Hattons Warwell wagon and converting it to S7

[richard carr]

I ordered one the Hattons warwell wagons when they were first announced and they have fiinally arrived.

It's a very nice looking wagon

Here's the box etc









It's fair to say it's well packaged but a lot smaller box than Heljan use.

Here's the wagon out of the packaging, this is the 1970s olive green version with Gloucester bogies and is dual braked.









The last photo isn't the clearest of the wheel set but basically it is a steel axle cut to a pin point that sits in the plastic of the bogie side frame. Unfortunately these are not easy to convert to S7.

For most of the Heljan wagons done so far you can just drop on S7 wheels from Peartree and they take 2 minutes to convert. Peartree wheels are not going to fit here so these need to be thinned by 0.75mm and the flange reprofiled.
It took me 2 hours to do this using an Alan Harris form tool on my Myford Lathe. You could do this on a Sherline or something similar as the wheels are a soft brass and machine very easily.



The top photo shows the original wheel set and a reprofiled one

The bottom photo the rest of the machined wheels.

Fitting them back on the axles was OK for 3 axles but on the fourth the non insulated wheel needed a bit of super glue to hold in place.

A really nice wagon for £85 but I wouln't be going for many more unless I can persuade Peartree to make some drop in replacement wheel sets.

Richard

 

[daifly]

Thanks for the cautionary description Richard.
Dave
BTW the thread title could do with an edit! [editor : done!]

 

[AJC]

Interesting - comparing those bogies with photos of the real thing, it seems that they're just like the 4mm versions and are much too narrow. It seems fairly apparent that the brake wheel should line up vertically with the outer flange of the frames.

MODA Warwells PFV, PFB and KWB | MODA95574 KWA 50.0t Warwell Tare 29t 300kg [Diag PF041A, rebogied c1977-9] + MODA95519 KWB (no bogies) @ Scunthorpe Tata Steel 2015-06-06 © Paul Bartlett [4w]

How practical would it be to respace the frames with a new stretcher?

Adam

 

[richard carr]

Well spotted Adam, the bogies are a bit narrow and it does make fitting S7 wheels a bit tight but they do fit. I'll take another look at it tonight but I think it would be relatively easy to widen the bogie, its a very simple construction. The wagon runs very smoothly even over my deliberately bad track test track. It's heavy as a large part of the chassis is diecast.

I'm going to talk to Peartree about getting some replacement wheels that will drop in but I want to see the Dapol HAA wagon first as Dapol wheels are very similar to this and Peartree will need to do at least 100 wheel sets to make this viable at reasonable cost.

Richard.

 

[Brian Daniels]

Are you going to remove the vac brake and put the correct air braked gear under it?

 

[AJC]

To be truthful, I was expecting it, having seen the 4mm one at close quarters (same problem there; dad's respaced the frames on his). My concern wouldn't be fitting the wheels, which as you've shown is practicable, but the look of the vehicle; the bogie frame/solebar relationship is a distinctive feature of these wagons, especially in 7mm (and above).

Adam

 

[richard carr]

No Brian, I do not have the time, this will be another wagon in my mixed Speedlink train, it's starting to get a bit of variety.

 

[Osgood]

I'd be very happy to take a set (4 x axles) from Malcolm.

If someone can help me with with a decent drawing of the standard 3 hole disc wheel as fitted to 16T Minerals (showing rear profile) I could in turn help Malcolm by giving him another order.....anyone?

Tony

 

[hrmspaul]

I'm going to talk to Peartree about getting some replacement wheels that will drop in but I want to see the Dapol HAA wagon first as Dapol wheels are very similar to this and Peartree will need to do at least 100 wheel sets to make this viable at reasonable cost.

Richard.

I know I shouldn't interfere, but I don't understand this comment. The Warwell has 2ft. 9in wheels 838mm and an HAA the unusually large 3ft 7in.

Paul Bartlett

 

[richard carr]

Paul

You are not interfering, in fact thank you for that information, I had not realised that the HAA had such large wheels.
I do appreciate that that the warwell has small wheels .

To make it viable for Peartree to setup his machine to make the wheels, it would need at least 100 wheel sets in each size to get a reasonable price per wheel set. I had thought the HAA was 3 foot 1 as per the 16 ton mineral wagons and many others which makes using 100 wheel sets relatively easy.
Bbut never mind I have no intention of reprofiling 20 HAA wagons so I will still be talking to Peartree about all these once the HAA wagon appears hopefully very soon.

Richard

 

[richard carr]

As Adam pointed out above the bogies on these wagons are way way too narrow, I make tham about 8mm too narrow !

For some freightliner wagons I bought a few years ago I made some new bogie chassiss to which you can glue on the side frames. So I thought why not do the same for the warwell wagons. I can use Peartree wheels (of which I have plenty) rather than having to reprofile the Hatton wheels. The wheel base for this bogie is 5 feet 9 inches, as I didn't have version already done for this size I needed to draw up some new artwork for an etch, here's the resulting etch.



There is enough for six wagons on this sheet, I have already chopped out 2 of them. The chassis comes in 2 parts held together with a 6 BA screw so that one axle can rock.

The bearings are 1/8th inch 4mm loco main frame bearings by Alan Gibson so fairly easily obtainable.



All the bits removed the etch with scissors



I solder the bearings into the etch some are a tight fit others easily slip in.

You can see the 6 BA screw, a 3/8th one is long enough.







The parts need folding carefully to be at 90 degrees, so the axle rocks and the wheels turn freely in the bearings. Once folded I solder them up with 145 solder.

 

[richard carr]

Here's the bits foldered up.







The cross beam is there to enable the height of the bogie sides to be adjusted. It is always a bit of a guess when drawing the art work just how high it needs to be. In this case all 3 pieces are need to raise the sides by 1.5mm to get the axle box centres to match the wheel centre.

The whole in the middle isn't large enough either unfortunately, I really should have checked it. I ended up drilling them out to 7.5mm which needs a fairly slow drilling speed to achieve.

Then you get to the brave bit, you need to chop your bogie into 3 pieces as you can see below. It is a soft plastic that is easily cut with a rough pieceing saw blade.





To aligh the chassis and the cross beam height adjustment I made a simple jig from a piece of tufnol.
I then turned the end of this down to fit the plastic bogie cross beam centre to align that in the centre too.





I just used super glue to stick the plastic to the nickel silver, the glue seems to melt the plastic a bit and gives a very good bond.

 

[richard carr]

So this is how it started out on a gloucester bogied version



The hand wheels should be outside the wagon body



So here the first side attached and the 2 bogie halves joined to gether.










I think this is big iprovement over the original.

 

[Yorkshire Dave]

Hi Richard

As daft as it sounds for S7 - wouldn't it be easier to design and 3D print a wider replacement drop in bolster for the Heljan trucks to convert them to S7 onto which the sideframes can be screwed to. That's assuming you're a whizz with CAD etc.

I have a similar same problem in my P48 modelling except I have to narrow the bolster. Fortunately there's a guy in the states who produces 3D printed replacement bolsters for Atlas trucks to convert them to P48 thereby making the job easier. The photo here is to demonstrate the 3D printed P48 bolster (bottom) compared with the original Atlas OW5 truck (top). Obviously it would be the inverse for for S7.

 

[richard carr]

Dave

In theory it would be but the axles are too short to fit between the wider side frames so you would need to either find longer axles and reprofile the wheels or maybe you could find a way to use the Peartree wheels.

My 3 D CAD skills are at best limited, so I'm not going to do it

Richard