Adam FW

Firstly thank-you, I was very proud of it when I made it a few years ago and I think it still holds up well to my more recent creations Unfortunately I don't sell it at the moment, it was originally printed on shapeways (the cost would be crazy to do that today) and I haven't set the files up to print on my own printers yet and have other new stuff that I'm working on at the moment. I still plan on making one (or more) of Bellerophon's sister locomotives so I'll get around to it eventually and it may go up for sale alongside my Avonside kit so keep an eye out but I wouldn't want to guarantee anything.

I’m very proud to say the the round tank Avonside B4 kit that I designed is featured in this months BRM magazine, you can find the build on page 78 and I think they made a very nice loco out of the kit Hopefully we’ll get the square tank kit in a magazine in the future as well On a separate note unfortunately for any potential purchasers the first batch of St Thomas kits has now sold out so I guess I need to print some more so they should be back on sale within a week or 2. I’m sure it’s popularity is entirely down to the appeal of my expert build But whichever idiot (me) who thought St Thomas would be the least popular kit clearly didn’t know what he was talking about

From pictures of st Thomas the wheels were surprisingly clean but I agree they’d typically be filthy in industrial use I’ve got some LNER garter blue paint somewhere so I might try giving them a wash with that, it’s a paler and greyer than the blue spray I used but as a wash it might work, it also appears the wheels were a bit darker than the body anyway, probably just because they weren’t in direct sun light so didn’t fade as much, doubt I’ll be able to match the lining though.

Well I fitted my avonside st Thomas body to its new blue chassis and it’s an impressively poor colour match, the NCB blue looks almost purple in comparison its better than the old green wheels but definitely needs repainting, does anyone know if the cylinders can easily be removed from the B2 chassis and how to remove them? I’d rather spray paint them off the chassis, mask off everything bar the boiler cladding and spray that blue as well to get a spot on match with the body then brush paint the wheels as they aren’t in direct contact with the body colour and I don’t like the idea of spraying the wheels at all

Thanks to the joys of signed for delivery and no longer being at home 24x7 my other bank holiday purchase has only just appeared, the blue NCB Ryhope colliery peckett b2 from Hornby It’s chassis is going to end up being used for St Thomas but I was hoping that it’s blue wheels and cylinders would be close enough to the blue of St Thomas that I wouldn’t need to paint them before weathering, no such luck it’s a far darker shade, so I would have probably been better off with another sherwood chassis, nevermind.

So following a request from someone who bought some of the Railway Mani kits (thanks to everyone who has so far!) I've spent some time working on an alternative chimney for the St Dunstan kit to recreate it's sister loco and stablemate St Martin which had an unusual Stove Pipe Chimney (click on the picture below it's a flickr link not an image and goes to Gordon Edgar's photos where he has plenty of great industrial loco images) I think we've only come across 4 photos of St Martin 2 in colour, 2 black and white but luckily one showed the top of the saddletank which made things easier as it showed a nice, convenient cover plate so I didn't have to modify the saddletank only the chimney This is the CAD so far, just need to add some rivets and test print it, seeing it in 2D on a screen is OK but having the printed part is far better to get an idea of the overall appearance.

really good to see your model progress again corbs (though I am biased) you just need to pull your finger out now and get me some lining for my St Thomas build, he’s waiting eagerly

Over the bank holiday weekend I confess I bought more locos, the first to turn up was this beautiful Webb coal tank that I’ve been wanting for ages but I’d only ever seen the LMS and BR versions in person and only wanted the LNWR one. well Model Railways Direct has it on offer so I bought one and I’m glad I did, it looks stunning and runs nicely. It probably won’t be re-bodied as I like it how it is though that may change if I get any bright ideas. I also ventured into games workshop to chat about weathering and bought some washes to try out as I’ve already got some powders and failed badly at dry brushing. I like the side of the lowmac I weathered compared to the original but the top is too streaky and heavy for my liking these 2 wagons I experimented with both heavily coating the wagon and leaving it to dry (blue) and also applying a wash then wiping some of it off to get lighter weathering (red). I think I prefer the latter but I’m still struggling to avoid streaking Or water marks on large flat areas I’m going to head off to a local hobby shop later in search of a fibre pencil to have a crack at rubbing back the lettering on some wagons to make them look more used before adding a wash and see how that looks

