certainly MUCH LESS than the secondhand one currently on ebay. And yes they are good. Oh yes it can! (Sorry it's that time of year) @Steamport Southport Can you confirm - I don't have a recent MRJ - , but a 2022 edition gives George Watts' contact details as: 11 Croshaw Close Lancing West Sussex BN15 9LE Tel 01903 767231 @fulton GW also does a wheel puller, similar to the one you illustrated, but £12 (2022 price). I tried to use a GW puller to rectify a wheel I had pushed on too far (before acquiring a quartering jig) but it is only stable in one plane and the wheel is now just slightly out of true. I keep hoping for a 3 - legged puller like a car hub-puller. For anyone who hasn't enough toys - GW also does mini-rollers and a universal rivet punch tool

Now in black: Inspired by a bit of low morning sun through the window, I thought "photoshoot time", forgetting that of course it would show up every imperfection even better than usual. I had bought a spray can allegedly of Black, Matt Finish to save daubing with a brush. This product, "Rustoleum Universal Advanced Formula All Surface Paint" turned out not to be my idea of matt. Although, for future reference, if one wants to match the slightly shiny plastic finish of an old black loco as-is, it may be a useful product. As you can see, I have daubed real matt over the top, but halfheartedly. I haven't time to finish this off properly at the moment, so back in the box it goes. In the meantime, I have replaced the missing front steps, by grafting on the cab steps salvaged from another, very badly damaged, Jinty body. The nearside is not too bad, but the off-side is a bit ... off. Apart from that the tell-tale is that the cab steps have some rivet heads while the front steps don't.

Ah yes, now you mention it, no contest really.

Well the frames are HO width, but the body is about the same width as OO, so I assumed they had adopted a euro loading gauge which had worked out about right.

Nope, not going there. the brake van?

The South Yorkshire Times of 4 Dec 1925 recorded the passing of Mrs J.E.H Drabble, including: "Mrs Drabble, who was 83 years of age, was twice married. Her first husband was Mr William Henry Mitchell, whom she accompanied to Kilnhurst in the year 1886, when he established, in partnership with the late Mr Henry Ellison, the very successful tar distilleries known as Ellison and Mitchell Ltd, until a few years ago, when they were merged into the Yorkshire Tar Distilleries Combine." So Mitchell took care of the Kilnhurst end. He died a few years later, leaving a young family but a son later became a director of Yorkshire Tar Distillers. The same paper recorded on 18 July of that year, that the late Mr Henry Ellison of Morecombe and Cleckheaton, had left an estate with "net personalty" of £216,896. Where there's muck... Earlier newspapers contain some lurid stories of industrial accidents etc which add much more colour to the saga.

More on Henry Ellison - the 1901 census for Cleckheaton records: Henry Ellison, 53, b. Ireby Cumberland - tar distiller Henry Ellison, 29, b Cleckheaton Yorks - disinfectant maker Joseph Ellison, 23, b Cleckheaton Yorks - tar distiller Fred Ellison, 21, b Cleckheaton Yorks - disinfectant maker (Wife, 2 daughters and live in maid also present but not recorded as having any tar-related activities.

Keith Turton vol 6, P164 has a pic of Henry Ellison, Cleckheaton, no54. I'll take advice on what colour it is! The powside decal is white on a clear background. Wagon built by Pickerings. There is a different picture in Alan Coppin's, Oil on the Rails, of Henry Ellison, Cleckheaton, No13, by Charles Roberts. This is a pale colour (grey?) and only has a discreet owner's plate on the solebar. Incidentally the useful po index by Joe Greaves, refers to the man as Harry Ellison rather than Henry. According to this index the pic in Coppin is also in Richard Touret's Petroleum Rail Tank Wagons of Britain.

According to https://www.lner.info/locos/Railcar/gnr_railmotor.php "The boiler was provided with a casing but this was removed in November 1907 after complaints of oscillation. This required minor modifications to the chimney, dome, and sand boxes."

