Another session at the bench yesterday saw the remaining brake van ready for paint. With the addition of the final details such as buffer stocks, sandpipes and guard irons added.
LSWR Brake Van Ready For PaintLSWR Brake Van Ready For PaintLSWR Brake Van Ready For PaintLSWR Brake Van Ready For PaintLSWR Brake Van Ready For PaintLSWR Brake Van Ready for Paint
Having finished the Princess I have promised my good lady that the 8F (which she bought me in 2010 would be the next loco to be finished. So in the spirit of things I took the pretty much complete tender and the loco chassis along to Stafford so that I had something to talk to people about in between dealing with the modelling competition and the Sunday display of members models.
I was surprised but not too dismayed when three separate people advised me that 8F’s didn’t have water pick up gear fitted. I say not too dismayed because I have no intention of taking it apart to remove the water scoop and associated fittings and it will solve a little niggle that I have had since deciding to model 8425. 8425 had a welded tender and Dave Sharp does provide sides/rear plates to make up a riveted tender when originally building the tender to be for an LNER 06 I chose the riveted sides. I never felt confident that I could remove the riveted sides and fit the welded ones and as I couldn’t find the welded ones I feared that I may have cut them up and used the metal to make other parts.
Fast forward to about a month ago, while looking for something else, I found that by good fortune I did keep the welded side overlays. Also in the stash as mentioned on Nick’s current build thread, I have a JLRT Rebuilt Scot. So I intend to swap the tenders and use the Scot tender built without the water scoop and fittings with the MOK welded sides which are a perfect fit when dry fitted over the JLRT etches.
I have made a small start this evening and I thought I might have to make a new anvil for m rivet punch but it seems I had already made one for smaller spaced rivets so that was a bonus.
Well, I got there at last. Her Royal Highness will now go around 6ft curves without derailing or shorting.
I did have to introduce some springing to restrict the movement of the bogie.
DA Princess Royal – Spring Wire Restraints
There are two spring wires at the rear which fit between the inner and outer bogie frames. They restrict the sideways movement of the rear of the bogie. The bogie pivot point has side control springs which allow more movement at the front of the bogie. This sort of worked but the front of the bogie was so light that it had a tendency to lift of the track so I added a second element of springing which holds down the front of the bogie and all runs nicely. This spring has a loop which is held in place by the pivot screw then bends over the front of the plate that you can see in the image below before curving onto the front of the bogie frame. Although it looks huge in the enlarged image it’s only 0.5mm spring wire.
After all that I forgot to add that I also turned some replacement buffer stocks. Those familiar with Jim’s kits will know that to keep costs down Jim provides whitemetal buffers which can be sprung but it involves fitting a piece of spring wire through the back of the coupling hook and then to the rear of the buffers. Although I used this method on a few of my early builds having broke one of the cast heads of a buffer rather put me off the idea so now I add sprung buffers and I usually solder the coupling hook solid.
I had some spare buffer heads (kindly supplied by our very own Mr Moss as when received from NER Days they were unusable without further machining which Mossy isn’t equipped to do) which are fitted with 10ba nuts so the shank is a bit thicker than the 12 or 14ba that most comercial wagon buffers are fitted with. I did drill out one of the white metal buffer stocks and I did make it ft but the walls were very thin. I decided to turn replacements from some 14″ nickel rod. Although the finished dimensions were the same as the whitemetal examples the nickel replacements are much more substantial.
LSWR Brake Van Buffers
So now The van just needs these fitting, some sand pipes and coupling chains and a good clean up before painting.
On Bank Holiday Monday I took the one to be finished along to Harrogate show and again made excellent progress despite chatting to lots of people.
What I hadn’t realised at Redcar show is that although I had assembled parts 23,24, 25 and 26 into a sub unit and dry fitted fitted them I hadn’t actually soldered them in the second van. Sadly when I piked the van up to pack it away the sub assembly must have dropped off asI couldn’t find it at home when I discovered it’s was missing.
So I ended up scratch building a new sub assembly to replace the missing one.
I fitted a floor and then fitted the subassembly before fitting the rodding. Having prepared the parts before I went to Harrogate I did all the assembly during the show so didn’t get any photos of the subassembly after I put it together or without the rods in place. I replaced the two part etched crank with a piece of 10ba threaded rod (I have a number of short lengths from where I have shortened 1″ screws) with a wrap around that better represents the real thing.