It's been a long time coming but here's the line up of my square tank (late) Avonside B4 3D printed kits. There's 3 versions and all are now available on @Corbs Railway Mania website (links below) though I think I need to print some more of MDHB no3 as the first batch is already running low: Snowdown Colliery 'St. Dunstan' - standard round window cab with riveted 3 section saddle tank https://www.railwaymania.net/…/avonside-b4-bodykit-st-dunst… Snowdown Colliery 'St. Thomas' - square window cab with riveted 3 section saddle tank https://www.railwaymania.net/…/avonside-b4-bodykit-st-thomas Mersey Docks and Harbour Board No.3 - standard round window cab with flush sided saddle tank https://www.railwaymania.net/shop/avonside-b4-bodykit-mdhb3 I hope you like them and if you build one send me a picture, I can't wait to see other people's finished models as I'm sure many of you can do a far better job than me.

Final assembly of the square tank avonside was a little trickier than with Portbury as theres an additional handrail between the smokebox and the running board which is fiddly to install. I started by screwing the assembled running board onto the peckett chassis to help keep it flat then applied glue to the recesses for the saddle tank, I used a spare bit of handrail wire to get into the tight spots and spread the glue around with the saddle tank in place I then added glue to the recesses for the cab to fit into and added some glue onto the back of the saddle tank where it meets the cab, this adds an awful lot of strength the last job was to attach the final handrails and knobs, these run from the side of the smokebox down to the running board with a handrail knob at the top, I tried several ways to do this but settled on gluing the handrail and knob together, painting it, then threading it through the hole in the running board from above. I added some tape to the smokebox so I didn’t scratch the paintwork the handrails were then glued into place and cut to length using snips

I won’t bother going into detail on painting st Thomas beyond the stripes, suffice to say I painted all the parts separately before assembly and it was mostly spray painted, with just a bit of touch up work needed using a brush Here’s all the bits of the kit lined up and pre painted I couldn’t resist loose fitting everything for a sneak peak at the finished model as I want to weather this model I decided to add a wash to the cab interior as I won’t be able to access it easily once assembled, another benefit of this kit being in separate parts. I could have added a crew as well at this point but didn’t have any to hand so I’ll have to fit them at a later date

I probably should have shown the loco I'm basing my model off, since I don't own a picture of St Thomas I recommend looking at @montyburns56 70's Industrial Steam thread which has quite a few images from the Snowdown colliery on page 11 with a series of photos by John Stein. In total I believe Snowdown had 3 Avonside 0-6-0ST's; St Thomas, St Dunstan and St Martin, all named after churches in Canterbury. All 3 had broadly the same livery of blue with white lining and wasp stripes on the bunker and smokebox front. I've only ever seen 1 image of St Martin which also had some yellow lining on the front as it met an unfortunate fate being left full of water that froze on a winters night and badly damaged it's tank. The other 2 survived into preservation.

