7mm Rob's workbench - Gladiator J6

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
With the end in sight for the J79 my thoughts have started straying to the next build which is to be an LNER/BR J6 (ex Great Northern Railway) This is to be built from a Gladiator Kit which originated in the George Norton Connoisseurs Choice range (according to the etches). Extras include full inside motion from Laurie Griffin along with a few of his detailing parts. Once it's painted (by Warren Haywood) I will then be weathering it and adding the finishing touches.

We start with what's in the box.




First the brass castings and turnings


Then the very cleanly cast white metal details.







Then the etches,

The chassis etches are quite substantial nickel silver etches, but the body etches feel much thinner so I suspect that they will require a bit of careful handling until they are soldered into a rigid structure.






Finally the extras, These are all from Laurie Griffin and were my suggestions to the gent that I am building it for to not only enhance it but to replace the vulnerable etched lamp irons.

Given that Heater has recently built one of these and shared it on here unless asked otherwise I will only share things that I think will add to Heather's account of the build rather than a blow by blow.
 

Heather Kay

Western Thunderer
It'll be interesting to see this come together. I've seen another nicely built example someone shared with me on Facebook, so we all know it can make a nice model.

Which tender have you got, Rob?
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Good question, when I ordered it I didn't specify so it is whatever comes as standard. I will have a look when I get a moment

Edit to add Class D Sterling Tender.
 

Steph Dale

Western Thunderer
Rob,
No hornblocks? Are you building the loco up rigid and/or how are you going to get the crank axle in/out?

Steph (intrigued)
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Hi Steph,

I realised that I hadn't included hornblocks as I unwrapped the chassis parts. Thankfully I have supplies of both yours and the original Finney ones to use until I replace them.
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
The J6 is is officially underway,

I decided to build the tender first to get a feel for things and the plan is to use the tender for the pickups so hornblocks were fitted. The good news for this plan is that there were etched cut outs for fitting them with certainly simplified things.

All the wheels are blackened but I need to stock up on steel 10ba csk screws because I haven't enough to do the drivers.
The horn guides are Finney but I seem to have misplaced the strips for retaining the hornblocks so I used a trick borrowed from Warren Haywood and used surplus 12ba nuts and bolts from Slaters crank pins to create retainers. In fairness I could have probably just soldered strips of scrap etch across the bottom because the Slaters wheels are easy to remove.

At the minute there is a lot of side play. I plan to leave this for the moment because the finished model has to negotiate 5' radius curves.

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You will note in the last photo that I shimmed the spacers with some scrap etch I am not sure whether I really needed to but it helped to level the space with the top of the frames and to get a tighter fit with the rear spacer that goes through the frames mid way. I suspect that if I had tested it without removing the etching cusp I may not have needed it.
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Although it looks to have been a little quiet on the J6 front things have been progress albeit that it's taken a slight detour.

After careful study of the tender in the photo v's what came with the kit, my client decided that he would prefer a different tender to make the loco match the photo. The alternate tender is now on order from David Hill at Gladiator but won't be available until March. I plan to continue to build the original tender, if for no other reason than to make sure I don't lose any of the bit's off it. - I have made a little more progress which I will share at some point.

Which means that thoughts have turned to the loco itself. I am very gratefully receiving help and guidance from Paul Pen-Sayers (@Locomodels) on building and fitting the inside motion in the chassis and I have been given Carte Blanche by my client to replace items in the same manner as I would if building it for myself.

So far I have elected to obtain some Premier coupling rods and some driving wheel springs from Ragstone. The latter I will need to modify but they will look a bit more like springs than the rather 1D etchings attached to the frames. In fairness to the kit, the etches are labelled 1992 and things have moved on a bit in the detail stakes since then.

This is what I mean by 1D they are a single layer etch with just the outline of the strap that retains the leaves.

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The reason I elected to go for the Premier rods is similar, in that the rods provided are only dual layer with the back layer half etched and they are designed to pivot on the crank pin rather than the knuckle joint. I could perhaps have modified them to pivot on the knuckle but without adding another layer from scratch, I felt that they would still be a bit on the delicate side for coupling rods. Paul of course made a superb job of those for Heather's build and I am guessing that he made up some additions in his workshop.

Moving swiftly on, I have started to clean up the inside motion parts and slipped some of them onto an axle to see how they fit.

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Much more work to do on them of course - including attempting to straighten those straps...
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
As mentioned elsewhere a lack of time and energy has allowed me to do a few small jobs on the J6 that didn't require anything that wasn't therapeutic.

Although David had advised that it wouldn't be available until March it was a pleasant surprise when an email suggested that it could be collected at Bristol show. @warren haywood very kindly collected it for me so the build has resumed. Perversely I have decided not to start with the tender but to get the loco frames done next - it's to have working inside motion.

Parts of the etches do show their age and so it is with the loco springs which are a very basic etch. My client has asked me to build it as if it were for me so I have the discretion to obtain replacements for anything that I think could be improved upon.

