I finally managed to get a little more done on the Tamiya Panther at recent arts and crafts group sessions and I have managed to fit the road wheels.

Sometime during the build I have managed to lose one of the wheel hubs. A lady at our arts and crafts group was offering various item free to anyone who wanted them. In amongst them were a pair of 5.5mm knitting needles and I recalled that a fellow Gauge O Guild Member had mentioned how well they turned. So I asked for them and turned a replacement hub. I still need to do a bit of work on the face but I am pleased with how it’s looking so far.

I seem to have been really busy with real life and not a huge amount to show for the work on the Princess.
I have returned to the chassis while I await castings for the back head and the firebox print – Royal Fail seem to be keeping their reputation intact FB posted a week last Saturday and replacement castings from Ragstone posted a week yesterday, no sign of either yet.

On the rear axle which is to be driven there isn’t a great deal of room on the axle for the gearbox, hornblocks and taper pin. It turned out that after trying everything the taper pin actually sat under the left hand hornblock. Initially I tried cutting down the taper pin so that it just went through the axle and would spin inside the horn block. I obviously didn’t make it a tight enough fit as it went walk about. Thankfully I do have a few spare taper pin so I was able to replace it but I didn’t want the same thing to happen again so after some thought I hit upon the idea to thin down that hornblock. I took it out and milled 1mm off the rear of it. Which you should be able to see from comparing the first two photos

Next I moved onto fitting the representation of the inside motion. I had to solder the eccentric straps together and then make some location points for the slide bars and lotion plate.

I have done this with a couple of strips of scrap etch and the plan is to mill a couple of small angle plates to allow the cylinder front to be screwed in place. I will take some more detailed phots once I have finished this.

Subject to retaining it I have achieved what I set out to, you can see the cross heads through the openings in the frames, with a small amount of visible movement when the axle is rotated.

I have just had to delete just over 12,000 Spam User accounts. Sadly this may have meant that I have deleted a few genuine users too.

If you have lost your account please register again and now that I have the numbers down I can make a better job of managing them.

My apologies and many thanks.

Regards Rob

I managed to grab a couple more shots out in the sunshine this morning. I am really pleased that this took third place in the Modelling competition. It was one of three cranes entered and one of them took first. The one that took first was an impressive scratch built beast with a professional paint job which really made it look superb. As soon as I saw it first thing in the morning I was sure that it would win.

I finally got around to finishing off the Crane and match trucks this week ready for taking them to Guildex to enter in the modelling competition. Nothing like a deadline to make you pull your finger out.

I have had a Hobby Holidays Chassis Jig for a good number of years and I am really pleased with it.

It came with additional components to make it into a rolling road. I do use this but I have never really been happy with it. The rollers are set at 32mm apart to suit Peco track but as with the inherent slop in Peco track I find that the loco being tested tends to hunt from side to side never really giving a true reflection of how it’s actually running. I tried once a few years ago to reduce the distance by adding washers behind the roller bearings but my washers were too wide and all it did was seize up the rollers so I took them back out. When I bought my mill I had the bright idea to mill of 0.5mm from each spacer to reduce the slop but never got around to it until yesterday. I was about to dismantle the roller sets to mill them when I remembered that a former guild member had given me a collection of various nuts, screws and washers so I had a look through them and found some 0.5mm thick washers that were also very thin in terms of the washer area which while acting as a spacer to take off 0.5mm didn’t inhibit the movement of the bearings.

Hopefully this photo will show what I am struggling to describe.

This cured the hunting immediately, so I can’t recommend it enough to anyone else experiencing the same issue.

If you are connecting power directly the the motor the HH rolling road units are fine but if you actually want to test pickups then that’s a bit more interesting because the unit really isn’t designed for it. For years I have used a bit of a lash up of some lengths of copper wire and some crocodile clips to transfer power to each of the wheel cradles.

After doing a recent repair job for a fellow member which required testing pickups I thought it about time I did something a bit better. I found in my stash of “it will come in useful some day” materials a strip of aluminium which when cut into two pieces was perfect to create two bus bars. I milled some slots in them to allow adjustment to cover all my rolling road cradles (mine is a 5 axle jig).

As luck would have it in the front of the rolling road units is a hole to allow you to fit a hex key to get at some cap screws on the rear. These were just the right size to tap M4 while still allowing the hex key passage. There are also a set of holes already tapped M4 on top of the adjusters which will pass the current to the other side.

This is the bus bars in place. All that’s left for me to do is shorten a few cap screws to make them fit better. The end tabs allow me to connect via crocodile clip either DC or DCC

To prove it all works I took a shot video but instead of there being a boring video of a loco on the Rolling Road I played with the video editor to to turn it into a cartoon.