After priming and sanding the components for St Thomas I sprayed several thin coats of yellow on to the front of the smokebox and the bunker rear and sides for the wasp stripes. I then masked out the wasp stripes using Tamiya masking tape. I cut the tape into points on the model with a scalpel and forced it it the crevasses around the smokebox hinges using a cocktail stick. I then sprayed the black I had to go over a few area with acrylic paint and a detail brush where the masking wasn’t great but it mostly came out nicely. I then had to mask the striped areas off ready for the blue paint

On with St Thomas, my test build of the square tank avonside. As with the round tank kit I designed and built some time ago this one is split into 3 major components, the running board the cab and the saddle tank along with a raft of separately fitted details (no photos of these unpainted sadly) as you can see there’s a little bit of cleanup to do where the support material has left it’s mark but it’s minimal and mostly hidden. After sanding this back my first job was to drill out the handrail holes being very careful with the vertical cab ones, the holes are printed but some needed excess resin removing so it’s a quick and easy job Unlike the round tank loco the square tank has optional front hand rail positions, two higher up closer together knobs for a straight hand rail and wider lower ones for a curved handrail. The holes are Capped off in the print so I don’t need to fill in the 2 I don’t need but it means I had to hold the part up to a bright light to see where to drill as the material is thinner where the holes are going and you can see it glow, the holes can then be marked. It’s far easier to do this before painting as corbs will attest to St Thomas has a straight handrail so the middle holes were drilled out. Now I bent and assembled the other handrails and loose fit them to make sure they looked right and trimmed them to length Next up I primed everything, let it dry and sanded back any obvious print lines

I test printed a few of the generic square tank loco kits for test building and approval, @Ruston built one of these up in his thread, and in my opinion it looks great (a far better job of prepping and painting than I'm capable of) However 1 kit does not make a range so I expanded from 1 loco to 3 just like with the round tank kit by altering some pieces that would be a pain to do practically but easy on CAD: starting with the generic basis we decided to define it as St Dunstan, a Snowdown Colliery loco that is in preservation: altering the cab windows and some cab details gave me St Thomas, another Snowdown loco with a cab modified by the NCB to have 'square' windows, again a preserved loco: Finally removing the rivet detail and bands on the saddletank created a loco flush welded tank similar to that seen on Cranford in preservation, this loco most closely matches No3 from the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, this loco was sadly scrapped in the 90s: All of these locos can easily be modified to make other prototypes, for instance you can sand off the rivets on St Dunstan's saddletank and smokebox to make Earl Fitzwilliam or snip off the front steps to produce Robert. That's enough of the design and printing stages, from here out it's all building and painting. I chose to do a St Thomas model, which means lots of wasp stripes (I must be a glutton for punishment), here it is waiting to be cut free

the test prints for the square tank Avonsides were assembled to check the fit and highlight any issues with the kit, @Corbs fully painted his one to go alongside a bagnall he'd recently worked on, which highlighted a few areas to improve Meanwhile I mucked about with making a ghost train out of clear resin and concluded that clear resin in an absolute PITA to print with At this point we decided something wasn't right with the model, but as anyone who's worked on something for a long time you tend to become blind to it's issues so got a bit of outside help from people more knowledgeable of the prototypes much like corbs is with portbury. This identified some core issues mostly differences with Portbury we had wrongly believed to be carryover between the Avonside designs. Of most importance was that the running board extended too far forwards of the smokebox, the cab and saddletank were too low, the safety valve too small and the bunker was too long. Some pretty major changes which was quite a set back having by now started the production prints for the round tank locos but I found time to make the improvements though having to redo the rivets was painful. Finally this version was ready for test printing, it's not easy to see all the differences (and not all have been mentioned) as some are quite minor but I think they add up to a much better model overall compared to v1 though I did change the buffer beam even more after this print

I'd experiment with a few changes to the model, I won't get into layer height and exposure as that's a separate can of worms to look into Firstly if possible I'd move to a horizontal rather than vertical orientation to keep the face with the most support material hidden on the underside. Currently the most supported face is also one of the most visible. If you can re-orientate the print to be horizontal you may want to look into angling the bracing detail on the wagon to not need any support, ie: if you angle the print at 10 degrees add a 15 degree chamfer under any overhangs to remove the need for support material entirely, if the detail is shallow you won't notice the chamfer. Secondly I'd use a lot more thin supports and get rid of the the thick ones, use them for corners or distant features only maybe. If nothing else the thin supports come away far more easily and mark the surface less so theres less clean up needed. Finally it could be the pictures but your orientation appears to only be angled on one axis so the lowest point on the model is an edge rather than a corner. I tend to use 10 degrees on 2 axis' but vary it depending upon the specific model, as @justin1985 said there are some ideal angles that could be used but these may take up too much space or take too long to print depending upon the model