It happens I'm going for a Henry Ellison tar wagon, (set just received from Powsides), so from my own googling: https://www.alamy.com/an-1893-illustrated-advertisment-for-a-carboline-a-coal-tar-and-eucalyptus-disinfectant-product-claimed-to-fight-against-diseases-like-cholera-typhoid-as-well-as-treating-fever-and-germs-henry-ellison-tar-distillers-in-1927-it-became-yorkshire-tar-distillers-ltd-one-of-europes-largest-chemical-manufacturersthe-firm-also-make-a-carboline-soap-which-is-impregnated-with-carboline-this-soap-is-splendid-for-scouring-scrubbing-and-cleansing-every-thing-for-all-domestic-purposes-nothing-could-be-better-another-article-manufactured-by-the-firm-is-ellisons-patent-automatic-disinfector-image397844196.html?imageid=4A5F2A76-1841-43ED-A2FF-735E3D468EEC&p=176197&pn=1&searchId=198fe70705669dd2beb47162c8aabd72&searchtype=0 @Compound2632Also HMRS have photos for 12T and 20T cylindrical tar wagons for E & M, registered to the Midland, but 1907 & 1910, so sadly outside your period.

As (more) displacement activity I started tidying up one of my 1960s childhood Playcraft/Jouef open wagons; if only to remove my poor 1970s paint job (in progress below). Along the way I wondered if I could somehow adapt it to fit my 1923 layout, but it is a bit on the long side for that era, being 20' long with a 12' wheelbase. Then I noticed it claimed to be a 22T tube wagon, so I looked that up e.g. https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/brlmstube The layout of the body side generally matches the 1/447 & 1/448 prototypes with the minor detail that the model has an extra plank, but more conspicuously has been "longitudinally challenged" to a fabulous 10.5 FEET under the length of the ex-LMS 1/447, let alone a 12 feet shortfall against the BR 1/448! The model claims to be B731490 which is in the right area, but I don't know which of the two prototypes it belonged to. Any offers? Various models have been detected as being under scale size, but I'm sure I can hear the spirit of the late Roy Castle exclaiming "It's a RECORDBREAKER!". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_Breakers

Be reassured by Vic & Bob:

True. One can only dream of how this might change if, say, the Life in the UK citizenship test was recrafted by doyens of RMWeb,

Oooh, can we hope that some of these old terms will one day appear in a future dictionary edition? Counterbalancing the crop of yoof neologisms.

@brossard Thanks for the suggestions John. I should explain that I am slowly building an EM Gauge layout with a through traversing fiddleyard. I discovered by accident that my OO Gauge Wrenn N2 has such fat wheels it will sit on EM Gauge track! Obviously it won't go through EM pointwork, but there is none of that in my fiddleyard. I thought it would be fun to keep this relic of my childhood (I see from the pricetag that I paid £7.50 of real saved pocket money to buy it new in a sale). It doesn't belong in my layout, but could work as an off-stage yard shunter to e.g. take a brakevan off the back of a rake and move it down the other end, ready to run a return service. Then I looked at the big, ugly wheels on this Jinty and wondered if it too would sit on EM track. It does just! I need to ease some of the wheels out a bit, but I think I have another future yard shunter. So, no, I'm not rewheeling this one. I do also have another Jinty which I did rewheel with Markits. I'm considering getting some bushes and EM axles for that one, although Jinties hadn't quite come into being in my time period. For completeness there is a third Jinty in pieces, which I bought off another lad for 6/- in 1969. Given that none of these will make it onto the layout proper, they are not going to get an expensive makeover. @33C I have also been inspired by your Triang Princess thread. When I saw your A6, I thought ooh! I've got a princess chassis in the loft! One day, with smaller wheels, there may even be an A7 in my fiddleyard! But that's a long way off.

