I received the chimney from Mike last week but the good weather meant that outdoor jobs took precedence. However, some modelling time yesterday afternoon and evening, saw the final touches to added the loco. I am now going to sit and look at it for a few days before arranging painting with Warren. Just in case I spot something that I haven’t noticed…
The next interesting bit of the build was when I came to look at fitting the brakes. The kit provides etched brakes for the tender in the usual dual layer fashion. I had some nice casting from the Hobby Horse Reynolds range. They were the ones that I was drilling out when I showed my use of pliers to clamp them for drilling a short while ago.
When I put some rods through the chassis in the holes provided and dry fitted the Reynolds castings to the stretchers and pull rod frame they wouldn’t fit because they were not long enough. After a bit of head scratching I checked the drawing and sure enough they are to scale length. However when I checked them again the etched ones provided it all made sense.
The answer to this little dilemma was to re-drill the holes in the frames 1mm lower down. There was just enough frame depth to do this without having to resort to adding hanger brackets.
When I started on the brake pull rods and fitting the water scoop, I quickly realised that the kit is very lacking in detail underneath the tender.
After being kindly supplied a drawing that showed the detail of the inner frames of the tender, I started to add some additional details. My spares box yielded a couple of balance weights which I added to the linkages supplied in the kit. Not perfect but better than nothing. This is still a work in progress.
As you can see from the photos it does all move at the minute but I may need to solder it solid depending on how far I can go with the remaining linkages and how controllable they are.
I also started work on the brake linkages adding a bit of 3D detail to the joints using scrap etch and brass rod.
It’s time for another weekend project to break cover. Another of my outstanding jobs is the build of a David Andrews LMS Princess Pacific kit. The Loco is to be 6206 Princess Marie Louise depicted in the late 1930’s.
I was pleasantly surprised upon examining the box contents, that the gent that I am building it for had ordered all nickel etches.
6206 was slightly unusual in that for much of her life she was attached to a tender equipped with a coal pusher. The additional parts for this have been supplied by Finney7 from their Duchess tender.
The box also contains a lot of additional extra castings to upgrade the kit parts.
The wheels are Alan Harris castings turned by the gent that I am building it for.
Mike has just sent through some photos of the chimney castings. They look excellent. Posted here with Mike’s kind permission.
I am looking forward to getting my hands on it.
Modelling time this last week has seen me back on the J6. I have been making progress with the inside motion starting with soldering the front of the slide bars to the cylinder front and then removing the motion bracket and moving it backwards to match the drawing in order that it would then clear the front horn guides.
Getting them square to each other was a little challenging so I cut a couple of rectangles of 10thou sheet to set both the distance between the cylinder front and the rear of the motion bracket and keep them square at the same time. I used a couple of aluminium hair grips to hold them in place while I soldered the ends of the slide bars to the motion bracket.
I still need to plot out and drill holes for the support rods for the expansion links in the cylinder front.
I have temporarily assembled most of the motion but I still need to add the parts to the motion bracket which support and operate the valves.
Having extended the clearance between the cylinder front and the motion bracket so that the cylinder front sits in front of the horn guides, I found that the slide bars still fouled the horn guides. T next task was to reduce the depth of the front horn block in the lathe so my four-jaw chuck got a turn. Because I only wanted to effectively face them off. I cheated a little and fitted a short length of 3/16” silver steel into the tailstock, slipped a bearing on and used that to quickly centre the four jaw.
The next task is to remove a section of the horn guides to clear the slide bars.
As soon as funds allow, I plan to buy a mill to compliment the lathe and boy would a mill make this task easier. I can see now why Nick plans his inside motion fitting as he builds the frames. A lesson learned for the future! Onwards and upwards as they say.
Further to my last post, when the brass bearings arrived I knocked one up into a lubricator to see how I would do it.
It was a bit interesting drilling out the bearing but following advice given I got a short length of tube the same diameter as my bearing and made a slit in it to make a split collet. This I gripped in one of the collets on the lathe and then I centre drilled it. Followed by drilling right through. They are slippery little blighters and one flew off into space as I was attempting to load into the lathe collet. Surprisingly I found it a couple of hours later.
I was fortunate to have some 1mm square bar in stock so I drilled right through one way and then half way on one side. When I fitted the rod through the bearing and into the square section I filed half of it away for the last millimetre which gave me a bit more room to solder the piece in that goes into the boiler.
With the obligatory scaling piece.
As with all such things in modelling making one is sometimes the easy part making another or several is more difficult. So it proved with the second one
I ruined one bearing when I hadn’t quite tightened the collet enough and the bearing wasn’t centred, then I didn’t get enough solder on the cross pipe so that came adrift as I cut it short and I ended up having to re-drill it in the pillar drill before I could solder it back in.
But get a pair I did. My collection of bits for the D2 is slowly coming together.
A fellow Gauge O Guild member asked if I would tell him how I made the form tool for the whistles. Because I am a bit impatient* I was planning to make another one to turn Globe lubricators (if I could).
So, I made another form tool and took photos as I went along.
Using a second cut file I filed away approximately half the thickness of the bar (in the event it was nearer to 35/40% than half).
Then I used a centre drill to drill a 1.5mm starter hold which I opened out to 2mm. I think my 2mm drill bit must need sharpening because I struggled to get it to go through the last bit.
I had drilled quite close to the end so I put the rod drilled end upwards in my vice and tilted it forward to file away until I had just over half the hole exposed.
Then I transferred it to the lathe. I put my cone shaped grind stone in the collet chuck and ground the inside of the hole to put my rake on it. The black pen mark on the stone was at the 2mm diameter mark so I didn’t inadvertently make the hole bigger.
Next, I used the diamond cutting disk to grind back the outer edges to refine what I had filed and get it nearer to final size. But before removing the tool from the cross slide I marked with a pencil the angle which I had ground at to make replacing the tool at the right angle easier should it need regrinding.
