Caprotti 5

Well in recent days I've shifted this build on quite a lot and not without setbacks too, the main cause of concern was seal soldering the tender side wrap to the footplate one dark evening, the result of a cold workshop, poor light and me being over eager was a rather not nice looking kinked and un straight lower edge of one tender side wrap. In the Britannia BR1 and the Class 4 BR2 tenders the baseline inward curve is formed with longitudinal assist lines which one bent to radius help manaint a straight bottom edge, however the BR1C tender etches don't have this and the curved area of the side wrap is half etched which can allow distortion to occur when soldering to the footplate base piece. I wasn't able to pre tin the inner side of the curve for strength because fitting the footplate base into position would have placed too much stress on the tank body. Anyway cutting a long story short after some head scratching the seam was opened up as carefully as could be possible within the restricted space for leverage, the side wrap de stressed and straightened and then tack resoldered to a correct alignment. One lesson learnt when building BR high sided tenders using Acorn etches.

Here is the repaired article.




Progress with the loco on the other hand is being a dream, the chassis is very free running, straight and well balanced so when it gets to motor fitting time and testing on the rolling road I have no worries. The front footplate area is mainly built now and the smokebox wrapper has been seamed together and the smokebox door casting fits snuggly abate currently as a dry fit. Work now turns to fabricating the cab area, the body to chassic holding down boxes and all made up ready for fitting latter and the firebox frame has also been put together ready for the wrappers to be soldered on and dressed.

 

Thanks Paul... I aim to finish the tender this weekend.

 

Finally finished the cab which started turning into a bit of a nightmare because aligning all the various angles correctly meant a bit of re adjustment and fiddling tack soldering things in place, anyway job done now bar for sweating on the window bezels which I'll get on this in the workshop in a minute or so. Next step will be to start on the boiler and firebox and when that is done I'll focus back on the frames and Caprotti valve drives.

I do think the Leek station water tank and porters room makes for a nice vision of things to come.

 

I have taken the decision to go over to DCC with sound from now on as many folks here will already know, they will also know that my knowledge in DCC products is near zilch, anyway I've fitted the firebox in place on the Standard Caprotti 5 loco which means I can now focus attention to fitting the boiler into position. Now as Dundee Paul rightly prophesied more questions are coming ... the motor gearbox is an ABC helical unit and my plan is for the decoder to be mounted in the boiler with a sugar cube speaker located under the chimney opening with mini pin connectors fitted in the pick up and motor feed loom to prevent stressing the wires in the even the body needs separating from the chassis. I've drilled a 6mm hole to feed the wires through from the firebox front bulkhead into the boiler, the firebox is set level its just a camera angle thing which makes it appear lopsided.

My question is (remember I'm a DCC novice) will this system be suitable or do DCC folk deal with this sort of thing in another way?

 

Now a thing to watch out for if anyone is going to build this kit and this is not a criticism on the part of Scorpio but the holes for the handrail knobs on the boiler (not the smokebox) are set a tad to high, this means when the holes for the handrail knobs are drilled on the firebox wrapper (fireman's side) an undue and obvious kink is created when the handrail wire is fed through. To get round this there are two choices, either drill the firebox handrail knobs higher up the firebox which will then make them visually too close to the mud hole door joints or, kink the two handrail knobs on the boiler downwards to form a smooth alignment. I chose the latter option as opposed to drilling a fresh hole 1mm below the existing one. The picture shows the correct handrail knob position on the firebox side.

 

So the final question for now is which sound decoder system for O Gauge do folks recommend and why please? The DCC control sytem I'm going with is the NCE Powercab.

Here in the insides of the barrel I've kept the stalks for the top feed castings in place when soldering as I thought they may well make good fixing points to position the decoder onto.

The boiler is lopsided as its only loosely dry positioned as yet.

 

Thanks Graham for the kind comment, basically this is a model of a BR Standard 4.6.0 tender loco built to power class 5... the then "new image" concept was a development of the final Ivatt version of Stanier's Black 5. BR experimentally fitted a small batch of Standard 5's with the Italian Caprotti valve system which function through a series of rotating drive shafts instead of the more normal Walschaerts rod linkage arrangement. The engine I'm modeling is 73142 which was last allocated to Patricroft before withdrawal in July 1968 and was a regular performer along the North Wales line in the final days, as a child we'd holiday in North Wales during Wakes Week and I saw 73142 a couple of times... once going under the bridge at Talacre and once in Prestatyn station.

 

Thanks Rob from some initial research looking at Coastal DCC it seems the Zimo and Legomanbiffa sound files are the best, so I'll have a chat with them for what they recommend as suitable. Thankfully they do a sound file for a BR Standard 5 which fits the bill for my wants.

 

Boiler, smokebox and firebox all joined together and lining up properly on the chassis, next job is to start the plumbing and finish the Caprotti drives.

 

Thanks for the nice comment Paul... been a tad busy with work of late so just a bit behind with things here, oh the NCE PowerCab kit arrived last week so I'm chuffed with that.

So panning through Brian Stevenson's BR Standard Steam Locomotives I noticed that the Caprotti 5 builds had an additional steam feed pipe running from under the footplate to the steam collecting dome, this feature was only applied to 73125-73154 and not the main fleet fitted with Walschaerts valve arrangement, the pipe involved making a cover plate too as these bits were not included in the kit. Ooh more scratch making as I've not long finished scratch building all the sanding gear. Anyway here is the piece in question... this little blighter took most of the late afternoon to form from a lamination of four layers of 18thou scrap brass etch.




And here it is affixed to the loco, the cover was glued into position as I've noticed the recent batch of whitemetal castings seem to vanish into thin air the second even a low temp iron goes anywhere near them. The pipe has been soldered from underneath the footplate.