(I considered filing this in the pugbash thread, but as my aim was to make a Jinty look more like a Jinty rather than create a Jintystein, I didn't think it met the standard of creativity). As a side project, I am fixing up an early Hornby Jinty, which was in pieces. While removing the remains of the broken front steps I gazed once too often on the unsightly blanking in the body work where there ought to be the boiler bottom and daylight. This particular model has a large screw through one side of this blanking to secure the body to a block, itself screwed onto the top of the chassis. This hole invited exploration with a piercing saw blade, scalpel, files etc. The blanking was removed. A fresh hole in the other side and that was also removed. Daylight! I set out to make a boiler bottom. I had saved an offcut of plastic (polypropylene?) water pipe thoughtfully left for me under the floorboards by a plumber. At a smidge under 20mm diameter, this is larger than the Jinty boiler; but only a small arc was needed so the difference in radius is inconspicuous. I cut a larger than necessary arc from the pipe and then filed it down gradually to fit. The tank fronts were looking ridiculously wide as they now showed the thickness of the cut away body, so I trimmed them back carefully. They are still way wider than prototype but good enough. This trimming also allowed me to slide my new boiler bottom in from behind. I used some contact adhesive to fasten it in place. I had started by cutting a decent length of pipe so I had something to hold onto, but having filed the correct arc I then cut it to length. Annoyingly I didn't check the appearance from all angles and I found I had cut the length too short, so there was a visible gap when seen diagonally. I glued back the bit I had just removed. Flat plastikard then formed the rear of the smokebox bottom. Et voila, a white underbelly. In order to fit the improved body I then needed to unscrew the mounting block from the top of the chassis. This of course also completed the removal of the means of fastening the body to the chassis. I had a packet of long 10BA screws and nuts from the late, lamented "Eileen". The underneath of the chassis had a suitably positioned threaded hole, (not sure what for), so I drilled this right through to the top and then drilled a countersink to hide the head - even though this is much less conspicuous than the screw heads holding the pick-up plate. I then glued a block of plastic under the chimney for this screw to engage with. That's it for now. I will spray the white stuff with black primer and then see whether I think the visible join needs fairing in or just settle for that. These pictures have reminded me that I still have more to do reducing the wheel flanges, so that is probably the next thing.

Nothing to show this week. I glued the sandboxes on to the frames, but then found I'd set them slightly too high, such that the body couldn't engage properly. Back off they came. I had some fun trying to make up lamp irons. I tried soldering staples as others have done, which seemed quite reasonable at the time, but the next day I decided I didn't like them after all. Waiting on some phosphor bronze strip to try that. In the meantime I decided to take a break and set up my layout to test: a. would the loco work at all, away from the workbench? b. Would it still go round the sharpest curves as expected? c. Would it haul a load? d. Would it work across my self-built double slip point, unlike my only existing loco - an Ebay purchase which only works tender first on one particular path. My layout is a semi-portable one, under-construction. The idea is that if I shunt some of the living room furniture I can set it up between, and over, these obstacles for a running session. Unfortunately since I designed this the Senior Partner has refurnished the room such that what I have built so far doesn't all fit. (Nooooooooo!) We tried rearranging things again, but no good; so I will have to alter a couple of sections and some sweeping curves will have to be rather less sweeping. Also since I last set it up, various bits that do still fit the room needed fettling to work as they used to. However, by the end of the day, the answer to the questions above seemed to be YES! In particular I assembled a short train of whitemetal wagons, notably a thug of a brake van which weighs as much as any three normally weighted wagons (yep, Ebay again) and the loco lifted it. I look forward to trying this with a longer train. A full test of the slip point will have to await my mk2 baseboard configuration, but the initial result seems to indicate that the slip is ok after all - it is the secondhand 4F that is at fault. So that's all good.

Perhaps this was just like-for-like replacement for maintenance? I believe axleboxes had whitemetal bearings which needed replacement from time to time. This was a matter of cleaning out; pouring hot metal into the inverted axle box; and, when cold, scraping it into an even surface and ensuring a channel for the lubricant to run onto the axle.

Without wanting to "cast nasturtiums" at the models in this thread, the 1969 Planet might hold its own today.

I had a quick search. December 1969 RM includes a scratchbuilt O Gauge Planet by D.R. Spence, with an accompanying 4mm drawing by CJF from Ahrons. The first article concluded: "Incidentally the total cost of the loco and tender was £3/5/- so who said that O gauge modelling was expensive?" Perhaps these items inspired one of the items in this thread?

Decals day! HMRS Pressfix. Some of the smaller items took more than one go, as I managed to apply them rotated. The bufferbeam "M" I managed to peel off and stick back in the correct orientation with "glue and glaze". I'll see if it's still there tomorrow! The only picture of this loco I have seen is from 1920, at which time this number was on the side of a much older, smaller tender. I have chosen to imagine that this was a temporary arrangement and that by 1923 (my year) it had managed to get an upgrade back to this more normal configuration.

@Compound2632 Wagon numbers - I expect you already have this, but just in case: Midland Locomotives (E & J) vol 4 plate 36 - the 3 plank wagon in the background. I can't make out the number but persons with better eyesight will.

MR wagons are your friend in this respect, as their pale grey paint turned progressively darker over time. Essery (vol 1), says this was because the lead reacted with sulphur in the air and includes a pic of two 10T brakevans together. They are conspicuously different in colour, so you can be relaxed about colour matching!