Wantage Road 1880 4mm Broad Gauge

[lezz01]

it's a bit of a beast isn't it!?

Regards lez.

[Charlie586]

(Embedded pic)

 

I think you'd have to drive the middle or rear wheel near the boiler and propel the front truck.  Getting all the gear to move is the obvious big problem. Something for when I fully retire I think.

[Nick Holliday]

It looks as if you could hide a HighLevel gearbox in what I assume is the cylinder housing, with the motor in the boiler. They have conveniently provided connections between the boiler and cylinders to hide the drive shaft, and the gearbox can be off-centre to suit, if necessary.

[Charlie586]

7 hours ago, Nick Holliday said:

It looks as if you could hide a HighLevel gearbox in what I assume is the cylinder housing, with the motor in the boiler. They have conveniently provided connections between the boiler and cylinders to hide the drive shaft, and the gearbox can be off-centre to suit, if necessary.

That would be maybe a better way than I had in mind. The connection would hide a shaft very well, it almost seems designed for it. Getting enough weight upfront maybe an issue. Driving the middle, boiler section would enable using tender weight. Whether the thing would stay on the track is anyone's guess though.

[lezz01]

I would drive it through the 10 smaller wheels using a gearbox on each axle with a layshaft and UJ's running the whole length from the tender to the first axle under the boiler with a 2-1 reduction box connected under the firebox and the motor in the boiler. That would leave the driving wheels and motion free running and I would build the front section out of steel for more weight. Getting to go around any sort of curve would be the main problem.

Regards Lez.  

[MrWolf]

I don't think that weight has to be that much of an issue with the leading truck carrying the motion. The drive gears could be solid brass, as could the cylinder block with a wrapper carrying the lagging detail.

A narrow shaft with three worm gears fitted and hidden at chassis level could drive all three axles under the boiler, or at least the leading two, via a pair of spur gears and a motor hidden in the firebox. A pair of UJs or flexible shaft could do the same job and drive both loco and tender units.

[lezz01]

Well either way it's a lovely looking Victorian monster. I'd love to have a go at it but I could never justify it.

Regards Lez. 

[Charlie586]

I'm a good 5 years from retirement (or 10 if something goes wrong in the meantime), so I'm in no rush to start (though I do have 2 spare sets of 6' drivers).

It is actually smaller than the beast it looks, but I agree it needs drive to at least 2, preferably more, of the axles by some kind of shaft. 

 

21 minutes ago, lezz01 said:

Well either way it's a lovely looking Victorian monster. I'd love to have a go at it but I could never justify it.

Regards Lez. 

You could always make a static model and see what happens. It would fit nicely in a bookshelf. 

[lezz01]

Well I do have a drawing............Hmm 7mm......hmm!

Regards Lez.

 

[Charlie586]

7mm would be quite an imposing model.  Good luck!

 

[lezz01]

The problem is I only have a drawing of the left elevation and no detail of the motion. I'd need more drawings to even begin to make a start on it. So if anyone has some other drawings of her I would be grateful if you could let me have a copy of them.

Regards Lez.  

[Compound2632]

On 28/07/2022 at 15:10, Charlie586 said:

Getting enough weight upfront maybe an issue. 

 

But an entirely prototypical issue.

[Charlie586]

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

But an entirely prototypical issue.

 

Yeah the real thing performed terribly,  I imagine hurricane with its single driver was even worse. Any poor running on a model can be shrugged off and called scale performance.

[Charlie586]

5 hours ago, lezz01 said:

The problem is I only have a drawing of the left elevation and no detail of the motion. I'd need more drawings to even begin to make a start on it. So if anyone has some other drawings of her I would be grateful if you could let me have a copy of them.

Regards Lez.  

There was an article in the broad gauge society broadsheet magazine a few years back, but all mine are still in boxes. Don't know if it would be helpful or not.

The broad gauge engines book vol 1, which  I haven't got, is probably useful. 

There's a small sectional drawing in the rcts book that came from The Engineer originally. 

[lezz01]

I have the Broad gauge engines Vol I it only shows the left side elevation so the rest would be guesswork. It's the motion I'm really interested in, most of it I can figure out, it will be a crank either side of the gear wheel with a smaller gear on the leading axel but the valve gear it a total mystery. Mind you if that lever isn't a reverser then it looks like it will have a similar arrangement to a beam engine which means it was driven from the front and not the back of the firebox. Thunderer and Hurricane both look like they were a total pig to drive. No wonder they were broken up after only a year.

Regards Lez.      

[Charlie586]

9 hours ago, lezz01 said:

I have the Broad gauge engines Vol I it only shows the left side elevation so the rest would be guesswork. It's the motion I'm really interested in, most of it I can figure out, it will be a crank either side of the gear wheel with a smaller gear on the leading axel but the valve gear it a total mystery. Mind you if that lever isn't a reverser then it looks like it will have a similar arrangement to a beam engine which means it was driven from the front and not the back of the firebox. Thunderer and Hurricane both look like they were a total pig to drive. No wonder they were broken up after only a year.