The Hornblocks are Finney and were from stock so I will need to pick up some replacements for them from the Guys when I see them next.

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The spring castings are from Andy Beaton (@demu1037) at Ragstone Models and will be modified to make them look more like the J6 springs before fitting.

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Susie

Western Thunderer
Hi Rob,

A very interesting build. These etches seem to have done the rounds, as presumably they started out as 4mm items. The 3mm Society sell the same Geo. Norton kit, suitably shrunk down, and here it is in 7mm. I know the original engines were versatile but this takes the biscuit!

Susie
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Hi Susie,

It seems so I am informed that they were originally hand drawn in 4mm scale by Malcolm Crawley.

It's quite interesting to see the quality of some of these hand drawn kits. This one doesn't look bad apart from lacking a little of the finer detail that we have come to expect and Jim McGeowns kits are very precise.

While others look quite crude in comparison, or as I heard them described once agricultural - a term which I think fits perfectly. I should imagine the larger the scale that they are blown up to the worse the imperfections become. A few years ago I built a horsebox kit from the original Model Signal Engineering range and although it made in to a reasonable model in the end, the etches left much to be desired in terms of the draughtsmanship.
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Further progress has the chassis together and ready for the fitting of the hornblocks.

Despite the quite substantial frames there was still a bit of flex in between the two main spacers and the rear one which is just soldered to the top left the bottom of the chassis with a tendency to splay outwards. To get over this I have temporarily soldered a third frame spacer (labeled motor spacer in and I also cut one of the wider frame spacers down and soldered it upright to take out the splay at the rear.

As is comes there are three sets of spacers, marked from when it was blown up from a 4mm kit 00 gauge, EM gauge and P4 I am using the EM gauge spacers as a compromise between getting int to go around 5' curves and having sufficient room to fit the inside motion.

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Before I go any further I am going to rework the springs and fit them before adding the Horn guides.
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
A spring in the step, or should that read, "some steps with the springs" (groan!)

We started with this.

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I then patiently cut that down to get these separate pieces

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What I am aiming for is a 3D profile of these

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Then I started to re-assemble them - and to misquote Eric Morecambe, all the right bits but not necessarily in the right order....

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Monday evening should see them ready to fit (I hope!)
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
I had originally planned to go to Kettering show this weekend with a stop over on Friday night. Taking the decision not to go has given me an extra couple of days of thinking/modelling time in which to really get my head into the inside motion.

Fellow member Paul Penn-Sayers (@Locomodels) had offered to cut out a motion plate for the J6 for me. Paul has also supplied lots of information and patiently answered my 'newby' questions regarding inside motion for which I am eternally grateful. While I fully intended to take up the offer events somewhat overtook me.

While studying the GA drawing to work out which bit was which on Wednesday evening I had the thought of importing it into Inkscape (the drawing package that I use to draw for the silhouette), rescaling it to 7mm scale and then highlighting the components that make up the motion so that I could see what they are.

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You can see the difference in the layout of the motion compared with the Midland variation in which the motion set from Laurie Griffin is based - below is a snip from the LG instructions.

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While I was doing my stuff in Inkscape, Chris suggested using my silhouette to create a template for the motion plate to test whether it would fit between the frames etc. I thought that a great idea and within a very short space of time I had drawn up and cut this

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I used that to transfer the measurements onto a spare frame spacer and drilled/cut filed it out. Due to using it as a template to scribe around, some of the measurements were fractionally over size, while the internal ones were slightly undersized. I kept filing until the slide bars fit and I got this. - I added the framing top and bottom afterwards.

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Looking at Paul's (as posted by Heather yesterday) and Nick's superb motion plate examples, I realise that I will have to file some relief in the tops and bottom of the slide bar seats/openings in a similar manner to the centre opening where the eccentric rods will pass through, in order to allow for the up/down movement of the piston rods.

This is it in the frames - held by a blob of Blue tack

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Although as I say I am very grateful to Paul for his offer to cut one out for me and looking at the example posted by Heather, it would have been of a much higher fidelity than my first effort has achieved but it's a skill learned and Paul's help has helped me to make sense of GA's which has previously eluded me - all the lines blurring into a shapeless mass. Another skill which will only improve with practice and should translate into better quality models at the end of it.
 

Steph Dale

Western Thunderer
Rob,

That illustration from Laurie's instructions is very misleading. It's not a conventional set of Stevenson valvegear at all; both the undershot valves and the use of piston valves with Stevenson gear are relatively unusual (although the set in the valve rods is unusual) and actually very unusual for the MR (if it happened at all?). I suggest you're doing something much more conventional with slide valves between the cylinders.

There are some good publications out there, both a book by Lake/Reidinger 'Locomotive Valves and Valve Gears' and a series of articles in the HMRS journal from many years ago.

There was also this thread: Inside valvegear in 7mm. Techniques and components which might help with some ideas about how to get it all together.

Steph
 
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