LSWR Brake Van Brake RoddingLSWR Brake Van Brake RoddingLSWR Brake Van Brake RoddingLSWR Brake Van Brake Rodding
Although there is a plan view of how the brake rods fit the small fitting that fits the upper rod to the bottom of the van isn’t provided so I knocked a couple up from scrap etch. Bending and soldering those last two short upper sections of rodding in place really challenged the patience and it’s a good job I was in public or I may have expanded my Anglo Saxon dictionary…
For the last couple of weekends I have been demonstrating brass wagon building at a couple of shows so I took these along to see if I could make some progress on them. Surprisingly I did manage to make quite a bit of progress with both of these now up on their wheels with brake gear fitted. They still need brake rodding added and then details such as buffers etc. – I will take some photos once they are properly dry.
The plan for these was always to sell them when complete to fund something else and now that they are nearing completion I am starting to think about what livery to finish them in.
The good news is that they are now both sold, one as is to be finished by it’s new owner and the second to be finished and painted in a yellow light railway livery.
Here’s where I had got to by the end of Redcar show.
Connoisseur LSWR Brake VanConnoisseur LSWR Brake VanConnoisseur LSWR Brake Van
All issues of whether the styrene might wear over time aside, even with added weight on the trailing truck, the chassis still wouldn’t go around a 6ft curve reliably so more drastic measures were needed.
Using a piercing saw I cut out part of the inner frames.
DA Princess Rear frame modifications
Then I soldered a plate across the ends of the frames at the front by good fortune there were two tabs at the rear with could be soldered to.
DA Princess Rear frame modificationsDA Princess Rear frame modifications
I then reduced the width of the inner plate and soldered the frame pieces back together with some end plates to take up the gap left by the saw kerf.
DA Princess Inner Frames NarrowedDA Princess Inner Frames Narrowed
A quick dry fit of the rear truck leaves plenty of space either side of the inner swing so there should be no shorting but I may need to remove some of the spring casting to allow more swing to help it get around the curve – it’s a long chassis.
Having solved the issue of the wheels touching the upper frame I then discovered that the wheels were touching the inside of the frames when going around a 6ft curve.
DA Princess Still creating shorts!
So I added some styrene insulation either side of the inner frames.
This cured the short problem but running trials revealed that although it would now go around 6ft curve without shorting it didn’t do so reliably without the trailing truck derailing.
In an attempt to cure this I tried introducing some weight on to the trailing truck. I cut a couple of rectangles of lead and using a V block and a couple of different sized rods I created some weights that fit on top of the ruck over the axle.
DA Princess Trailing Tuck BallastDA Princess Trailing Tuck Ballast
I was getting low on lead but just this week we have had a couple of chimneys repointed and re-leaded as well as four wet verges I asked the roofer for the lead that they removed so I now have sufficient to see my days out I think.
It’s been getting on for six weeks since my last update on HRH. I haven’t been idle and the process of eliminating shorts has been a journey of education, frustration and determination to not let it beat me.
Starting with a belt and braces approach I remade the drawbar in Delrin.
DA Princess Royal – Delrin Drawbar
Next, having already added insulated washers to the wheels which are insulated at the hub I turned my attention to the driver which are rim insulated. I had previously made inner balance weights from Nickel sheet and although I had stuck them to the wheels with epoxy I was concerned that they be be helping to bridge the insulation gap should they touch the frames. My answer was to remake the balance weights for the insulated side from styrene.
Then I noted that the cross piece pf the rear inner frames was touching the tyres of the rear truck wheels. You can see the plate with the half etched rectangles in the image below.
DA Princess rear frames
A look at the instructions mentions the possible need to remove the half etched sections in case of shorts so the plate was removed and the rectangles removed.
DA Princess Frame plate modification
Sadly, this didn’t cure the problem so in the end I took of the outer sections leaving just the brace in the middle.
DA Princess 2nd Frame Plate Modification
As it turned out that solved one problem but left another which will be the subject of another post
Then I connected the loco and tender together and it immediately tripped out the controller and so I started a further round of troubleshooting. First I removed the bogie and after coffee I went back into our cloakroom where I have temporarily set up my test board. This room is west facing so gets sunlight mostly in an afternoon but it’s below ground level as the path outside the window is cut into the embankment and so doesn’t get quite as much natural light unless the sun is really high in the sky and it’s late afternoon.
Now one of the suggestions from Thursday nights meeting besides dig out the multimeter was to try hunting for shorts in the dark as sparks are easier to see. As I went in for further testing I forgot to turn the light on and so the room was a little gloomy. This proved to be a benefit, because as soon as I moved the bogie on it’s own, I noted a spark which I wouldn’t have seen with the light on. I noted that the guard irons were quite close to the rails and may have caused shorts on curves so they were adjusted and then further examination showed that I had fallen foul of the etched washer/hub insulation again. A further check of the trailing tuck revealed the same issue. I had a few spare insulated washers that I had turned when working on the tender but they proved to be too thick even after turning/milling down the axle bushes.