Then I hardened and tempered the cutting end. I did this by heating the end using my Microflame to a red heat then I quenched it in a jar of water. I repeated the process but only heating until it changed to a blue colour before quenching again in water.
I tried cutting a globe but I made a couple of mistakes:
The material I was trying it on was too thin (2.5mm diameter) and I had predrilled the centre thinking that I was going to thread a rod through it.
The ‘globe’ broke off long before it remotely resembled a globe and I realised that even with thicker material I needed to grind more off the tool to make the forming half circle shallower. At this point I used thicker material but still predrilled it.
Another try; another failure and another regrind.
The last go was cut from 4mm bar and no predrilling and I also took some of the edge of the ‘globe section with a diamond file prior to applying the form tool.
Having done all this I now think that I may get away with thinner rod now that I have refined the form tool and my technique.
Of course, the law of sod dictated that not 15 minutes after finishing the successful lubricator the postie came with some brass bearings that I had ordered from China and wasn’t expecting for another three weeks or so.* I an Middleditch in his original advice had suggested buying brass ball bearings and drilling them to make the globes from
The subject of those will make another posting at some point.
I had a long morning finishing of some fencing at the back of the house yesterday so modelling took a back seat. I did however manage to do some test running of the Class 5A on my rather rough and ready test track which it passed with flying colours.
I took a video of the slow running. It’s only just over a minute don’t fall asleep.
The final part of the build while awaiting the chimney casting was how to fit the cab windows.
I drilled each one top and bottom and added a pivot pin.
After thinking about bits of tube etc. I realised that I could add some bottom ‘hinges’ in the form of pipe type bracket and do the same at the top but only solder one tab so that the bracket could be eased back to make the window unit removable for painting.
A few shots as she stands awaiting her chimney. I also added lead to the side tanks and as I suspected she now runs quite smoothly on the rolling road. I will continue to run in while awaiting the chimney and when the weather improves, I will dig my test track out of the shed and test run around curves.
Under the kind tutelage of fellow Gauge O Guild member, Ian Middleditch I have been playing with turning whistles.
First, I made a form tool from a length of 3/16 silver steel rod ( based it on a photo that Ian kindly sent me of some that he had made.
Once filed to shape the cutting end was hardened and tempered using my microflame (the last time I hardened and tempered anything was when I was at school).
Next I drilled out the centre to take a 0.8mm rod and then roughed out the larger top part of the whistle.
Then I used the form tool to create the final shape. It did create the final shape but I think that it would do even better on a slightly narrower piece of rod this one was 2.4mm and I think that a 2mm rod would create a better shape with this particular tool. In the event I touched it with the diamond file to finish it off.
I then parted it off and I took Ian’s advice and put a length of 0.8mm rod in the tail chuck and through the hole in the part so that it didn’t disappear into the mists when parted off.
Repeat the exercise for the bottom part and solder together on a length of rod with a 0.5mm spacer in between to create the whistle (I used a small piece of 20thou styrene with a hole and slot made in it to slip over the centre rod).
The nuts were added after the whistle was made up and are from microbore tube filed in a pin vice to a hexagon shape.
The build slowed down a little when I realised that the chimney casting had the flare cast lopsided. This meant that when you had the chimney sat on vertically on the smokebox there was more flare at one side than the other. I tried to reshape it with bars rolling it over a former the same size as the smokebox but I couldn’t improve it much.
After some discussion with Brian, I emailed Laurie Griffin and Andy Beaton to ask them if they had anything suitable in their ranges that might do (as long as it looked right it wouldn’t matter which loco it was originally designed to fit). Sadly the nearest we got to was an LNER standard chimney from Laurie.
The next step was to ask fellow Guild member Mike Hopkins who has been posting some excellent stuff on the Guild forum where he has been designing in 3D then printing waxes and having them cast in brass.
I supplied Mike with a drawing a couple of days ago and he went away to draw it up.
Below are some photos of the wax prints prior to removing the supports and sending them away for castings. Photo’s copyright of Mike and posted with his kind permission.
I had some Milliput out for making some modifications to some axlebox ready to make some castings of them. I needed a miniscule amount so it seemed a shame to waste the rest of what I mixed so I filled the back of the balance weights for the Class 5a.
They still need a little tidying up but they do look a bit better than just an etched skin.
When I did my J63 I had some etched washers that were just the right size to make the front windows into opening ones by sticking them either side of soe glazing material and wrapping a strip of brass around them.
I wondered if I was able to turn a couple with a proper recess rather than a wrap-around overlay, now that I have a little more confidence with the lathe. I ordered a 3.5mm boring tool and when it arrived, I thought I would have a go.
I cut a length of brass rod and turned a section of it down to the required width and then drilled progressively bigger holes in the end until I reached 5mm in diameter. Then I tried the boring tool ad had a gotcha moment. The tool might be 3.5mm wide but it’s also 3.5mm deep and it wouldn’t fit when trying to centre it in the hole for cutting…. In order to get the tool in I would need a bigger hole than I wanted.
I scratched my head for a bit and then had a rummage thought the box of tools that came with the lathe. One of them had been ground with boring holes in mind but the corner of the cutting edge was chipped so while it would cut, I didn’t get a square edge to the bottom of the hole.
It was at this point that I remembered that I had bought a mini bench grinder from Lidl about 3 years ago and it was sat on a shelf under my bench.
Out it came and I had my first go at grinding a cutting tool for the lathe. Light touches soon restored the missing bit of tip and I now see what Ian meant when he said a sharp tool makes a lot of difference to how it cuts.
While I had it on the bench, I reground a couple more tools that had dings out of the edges too.
And one with the obligatory 5p for scale.
