This week has mainly been about returning to the elephant in the room, the Firebox. There had been some discussion on Western Thunder some time ago about issues with the resin casting and I must admit I didn’t get ‘it’ and after a (very!) rudimentary measure up, it didn’t seem far out so I left it at that.
Fast forward to last week and Nick Dunhill posted on my thread on the GOG forum and mentioned how far out his had been on all the ones that he built (he built four in total) and how much work it had been to rectify the problems.
The talk also mentioned a whitemetal cast firebox produced by DJH for Gladiator (prior to David and Trisha buying the range). After seeing the discussion the guy that I am building it for rang me and told me that he had one of the Gladiator/DJH fireboxes which he would send me.
Once I had it in hand, I imported some GA’s into Fusion from the Wild Swann book scaled them and started to compare the castings to the real thing.
Once I had done the comparisons it all clicked into place.
Because the ends of my casting were at 90 degrees to the footplate I thought that I had better castings once I realised that Nick had lowered the front by circa 2mm and raised the back by another 1mm it made sense why his front and rear face were no longer at right angles to the footplate and why the subsequent chopping and gap filling.
Nick’s advice was to scratch build one or get Mick Davies (of Finney7) to draw one up and print it for me. I have initially opted to have a go at drawing it myself.
This is where I got to after the first session. Subsequent study made me realise that I needed to bring the curve under the front down a bit.
After my second session I had this – I did a short video capture of Fusion as being easier than taking multiple renders which I was struggling with.