I need to remove my Spin Indexer from the mill to refit the vice to mill off the shoes from the brake hangers for the 8F. I plan to refit 3D printed brake shoes to the cast brass hangers.
So before spending time re-tramming the vice, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t need the spin indexer for anything else. Spoiler alert!, I did.
One thing that I have noticed in almost every photo of a loco fitted with a Westinghouse Pump, is that alongside the pump there is a Governor. You rarely see them modelled so I wanted to have a go. I did make one in the past for the Gladiator G5 but it only vaguely resembled the real thing.
As you can see from the 5p piece it’s a tiny little thing but I’m really quite pleased at how it’s turned out.
Although modelling has slowed down due to catching up with a few jobs around the house I have managed to do a bit more on the 8F.
I fitted the whistle albeit it still needs a drop of glue to secure it. Which I plan to do when I stick the smokebox door on.
That was to be the next job but when I came to dry fit it, I realised that the inner ring inside the smokebox was set back too far for me to be able to use epoxy to secure it. I would have needed to use that much that it would have run out all over. So I decided to make a couple of spacers to reduce the gap.
I cut a couple of squares of scrap etch (some of my older kits had quite wide edge strips which I saved) and then trimmed the corners off. I then used thick superglue to stick them to the short piece of thick walled steel tube that I used to make the quarter round transition rings for the N10 boiler/smokebox joint. Once secure I carefully turned them to size, initially taking off 0.05mm at a time, then working my way up to 0.1mm once I was confident that it wasn’t going to ping off.
In the end I only needed one spacer so one will go in the spares box.
Next I refitted the fall plate which had come adrift while handling the body and then I turned my attention to the cab doors. Like many I do prefer to make the cab doors articulate if possible and I had been pondering how I might achieve this before actually looking at the etches that make up the doors. Having examined them and worked out how they go together, I was pleasantly surprised to see that articulation is built into the design. in the end it was just a matter of soldering the two faces of the doors together then securing a length of 0.5mm wire through the “hinges” by soldering it to a half etched recess in the back of the doors.
I haven’t managed much modelling in the last week or so due to other things but On Tuesday I did manage to fit and chain a load on the bolster wagons.
Late last year Chris pruned our apple trees so I selected a couple of suitable lengths from her trimmings and put them on the end of my bench to dry out.
