There were two Silvertown lubricators on the RH framing of most 8Fs, the exceptions being the LNER built locos which were fitted with Wakefield lubricators. The forward lubricator had 6 outlets each side for cylinder lubrication and the rearmost had 4 outlets each side for axle box lubrication. Brass castings for the appropriate Silvertown lubricators are supplied in the MOK kit. They're not bad castings and with a bit of work they clean up OK. The small pipe unions are represented on the castings but they're very close together and get a little unresolved during the casting process. All overcome with optimism I tried to drill the unions to take 0.3mm wire, but nothing doing. The cast brass is dead hard and the shape and spacing of the cast unions was a bit statistical.
The unions were filed off the castings and 0.8mm holes were drilled though in their place.
The outside diameter of the unions scaled to about 0.8mm and I intend to use 0.3mm copper wire (from cutting up a short length of electrical flex) for the pipes. Microbore brass tube from Albion alloys was used in two sizes to make new pipe unions. One tube was 0.8mm x 0.4mm, the other 0.5mm x 0.3mm.
By drilling out short lengths of the 0.8mm x 0.4mm to a diameter of 0.5mm it was possible to insert a corresponding length of 0.5mm x 0.3mm tube to make a tube effectively 0.8mm x 0.3mm. The tubes were silver soldered together, taking care not to bung up the 0.3mm hole with solder, and trimmed to a length that left enough sticking out of each side of the lubricator casting.
Approximate hexagons were filed on each end of the tubes to represent the pipe fittings before they were silver soldered into the castings. A casting is shown here on a ceramic honeycomb plate. The casting is held steady by stainless steel tapered pins dropped into holes in the plate. It's a jewellery making thing that I came across when I was buying silver solder a few posts ago. I find it very useful.
0.3mm wire is passed through the tubes to represent the oil pipes. A couple of tubes needed easing open with a 0.35mm drill before the wire would pass through. I do wonder if using the two tube diameters was worth the trouble, and possibly just the 0.8m x 0.4mm tube would have done the job without the wire looking to wonky. The cast priming handles are a bit chunky and I thinned the ends a little - still too thick, but I didn't fancy making any finer ones from strips of brass. The wire was soldered in with tiny slivers of 145 solder.
The arrangement of the pipes varies between locos. On some locos the pipes remain at the height of the unions as they turn inboard towards the inside edge of the framing before dropping down to the framing and over the edge between the mainframes. On other locos the pipes drop from the unions down to the framing first before turning inboard. The earlier locos seemed to have all the pipes high initially. Some later locos had all the pipes low. From photos most locos seem to have a mixture of the two styles- the pipes between the two lubricators dropping down first and the pipes on the front of the front lubricator and the rear of the rear lubricator staying high before dropping down. I imagine that it all got a bit mixed up as locos were overhauled and some pipes replaced. The photo of 48142 seems to show the inside pipes low and outsides high, so that's what I've attempted to model. The pipes were arranged and trimmed on the bench before the lubricators were sweated onto the footplate with 145 solder.
They're not perfect and I've seen them done better in 7mm, but they'll do for me. And in the end this is a 1966 8F (Paint it black , Rolling Stones was in the charts - seems appropriate for an 8F) so there'll be plenty of crud on the framing from spilled oil and sand.