I was initially going to make some up by using a hole punch to cut holes in some styrene sheet and then snip of /file them into circles. By good fortune a video that I had seen some time ago that was lurking in my memory surfaced on my Youtube feed. After rewatching it I decided to have a go at pressure turning a number of washers all at once.
Now unless you want really big washers the process is a little wasteful because you need enough stock to hold onto to drill the centre hole. I chose to cut some 0.5mm styrene sheet into 20mm x 20mm squares aiming for a finished size of 10mm diameter. You also need some scrap to hold the parts and one of them becomes almost sacrificial.
The first step is to grip the styrene squares between the two pieces of scrap material.
Drilling blanks
I used a 1″ G clamp and a small engineers clamp to hold them all together to drill a 5mm hole through all the parts. This was to allow clearance on the 3/16 (4.7mm) axles. At this point you transfer the whole set up to the lathe before releasing the clamps.
Setting up for pressure turningPressure Turning Parts
I created the above set up which consists of a 22mm piece of Delrin in the collet (I had to turn a stub down to fit in a 16mm collet which is the largest ER25 collet that I have). This had a 5mm hole drill partially through it. At the tailstock end is another piece of 22mm Delrin which has had a 60 degree cone turned in the back so that it fits on a live centre then a short section turned down to 10mm to allow the tool to clear the workpiece(s) again it has a 5mm hole through it. Then a length of 3/6 rod was passed into the hole in the mandrel in the collet chuck and the parts fed onto it, before removing the clamps. Lastly the live centre is wound tightly against the parts which squash and grip all the parts for turning and locked.
The next step was to turn down the sacrificial scrap support until all the parts start to be turned. My sacrificial scrap was plastic which has a layer of aluminium either side of it and I found that the most depth of cut I could manage was 0.25mm per pass otherwise the parts started to slip. I started turning with a carbide tipped bit until it would no longer fit, then I changed to high speed steel grooving tool that I had ground for another job some time ago.
Washers well on their way.Finished Washers
One piece of advice given in the video was to make sure that you were using a sharp tool for the final pass to help prevent the tool from rolling the edges of one part over onto the next.
Finished Washers
These are the finished parts and they are all really crisp, aside from the one that was nearest the left hand piece of scrap which had a small burr around the edge (visible at the corner of the ruler). This burr was easily scraped off with a scalpel blade.
Since my last post I have been beavering away identifying and curing the shorts on the tender which I am happy to say that I have done.
As with many things in life getting there required at least one side project. During last Thursday’s GOG online modellers meeting the consensus was that I really needed to dig my multimeter out of the depths of the shed. On friday morning I bit the bullet and started to pull out plastic stacking boxes (having first removed the lawn mower, petrols cans, oak kitchen cabinet doors and finally my router table). An hour and a half later I had retrieved one of my two multimeters and put everything back.
Sadly the one that I found was the one with the missing probe, the wire was there but the common probe which had broken off in the dim and distant wasn’t with it. Before embarking on making a new probe I fitted a new battery to test that it still worked which thankfully it did. The metal section of the probe was made from a length of brass rod which sat atop my useful bits box on the workbench and I quickly drilled one end to accept the wire and turned a step onto the other to fit snugly into the yet to be made insulated delrin handle.
I didn’t take photos along the way but this is the finished article alongside the original ‘live’ probe.
New Probe for multimeter
Once I had it I reassembled the tender chassis test along the way without find any further shorts.
The last week and a bit of modelling time has been spent tracking down shorts on the tender and isolating them. This has required me making a number of additional bushes and delrin/acetal washers.
Insulated washers and bushes
I also had to rethink the way that I had mounted the two U shaped brackets which fit across under the tender. Unthinkingly I had mounted them in the same way as on the MOK Stanier tender using small pieces of brass angle drilled and tapped for 14ba screws. Sadly when assembled these frames touch the brakes which although the shoes are insulated the hangers are not and between the two breached the insulation between tender chassis and body.
I made up some wire supports and then shortened the brackets to clear the outer frames. Below are a couple of shots of the sets that I used to get them soldered vertical to the brackets and then cut them off to the right size. I read recently on one of the forums someone say that you cannot have too many engineers clamps. I agree wholeheartedly although when used as soldering aids they do have a tendency to rust. I do have a cunning plan to get around that, I have a length of brass bar that I have had for about 10 years which will be just enough to make a pair of brass jawed clamps which shouldn’t rust.
