Nick Dunhill's 7mm W (A6) or Whitby Tank Workbench

Nick Dunhill

Western Thunderer
.....cab door handrails. I bought some Laurie Griffin tapered handrails and they have cleaned up nicely. Spinning them in a mini drill and polishing them with wet-or-dry (hold both sides) straightens them up.

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I measured the position of the base holes for the handrails off the GA and pre-drilled them before soldering on the tank/cab/bunker sides. To my horror the cab cut-out beading was slightly too short (also to be completely accurate it's offset so that is thicker on the inside than the outside.) Here's how I got round it.

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Ends too short, so splice a bit in. There's some scrap material on the etch that's the correct thickness. Solder with high temp solder (electrical at 240deg.)

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Add yer handrails with lower temp solder, 140 deg.

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Cut out the unwanted bit with a piercing saw carefully and make good.

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Or with the benefit of hindsight you could drill the base holes half a mm to the left/right and avoid all the above malarkey....your call......
 

adrian

Flying Squad
I bought some Laurie Griffin tapered handrails and they have cleaned up nicely. Spinning them in a mini drill and polishing them with wet-or-dry (hold both sides) straightens them up.
:eek: :eek: cripes that's not cheap! I suppose it's ok if you can charge the customer for the privilege. For the rest of us building for ourselves then I think I'll stick to 10 minutes with a big file and a bit of nickel silver wire.
 

Nick Dunhill

Western Thunderer
.....have made a start on the cab rear prior to fitting up. Have made the hatch and runners for the shovel plate. The water level gauge is interesting. In later years it had a perforated tube (turn handle water pees out showing level) as most LNER engines, but in the early NER days it had a glass tube within a steel pipe to show water level. I have filed the holes out of a bit of thin walled tube and intend to drop a length of NS rod inside it to represent the glass tube after painting.

Thanks to Tom Sherlock Burnham for spotting that. The other thing Tom spotted that I'm not so enamoured with are the 10 bars over each window. Bahhhh! The eagle eyed amongst you will spot that the loco now has buffer steps.

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Next window bars.......
 

Nick Dunhill

Western Thunderer
Call For Help.

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Look at the rear cab windows of this pic of the preserved J72. All the ex-NER tank locos have the same window frames. There is a ring round the window opening to which all the window bars (11 of them) are attached. I assume this ring/bar assembly is also a standard NER fitment and would also be present on the A6 (W), A7 and A8. Does anyone have any photos of an A6 or rebuilt W showing (confirming) this?

Ta
 

Nick Dunhill

Western Thunderer
...I have fitted up the bunker rear which is the last of the big parts in my etchings. The part fitted well but here's a summary of the minor faults I have found. You'll see above we had an issue with a slot only half etched in one of the chassis members. Easy to resolve. The second problem is one of the step backing plates that is not handed, ie both parts are for the same side, again easily resolved. One of the upper chassis laminates is wrong but easily resolved using the cut and shut method above.

The main body parts fit very well. I had to trim about 0.3 mm off the horizontal outer edge of the tank inner etches. I scribed a line and whizzed the extra material off with a sanding disc in my mini drill. The cab front, rear and bunker rear need 0.15 mm whizzing off each edge to fit comfortably between the cab/tank/bunker sides. Scribe/mini disc again, minutes work. One of my cab rears needed the height reducing by 0.3 mm (I filed material off between the tabs) the other did not, so maybe this is an etching discrepancy, or me putting the two sections together carelessly. Finally the slots for the bunker rear are about 0.25 mm too far to the rear. I reduced the thickness of the tabs by a similar amount (30 secs) and all fitted well. Nothing on the scale of some (A** Kits, eh?) kits and not bad for some etches that weren't beta tested.