Can you show an image of how many supports you used? I used to have similar issues and moved to a higher density of thinner supports placed close to edges which seems to work much better but mostly I try to make it so that the support are always on a hidden face as it never looks good and always needs sanding

back to the Avonsides, after spending so long with Portbury and the other round tank locos myself and @Corbs started off pretty confident that we could easily have a line up of square tanks done as after all it's just a different shaped tank, dome and chimney vs the round tank locos, how wrong we were... to begin with the cab is a different size, it's larger. Most obviously it's wider and sits close to the edge of the running board but it's also longer which in turn pushes the boiler and saddle tank forwards, but the smokebox needs to sit over the cylinders so in CAD the running board moves backwards instead. It's a headache to figure everything out, so much for a simple change. The first prints weren't the best, the running board was really flimsy where the cab and boiler met due to the wider cab taking away a lot of the strength but that was resolved with a few minor tweaks leading to this mk1 design

Without a mouse or 3d space ball. All CAD systems are pretty clumsy, it’s not you it’s the need to hold a mouse button and scroll at the time. I’m sure there’s some control scheme that works with a laptop trackpad but I’ve not seen it

Firstly thanks, I hope this answers your questions I’ve used a variety of CAD and packages Both professionally and as a hobbyist but for hobby work I’d recommend Autodesk fusion 360 it’s relatively easy to teach yourself to use and you can get it free for hobby use. Hardware is a difficult one to judge as simple components don’t need a powerful machine but once you get to complex assemblies with lots of features such as whole locos even my laptop which is basically a windows gaming laptop struggles and needs time to compute any changes in the design history. I presume the software would also work on a Mac I’ve got both an anycubic photon and an elegoo Mars pro resin 3d printer. I’ve found the Mars quicker and more reliable but both give equivalent print quality you will also need a slicer software to convert cad to a file the printer will accept. Some printers require proprietary software due to weird file formats but most accept chitubox which I think is free. This software is also where you add the print supports and set the printer setting for layer height and exposure

I’m glad you liked the kit and I’m very impressed by both how quickly and how well you have built it I’m really looking forward to see how you weather it, I’ve still got that to do on my St Thomas model that I’ve been building over the past week regarding your thoughts on improvements, the version 1 portbury model did have locating features for the sandboxes but they made getting a good flush fit quite difficult and the print wasn’t very reliable so we removed them favouring easier prep work over assembly. Removing the features also meant that alternative sandboxes can easily be fitted if desired I agree with you regarding the instructions, fortunately that’s easily changed

firstly I’m really impressed with your finish on this so far, you have far more patience for sanding than I do the boiler back head shape is taken from portbury, there’s an image of it during restoration on the Bristol harbour railway website showing the narrower bottom section with a curve between the barrel and this flat sided lower section, I believe their peckett henbury is similar. We didn’t have any measurements of it so you could be right that it is a little too small from the green sandboxes I presume you’re painting it all green, is it going to be based off a specific prototype or something freelance?

Here’s some pictures of my finished portbury kit, the last picture includes an additional alfloc water treatment pump that I designed and printed as used on the loco during its working life with the PBA theres more pictures and a build blog on my workbench

I'm wondering if Nafloc is just what the crews called it ie: it's a bit naff, going a bit more sciency it could be that Nafloc uses sodium (Na) and Alfloc is a system using Aluminium (Al), I get the sodium as that is part of water softening, the aluminium not so much AFIAK Interesting to hear how they worked Mike, I had presumed it was a fluid that got added into the box not a soluble block