Jig for soldering legs
I used the Expo pliers that I recommended recently to bend the corners pretty uniformly.
Jig for trimming legs
I also had a feeling that the washers which I had used to reduce the side play in the axles, might have been bigger than the insulation gaps in the wheel hubs thus creating a short, hence my making the delrin washers.
I bought these at Thirsk show last year or the year before and I hadn’t really used them much until recently.
I have absolutely no affiliation with Expo aside from a satisfied user of these pliers. Which I can highly recommend.
The curve of the jaws is slightly offset and I thought that this might be an issue initially but it has proved to be a design feature that has been very useful for bending wire to complex shapes.
Those who are observant, will have noted the jaunty angle that the return crank is sat at, in the top photo of the post with the sand pipes fitted. Having had this pointed out by someone this came back to bite me.
Initially I just thought that in lifting the loco up I had dislodged it causing it to unscrew and come loose. However no matter how much I tried I couldn’t get it to tighten back up in the right place. I tried shortening the bush but realised too late that the crank pin itself must have shifted in the wheel. Then having shortened it I found that when tight it was nipping the conrod and coupling rods so that they wouldn’t move.
Making a replacement bush was the order of the day.
Following my posting of the Joe Pie tap wrench on the Guild forum there was a bit of discussion on the types of tap wrenches in use and one member shared a BA tapping guide that he had bought commercially. Which I thought was a great idea for tapping holes that are too inconvenient to fit in a vice
Having been given the idea, I couldn’t resist having a go at making one this morning.
BA Tap GuideBA Tap Guide
I even managed to use the reject first attempt at making a drawbar for the Princess which I broke during machining due to me doing the wrong order of operations. I keep one of those square plastic trays that Slaters pack their small items like plunger pick-ups horn guides etc. on my workbench and all my small offcuts of brass and nickel go into it. Once I had machined each end off it was perfect for the guide bush.
I probably over engineered it in so much as I turned the end of the bush down to 5mm for 1.6mm and drilled a 5mm hole in the flat bar which is 1.6mm thick. It was a nice tight fit but I realised that due to the bar being drawn, it wasn’t exactly flat on top and the guide sat at a slight angle. still having the coordinates in the mill from drilling the hole I used a 6mm end mill to mill a recessed flat to accommodate the bush. I checked for squareness with a 1-2-3 block and then soldered the bush in.
The hole in the bush is 3.3mm and will take my 6 -12ba taps freely but with virtually no sideplay. I also have a 14ba tap and I might at some point add another guide bush at the other end of the ‘handle’ with a smaller hole to take that.
The sand pipes are now fitted without interfering with anything. I did get them fitted a couple of days ago but when I added the front bogie they stopped it from moving. I removed the two front ones and moved them slightly further back which did the trick.
DA Princess Sand Pipes FittedDA Princess Sand Pipes Fitted
I mentally kicked myself up the backside and got the sand pipes installed a couple of days ago so yesterday I took a break and made up another couple of Joe Pie inspired tools, which he shows in use in one of his videos.
These were an additional tap spinner which has an aluminium knurled grip but a steel inner so it shouldn’t wear with use. I also made a depth stop to fit over the tap if I wish to only tap a hole to a specific depth.
Miniature Tap depth Stop
The two fit together as above, or you can use them independently as below.
Miniature Tap depth Stop
In the video, Joe showed that he made his in pairs. This is so that he could have a taper tap in one and a bottom tap in the other. Having made the initial example, I still had a bit of material left so I decided to see if I could make a combined tap spinner and depth stop.
Miniature Tap depth Stop
It turns out I could, in the image below you can see the steel core inside the aluminium grip.
Miniature Tap depth StopMiniature Tap depth StopMiniature Tap depth StopsRemains of Die holder after using one handle and part of the casting
Just in case you are wonder what I used to make them I used the remains of one of the handles on the scarp die holder. I put it in the lathe and carefully parted the aluminium where I thought the steel roughly ended (as it happens I could have gone a little further) then having noted how securely the aluminium was attached to the steel core I realised that I could turn the remains of the casting attached to the bar into a round usable piece to make something from and the idea was born. I also have the other side to do something similar from. I can see more tools for even finer taps in the future. Unless I think of another tool to make instead.
Well I have the replacement sand pipes assembled ready for fitting let’s hope I have more luck in fitting these. One pipe is soft brass and the other slightly thinner one is copper.
DA Princess Replacement Sand Pipes
Below are the first ones that I made earlier in the build. I made myself a rod for my own back (if you will pardon the pun) by using hard brass rod for the thicker of the two pipes which when it came to it, was almost impossible to bend where I needed it to go.