Heljan Deltics

[richard carr]

I was lucky enough to get a pair of Heljan Deltics for my birthday last February. Nothing had happened until recently as I was waiting to get the Loksound XL4 chips from South West Digital and they finally arrived last week.
I have one green deltic that is going to be D9002 The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry from the mid sixties and a blue one that is going to be 55008 The Green Howards in 1981 condition. The basic Heljan model is pretty good if you ask me and looks like a Deltic, but it has got a few flaws. The biggest is that it comes with fabricated bogies, these are correct for an early loco and so far I have found photos of D9002 still with them in 1964, but they are completely wrong for a blue loco at any time.
There are no front steps or sand pipes, the steam heat pipe supplied has an air pipe connection on the end of it. The ETH equipment supplied is far too small and only fit for the bin. The fuel tanks are far too wide extending beyond the body sides. The front nose grill is too deep, noticeable on a green loco but not really on a blue one.

Thankfully Pete harvey has produced an etched sheet to help us correct some of these problems.
I'm starting with D9002, the plan is to keep the model as Heljan intended, so I'm only going to spend a bit of time doing easy improvements. Here's how I'm getting on.




I have narrowed the fuel tanks by cutting the sides off with a hack saw and then sticking them back together again with butanone and a bit of plastic card to reinforce them. Its taken about 2mm out altogether and I think it makes a big improvement for about an hours work.





This is the pete harvey etch. I have cut out and folded up 2 of the replacement steps here. You can see the frnot steps on the right front of the etch , the headcode covers and all the other bits are for the bogies to help turn them into cast ones.

The steps take a bit of folding and I used my hold and fold tool to get a really nice crisp fold.



The folds completed



You then need to fold it square with a pair of pliers and solder in the top step. To attach then to the bogie you need to drill two 1mm holes and then they become a nice press fit.

The front steps jut fold up and you can glue them on quite nicely.

The other main thing I have added is a decent steam het pipe, I have plenty of spares from my JLTRT 37s so I used a pair of those.

Here is a picture of D9002 compared to an unmodded 55008.





I think the blue ones look better than the green ones, even though there is far more wrong with it in reality. 55008 is going to get the full treatment though, which means a complete respray as the quarterlight windows need to be painted in and the head code box covered over with dominoes, I have some JLTRT eth castings which should look the part there and the bogie side will be removed and all the PHD etched bits added and the fabricated sides removed, I should be able to make a start on this tomorrow.

Richard

 

[Phill Dyson]

Despite the Heljan flaws, they are a very impressive pair of beasts

Phill

 

[alcazar]

Richard...you got two Deltics for your birthday? TWO???????

Where's that jealous icon when you want it?

Anyway, watching with interest...What, if anything, will you do about the over-deep nose grille? Over in another place, Brian Daniels noted that on the pre-production loco, but it never got changed.
Does Pete Harvey do an etched grille for it?

 

[richard carr]

The first thing to say is that no the models are not perfect but I still like them. If you don't like it don't buy one.

As for the model, it does have a bit of a tumblehome, it just doesn't really show in the photo perhaps not as much as the real thing. The second point is that if you look at period photos from the 60's you will see that the yellow panel is cut into by the tail lights, and the tumblehome is no where as noticeable as it is in that photo posted by Tom of a preserved deltic.
Here's one picture I found on FLickr of D9003, compare that to Toms



Its no good just looking at photos of preserved locos as though most of them do try to recreate the the loco as it was, they often don't get it right.

Richard.

 

[richard carr]

If its easy to split yes, but its not worth spending more than 5 minutes on it.

 

[richard carr]

Anyway back to some work after all that discussion.

I have made a start on converting the bogie frames to the cast variety from the fabricated supplied with the model.

Here is a photo of the before and after.



There is a few hours work to do all four bogie sides. The sides come off the bogie easily enough, just use a screw driver pushed into the join between them and they should pop off. To remove the fabrication edges I have used a craft knife and a 0 cut barette needle file, thats the file in the photo, if you haven't got a 0 cut a cheap one will probably do.
Be careful with the springs behind the bogie side these are only lightly held in place and can easily break off. I have super glued mine in place.
I still have 2 to do but should hopefully finish those today, its a bit of a boring job that has to be done very carefully.
The bogie sides also have the lug for fixing the 37 steps that needs removing and the hole in the frames to match that needs filing.

I also managed to narrow the fuel tank. It starts out at 58.8mm wide where as the body is 56mm wide. All the drawings I have seen show the fuel tanks being the same width as the body so it needs to loose 2.8mm. Its not hard I merely cut off each side with a hacksaw, filed off a bit more and stuck them back together. Here are a few before during and after photos.







You don't need to be that neat in making the cut, as the 2 pieces will just be going back together, I used butanone to do this and then added some plastic card rectangular section to strengthen the joint. It needs a little filling at the ends.
Be careful not to break the pipes off the end of each tank its easily done !

I also took some photos of inside the body so that you can see the supports that are used to help form the tumblehome to the body sides !