Regards Lez.      

Sent you a pm with the rcts picture which might help a little.

[Charlie586]

So, you may remember I got a new 3d printer a few weeks ago. I've no had as much time as I would have liked to play with it.

What made this worse was a few errors during the test prints that come with the printer which basically overcooked the resin which also stuck to the bottom sheet which I damagedtrying to remove. Anyway, anycubic sent me a replacement film, so that's all good. 

I've had a bit of a play, starting with the quickest settings and layer height of 0.05mm

Not perfect but quick, the brake van took about 2 hours to give an example. The only bit I've primed so far is in middle (culm valley carriage frame) seems okay.

I don't need any more wagons and brake vans, I think they'll pass with a bit of filling or filing/primer/paint.  I'm trying to avoid the constant reprints with slightly different settings I did on the other printer as I've still got boxes of similar things from that.

I tried this as 0.025mm, springs for the hawthorn. It takes a bit longer, but not twice as long.  The exposure time for 0.05 I'm using is 1.9 seconds and 1.3 seconds for 0.025. I can go lower with exposure as the bases are sticking too hard and no prints have completely failed.  It's a case of slowly reducing each print by 0.1 of a second until it goes wrong.

Fresh off the press, as they say,  a 46 foot e3, it really is the maximum length it will print. Did this at 0.05 took just over 2 hours. The ends need a different way of bracing during printing but I won't need anymore e3's for a long time if ever.

 

Need to redo the metro next and possibly do another lord of the Isles. These should ideally be printed at an angle which will up the print time and be an all day job. I might manage to squeeze in some smaller things in the evenings.

[Mikkel]

Looks like the new printer is earning its keep. Two hours for an E3 body, not bad.

 

I assume rooves are best done the time-honoured way - i.e. formed?

[Charlie586]

58 minutes ago, Mikkel said:

Looks like the new printer is earning its keep. Two hours for an E3 body, not bad.

 

I assume rooves are best done the time-honoured way - i.e. formed?

Thanks Mikkel. 

I think however slowly you print or how small the vertical layer is, you can't get away from printing a curve as a series of (albeit very small) blobs. Bending a flat surface of plasticard or brass will always be smoother in my opinion. It's probably a waste of resin / printer life to print a roof as well. The roof is probably the most noticeable part we first see as we tend to look down onto a model/layout. The tumble home will have small amount of stepping, printing sides and ends separately would reduce this. Or a few minutes careful filing and priming should get to a similar position. 

[John Besley]

I find this fascinating, Brunel was at the cutting edge with Broad Gauge and here is a Broad Gauge layout being built with cutting edge equipment many years later

[Charlie586]

On 03/08/2022 at 19:51, John Besley said:

I find this fascinating, Brunel was at the cutting edge with Broad Gauge and here is a Broad Gauge layout being built with cutting edge equipment many years later

Thank you John. Interesting to think what Brunel would have thought of 3d printers, I imagine he would have welcomed new technology.

[chuffinghell]

Re: over cooked resin
 

What do you have your Bottom Layer Exposure Time set to?

 

I had to increase mine from 40 seconds to 50 seconds because at 40 seconds the first layers were sticking to the fep instead of the print plate, however, I only have the Mono 4K so the print plate isn’t etched like the Mono X

 

Edited August 4, 2022 by chuffinghell

[John Besley]

24 minutes ago, Charlie586 said:

Thank you John. Interesting to think what Brunel would have thought of 3d printers, I imagine he would have welcomed new technology.

 

With Brunel's background he would have used modern technology if it was available.... You can see where steam punk comes from

[Charlie586]

12 minutes ago, chuffinghell said:

Re: over cooked resin
 

What do you have your Bottom Layer Exposure Time set to?

 

I had to increase mine from 40 seconds to 50 seconds because at 40 seconds the first layers were sticking to the fep instead of the print plate, however, I only have the Mono 4K so the print plate isn’t etched like the Mono X

 

At the moment bottom layer is 28 seconds, 6 layers with uv at 80%. It seems much lower than other people's settings I found on a Google sheet (via reddit). It's a much better problem to have than it not sticking to the plate, but it's still hard work to remove and the raft usually breaks while removing. 

[chuffinghell]

1 minute ago, Charlie586 said:

At the moment bottom layer is 28 seconds, 6 layers with uv at 80%. It seems much lower than other people's settings I found on a Google sheet (via reddit). It's a much better problem to have than it not sticking to the plate, but it's still hard work to remove and the raft usually breaks while removing. 

I’m still ‘messing’ with my settings because I’ve started using the water washable resin

 

0.05mm layers at 2s exposure with 6 bottom layers at 50s with UV at 100%

 

Its still not quite right though