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.
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.
Its those tiny details and the attention paid which makes these things tick as you know Rob... loving your micro add ons and following you through this build. Lovely work as always.
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.
With the brake hanger height sorted it was time to fit them. Because the wheels are on telescopic axles, they need much more wiggle room to be removable than the Slaters et al, types. It’s actually quite surprising how little room you need to remove a Slaters wheel. The lack of space around the brakes meant that for the wheels to be removable the brakes need to be removable too. I did this by adding a collar from microbore tube over the .9mm rods that the brakes hang from on the frames. And at the moment the cross shaft at the front of the tender is removable but I am sure that if this were fixed the brakes would pivot out of the way to get the wheels out. Just to prove that they are removable. I also made the two quite hefty support rods for the water scoop. Plus, a Blue Peter moment in that here’s one I did earlier. I fitted the brake cylinder that I turned when I first got the Unimat 3. A few general shots of the inner chassis, for no other reason than I got a bit carried away with the camera.
Now Rob, with all this attention to detail, I was expecting at least a servo to raise and lower the scoop, however still you seem to have missed the fact that the scoop is blocked . Wonerfull bui;ld as usual Paul
Further progress on the tender has seen the basics of the body put together. So far, the only issues have been some bowing of the half-etched sheets which has taken a bit of work to get them soldered up straight. The worst being the rear sheets with the steps and the coal door. In the end I added a second sheet of 10thou nickel to back off the coal door. I still have more detail to add to the coal door.
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 edge finder (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.
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.
Thanks Steve, I hope so. A couple of bereavements reported elsewhere since my last post on this have slowed things down somewhat but I have made a little more progress. Getting the rear of the tender and the tank top square and straight up has been a bit of a struggle. This has mainly been due to the fact that the rear of the tender is mainly half etched. The half etching process in what is quite thick base material, has made it curl in several planes. A look at one of the tender sides probably helps to illustrate this better than the photos of the tender rear. I got there in the end.
Although I haven't posted for a while, the battle with the 4000 gallon tender has continued. The biggest issue has been the coal space and getting it to fit. The instructions rather unhelpfully refer to fettling and filling gaps with coal. Fine if you are modelling a tender loaded with coal but not if you want to see the coal pusher. The coal pusher castings are Finney 7 and as expected just come as a set of castings so I needed to make the push rods from strips of nickel cut with the guillotine. Although a casting was provided in the set for the vent pipe arrangement Due to the laminated rear of the coal space being quite a chunk I didn't trust that I could successfully solder it on without the risk of melting it so I filed up a replacement from some brass bar. In order to get the coal chute to sit down properly I had to cut 2mm of the front edge.