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The bunker rear is tricky to form. Mick has etched the panel purposely too tall, to aid bending, with trimming required afterwards. I utilised the extra material to grip the panel and form the curve. I marked out the start of the curve with a marker pen and stuck the top edge of the panel to the centre of a 12 mm diameter bar with double sided sticky tape. Grip the edge of the panel and bar (upside down with tabs uppermost) in the safe jaws of your vice. Bend the panel round the bar, using a heavy straight edge, up to the marker pen line. Second time I was lucky and got it more or less right first bend. First attempt needed to be bent a bit more after offering up. Be careful not to solder the footplate to the bufferbeam via the locating slots as I did!

We plough on.......
 

mickoo

Western Thunderer
Nick, rear cab wall is my bad, forgot to compensate for the shelf thickness, so it's actually 0.4 mm to high on the artwork so no idea why one fitted and the other didn't :eek:

The rear wall is a mystery as the slots are actually forward on the artwork, the idea being the rear wall fits inside the side walls and the sides are trimmed back to give a smooth edge, not, as it appears in your photo of adding the wall to the end and trimming it's sides back.

Reading the rest I'd say at a guess, and this is in no way a defence from me, that the cab side slots have been opened out a little to the inside and the main sides have moved in 0.2 - 0.3 mm which is why the cab front and rear are too wide and the tank tops correspondingly so, and why the rear now fits the full width rather than dropping between the sides like the front and rear. My problem now is to try and work out how to prevent others making alternative solutions to the one I envisaged on future and current designs.

The problems seem mostly stem from the cusp allowance or how much can or cannot be taken off, I allow for 0.15 mm on each face and as I've found out with the A7 and B1, several of those added up and in the wrong place can throw things out, not really sure how you get around that, even after a test build there's no assurance others will take off the exact same amount and thus may never hit the goal the designer was looking for.

The other alternative is overly large sloppy slots, which allow people to juggle bits until they fit, though I'm not overly a fan of that approach, but being as this one seems to have failed in the design stage (tighter tolerances) then it's worth exploring for the future.

I struggled like mad with the A7 rear flare and ended up with large hitting impliments and wooden formers, fortunately kitchen work tops (bull nose) have a 12 mm radius to them. Areas like these are where nickel silver has it's disadvantages, for the future I'd run a separate 0.25 mm sheet for items that need forming.

You haven't built the bogies yet so can't test the bogie wheel frame arches, the A7 is to scale (1'-7" radius) and of course Slaters wheels are not, so there's a snag point there. The A6 is 1'-10" radius so I'm hoping the extra 1.9 mm radius is going to give you enough clearance to the bogie wheel rims.

MD
 
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Nick Dunhill

Western Thunderer
Mick
Cab rear is a mystery. Maybe I trimmed the top a bit on the second one, can't remember. I ran a 0.5 mm drill
along the slots on the footplate to clear out the cusps so its anyone's guess about the 0.15 mm discrepancies. There's a couple of things to be said I suppose. The amount of material to be removed is really negligible and it's much easier to remove material than add it, so for me it's a win. As ever knowing what is wrong in advance is 90% of the cure.

The bunker rear is fitted in the rebate between the sides. The slots on both models were a bit out but again not by a country mile, half the width of the panel is acceptable in my mind (never run with sloppy fit....eek!) I like the idea of the rear panel having extra height. I found that if you pop it against the bar in the vice (upside down) you got a lot more purchase and you roll up to the marked line. It worked well having extra material to grip in the vice.

In the main the panels fitted so accurately that they clicked into place and remained there before soldering. A testament to your design mate. Don't beat yourself up, it's a win win.

Nick
 

FiftyFourA

Western Thunderer
Just got a shock looking at that photo of the J72, that's me, the laughing fireman!

Don't remember where it was taken (over the past 3/4 years we have been all over with her) but it must have been a nice place to get me to laugh that much :thumbs:. Shame I can't do it anymore after my accident :'(.

It is lovely to see so much NER/LNER stuff rather than all those RTR panniers that seem to be coming out of the woodwork these days.

Nick - if you need any pictures of NER fittings and stuff just let me know. If I havn't already got them I can usually arrange to climb over (or under) one of our locos (NELPG) and get what you need.

Peter
 
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