After Mike Trice kindly pointed out that I have missed the bolt heads from the base of the brake standards I made some amendments and here are the revised entities.
I also changed the base of the threaded rod so that it will (hopefully) print a bit easier.
I had a spare half an hour or so this afternoon so I created a revised drawing to include the rectangular cover that many of the phots show on these brake standards.
Looking to start adding as much as I could details wise, before assembling the main components. I dry fitted the tank filler and the vent pipe castings on the tank top plate. Although the latter are generally not bad castings, when I opened out the etched holes, they both sat lopsided. I attempted to tidy them up using a square needle file but wasn’t able to correct the lean.
I decided to have a go at turning them, but gripping them to turn them in the lathe was going to prove interesting. So, I took a leaf out of the late David Smith (DLOS)’s book, and made a split collet from a length of aluminium rod.
I had recently watched a YouTube video of someone doing just that and the guy who made the video had left a collar on his split collet to make it easier to get it in and out of the lathe collet.
This shot shows how the casting sits in the split collet.
You can see in the shot below how lopsided the base was. The rim of the base plate was so thin that I dare not turn too much off or I would have ended up having to turn a collar to replace it. Which was plan B if I hadn’t been able to get the existing base plate to sit flat
Thankfully I got away with it and didn’t need to resort to plan B.
The recent hot weather has somewhat killed my enthusiasm for actual model making so instead I have been drawing up a few more bits and pieces. Some of them are still work in progress but I finished an LNER Brake standard last night.
I have long wished for a correct LNER brake standard casting so now assuming that it prints okay my wish should be fulfilled.
Modelling time has been in short spells just recently, hence my lack of posts. I have been beavering away at detailing the front and rear of the tender but I haven’t taken any photos yet. However, a discussion on the Guild forum about details of the coal pusher fitted tenders had me looking closely at the drawings of the modifications done to the 9 Ton tender to increase coal capacity to 10 Tons. There are drawings of the upperworks in LMS Profiles no 4.
The tank vent castings cleaned up quite nicely by spinning them in the mini drill with a bit of scotchbrite and although the water filler was a reasonable casting, when comparing it to the drawing it’s a bit on the undernourished side. So, using the same bar as I used for the eccentrics which was just the right diameter, I decided to make a replacement. I had a look at as many photos as I could find and it seems that David Andrews has the type of hinge mechanism pretty much correct albeit that all the ones that I saw had plain straps without visible fasteners.
After turning, I transferred it to the mill and used a recently acquired edgefinder (less than £7 posted from Allendale) to help to accurately position the holes. I then used a 1mm collet to hold a .06mm drill and away we went. Fitting such small drill bits into a collet on the mill is a bit of a fiddle and you could really do with another hand but it’s worth it.
Although I dressed the backhead a couple of weeks or so ago, I hadn’t managed to get it to fit into the cab before now because the stub of the whistle protruding through the cab roof stopped it from sliding in. One of those little few minute jobs that seem to take forever to get around to…. I finally got to it and the backhead now fits in place as if it was made for it.
Following the visit last week of the Volker Rail Beaver 1900 Tamper surveying the line last week (photos above) we have had several visits this week from a Volker Rail 2004 and today we had the chance to really get up close and personal as it levelled the line at the back of our house. What a fascinating machine to see in action.
We had something a little different down the branch this afternoon or rather it went up the branch last week but I only caught sight of the rear cab window as it disappeared out of view. We thought it odd that it didn’t return (usually most ‘trains’ go up the branch and return the same day). We have had quite a bit of works train traffic on Monday’s of late but much of it has been seen before so I haven’t posted any photos.
They look to have been working their way back from Redmire surveying the branch because it had already passed our house on the way to Bedale when I became aware of it and popped up to take a look.
By good fortune it had stopped a couple of hundred yards away and after marking up the ground, (when the machine made a series of loud beeps) it then reversed to about 20 yards beyond the house on the Redmire/Leyburn side. More beeps more marking up and it reversed direction again heading back off towards Bedale.
I reckon it must be sat in the passing loop at Bedale station now, because just before 5pm we had the Class 20 featured previously, come past light engine heading to Leyburn/Redmire.
For those it might interest, there are more details shots on my Flickr site
After spending a week teaching myself 3D drawing, I was back at the workbench today. I had originally planned to just turn a couple of appropriately sized top hat bushes, file some flats on them where they come together and job done. My recently acquired mill offered more possibilities to make something that at least looks like the original even if it doesn’t attach in the same way. This will be soldered to the cylinder front in between the slide bars, instead of being suspended from a substantial bracket between the frames.
This is my first real item produced with the mill and I am happy with how it turned out.
This is where it will sit in between the slide bars on the cylinder front. I have added some fastenings to make it look as if it should be there, when it’s ultimately lost in the gloom between the frames.
This is the final version. it was a bit of a challenge to get all the lever elements constrained so that I could extrude it but I got there in the end.
By turning different elements off as in the photo I can create separate STL files for just the lever, the complete valves without the cover or complete with the cover.