David Andrews Princess Royal - 6206 Princess Marie Louise

Thanks for the suggestions gents. The GA shows the 'big end' as being a type of sleeve which passes through the smokebox. As you suggest I should be able to make this adjustable.

My first thought was to draw it in 3D Mossy suggests and I still plan to do that but my only concern is that as ever the dimensions of the model don't match the GA so getting precision between the two will be the interesting bit.

 

Plan A is to recreate the flanged sleeve as a separate entity which will sip over the end of the main steam pipe and allow movement to hopefully take up the gap.

I started by fly cutting both ends of a piece of nickel bar to the radius of the smokebox.



Then, I turned down the diameter and drilled out the centres before parting them off.



The backing disks were turned from small squares of 0.2mm thick scrap etch.



The disks were turned, by super gluing the square offcuts to an arbor made from the remains of the nickel bar that the sleeves were turned from. I could have used solder to stick them to the arbor but reasoned that superglue would be easier to get off the finished disks and so it proved.



The next job is to remove the cast sleeves from the end of the steam pipe castings.

 

Removing the cast sleeve was a bit of a challenge and I used a combination of a piercing saw, a wood chisel and old files dipped in talc. This did remove the sleeve but it was hard work and left the stub slightly oversized and not remotely round.

I decided to make a tool to cut the stub into a regular round shape. I started with a length of steel round bar which I had recovered from an old printer fuser unit that I had replaced. I salvaged all the useful parts which included the bar, several springs and a number of screws. I am not sure what type of steel it is but it's probably the most free machining steel that have used to date.

I cut off a short length and faced off the end. Then I drilled a 3.2mm hole in the end. Once drilled I then took it over to the mill where I secured the length of bar in a square collet block. Finally using a bit of trial and error I cut teeth into the rim. The series of photos below show some of the milling process. I had already took a small cut to establish where the teeth would be before thinking to take photos.













The opposite end of the rod had a stub turned on it (which it located in the printer). This allowed it to be gripped with ease in a pin vice.


It made remarkably short work of truing up the misshapen end of the casting.







The next job is to test fit them to the footplate and see if I have resolved the problem.

 

It's with quite a sigh of relief that I have indeed sorted the problem. I just need to add the bolt detail now.

 

Actually, it didn't take much work to make the tool. With the material being so free machining, the making of the tool only took an hour or so.

Trying to work out dimensions to draw up a 3D model would have taken some time and then probably another hour or so to draw it up.

The bit that took some time was cutting off the cast sleeve without damaging the bits that I needed to keep.

 

I have already cut the collar flanges (the two that you and Brian thought were the beginnings of my 5p piece empire I just need to mark them up for bolt heads and decide whether to press them out using the rivet press or drill and use wire stubs. At the minute I am leaning towards the former as being the easier to do in such thin material.

 

Well, what an absolute beggar making those turned out to be.


I have made at least eight or more of these plates before getting the bolt heads in the right place and mounted to the sleeve correctly. Quite embarrassingly, it was for the most part due to my failure to add up correctly when working out the degrees of spacing around the circumference...


Still I got there in the end.