Its not that clear in the photo unfortunately.

The one thiing I would like to do is remove the fly wheels, has anyone got a suggestion for how to do this ?


Thanks

Richard

 

[mickoo]

Richard, why would you remove the flywheels? Easiest way is to extract the motors from the bogie, open a vice so that the motor sits freely between the jaws and is suspended by the flywheel and then use a suitable dia rod (old blunt drills are often pretty good) to drive the motor shaft out via the hole in the top of the flywheel.

If your removing the flywheels to get rid of the curved part of the rear cab I don't think you need too, from what I can see it's possible to remove that part of the cab, cut at lower floor level behind seats and add in new Plasticard walls of the correct nature, for correctness you'd be better off removing the cab front bulkhead and sliding the cab seats and stepped area back until the seats are in the correct location, then trim and fill with Plasticard to suit. The rear of the cab seat should line up with the internal half walls which line up with the split in the cab side windows.

I found this image years ago on the web, no idea of ownership so apologies if offence taken but shown for illustrative purposes only. It's from a DJH build.


HTH Michael

 

[BrushType4]

That's right Richard, some of the cab pictures I've seen had this screen/wall in the cab but not all. Prehaps it was a later addition? Guessing that it was to make the cab less draughty!

 

[mickoo]

That's right Richard, some of the cab pictures I've seen had this screen/wall in the cab but not all. Prehaps it was a later addition? Guessing that it was to make the cab less draughty!

Phil, they are acoustic screens the area behind the seats is sold with acoustic material stuck on and between them hung a thick rubber curtain, they were fitted to reduce noise from the droning of the engines, all Deltics were fitted by 1963, D9021 from new, D9006 in Jan62, D9016 in Apr62

HTH Michael

 

[adrian]

Those massive round intrusions that pass for cab rear bulkheads are one thing that put me off the HJ 37.

Don't worry, when it's "whizzing around Phill's Withercombe Branch at a scale 100mph with 10 on" I doubt whether you'll notice them.

 

[richard carr]

Michael

I want to get rid of the fly wheels or at least 1 so that I can fit a decent size speaker.

As it will be DCC controlled it doesn't need the fly wheels, especailly now as the one thing that is obviously different with the Lok Sound 4 XL chip are 2 F***ing huge capacitors, which keep the sound going for half second once you switch the power off. They are just what you need to keep it running on dirty track.

I can also fit a btter cab if I want to.

Richard

 

[Phill Dyson]

Don't worry, when it's "whizzing around Phill's Withercombe Branch at a scale 100mph with 10 on" I doubt whether you'll notice them.

Oi!

 

[mickoo]

Richard, that makes perfect sense, a good speaker with sound box will make a huge difference.

Regards

 

[alcazar]

mick, can you put up a link to where you found that DJH Deltic build, please?

 

[mickoo]

mick, can you put up a link to where you found that DJH Deltic build, please?

Afraid not, grabbed it off the net back in 2005, suspect the site is long gone now I'm afraid.

 

[richard carr]

A bit more progress has been made over the past few days. I have been busy preparing some of the PHD detailing bits
Here are some of them


The flat pieces with the hole in them go on the front ends of each bogie side. The bogie safety frames are a fiddle to make to get the triangular plates vertical. Then there is the ETH mounting plate for the nose and some JLTRT ETH castings.

These are all ready to fit now so I have stripped the body shell of everything that can be removed so it is ready to have the bits fitted and then it can be primed. All the glass pushes out reasonably easily, the side windows did take a bit of persuasion. The fans and motor just unscrew.

Here's the stripped body





The one thing I still have to do here is remove the windscreen wipers, for a late blue one they had single wipers not the double ones of the early versions.

 

[richard carr]

Work has been progressing well over the past couple of days. I have now resprayed the body and rebuilt it, here it is.



The quarter lights have now been painted over, unfortunately I decided not to prime these when I painted them and the cellulose based paint reacted with the plastic. Its not the end of the world but it meant leaving the windows to dry over night and then repainting them, they are still a bit orange peely but they are the right colour. The only difficult part of re building the body was fitting the cab front windows, these need you to fit the centre edge and bottom edge first then you can push the rest home, they need a bit of force after the extra paint build up.

Its starting to look the part now it just need the eth fitting and some single windscreen wipersand a few other details.
The biggest problem is trying to fit a large speaker, I'm still thinking about that, any suggestions welcome.

Richard

 

[alcazar]

I've probably missed something here, but why have you re-sprayed it back into the colour it was? I mean, what did you gain?

 

[richard carr]

The quarter lights were plated over during the 70's and painted blue as part of the body colour. You could just paint those but you will never get the colour to match. The same goes for the eth support plate on the nose, its painted yellow so the only way to get a colour match is to respray it. Its not much but if you want the loco to look right you need to do it. I have Heljan 37 where I have replaced the haed code boxes with PHD ones and although I tried to match the yellow paint they stand out like a sore thumb.

Richard

 

[alcazar]

Ah, right...that makes sense.