Tales from a sporadic modeller.

[adrian]

Hi, thanks for that.

I think the in-house designed stuff is very good - although I've no experience of the Diesels to compare against. The problem I think with the 3F and a number of the other steam outline kits is their provenance. My understanding is that the 3F was originally from Chowbent Engineering which may account for some of the issues I found.

I have an eponymous rivet tool. Actually it was my Dad's design and sold under the Cherry Scale Models banner. The Reynalds Rivet tool is very nice, at one point Lee Marsh was going to be making a new batch, advertised as BRM (Beeson/Reynalds/Marsh). I put my name down for one but heard nothing more and with his expanding loco building empire it's gone quiet on the BRM rivet tool.

 

[Dikitriki]

Adrian,

The 2F and 3F were originally Eric Underhill.

Richard

 

[Arun]

I think those 7mm ex-Chowbent kits which had a 4mm version in the Alan Gibson range [The 5XP Jubilee springs to mind] were designed by Ian Tattersall. Like many kit ranges [a discussion regarding which is currently live on the G0G forum] the individual kits within them can come from a range of authors/designers.

Arun

 

[Ian@StEnochs]

Most of the steam kits in the JLTRT range are from acquired ranges some of which have had some upgrading with castings and resin parts. The County, Scot & WD 2-8-0 are in house new design and some of the others are gradually being upgraded. Most of the development work has gone into diesels, are there any better?, and rolling stock kits.

Ian

 

[Stoke5D]

Most of the steam kits in the JLTRT range are from acquired ranges some of which have had some upgrading with castings and resin parts. The County, Scot & WD 2-8-0 are in house new design and some of the others are gradually being upgraded. Most of the development work has gone into diesels, are there any better?, and rolling stock kits.

Ian

The Diesel kits I have from them are very good indeed. The wagons, not so much. The Resin bodies are good but too often much of the running gear is generic, or otherwise lacking in quality, which is a shame.

As to steam, I'm not sure about the resin boilers etc. even for the new in-house kits. I get that for anything other than a parallel boiler loco. it makes assembling the kit much easier but I don't like the loss of internal space and heft of it all. I think it's completely the wrong material for tender tanks and bunkers, even difficult ones like a GWR tank engine bunker.

IMHO of course...


Andrew

 

[Ian@StEnochs]

The Diesel kits I have from them are very good indeed. The wagons, not so much. The Resin bodies are good but too often much of the running gear is generic, or otherwise lacking in quality, which is a shame.

As to steam, I'm not sure about the resin boilers etc. even for the new in-house kits. I get that for anything other than a parallel boiler loco. it makes assembling the kit much easier but I don't like the loss of internal space and heft of it all. I think it's completely the wrong material for tender tanks and bunkers, even difficult ones like a GWR tank engine bunker.

IMHO of course...


Andrew

Andrew

I have found the resin boilers to be very accurate and easy to use. They cast a weight into the resin so their is plenty of adhesion. However it's not easy to fit speakers if you are so inclined and you need to use glue of some sort to mate the boiler with the etched cab and footplate. The tender on the Scot is all etched but that on the WD has the tank, a big rectangular box, cast with etched front and coal space.

At Telford they had the Dukedog on display and it is almost all resin with some brass castings. The market they are aiming for are those who think they cannot solder and that etched kits are too difficult!
Ian.

 

[Stoke5D]

Andrew

I have found the resin boilers to be very accurate and easy to use. They cast a weight into the resin so their is plenty of adhesion. However it's not easy to fit speakers if you are so inclined and you need to use glue of some sort to mate the boiler with the etched cab and footplate. The tender on the Scot is all etched but that on the WD has the tank, a big rectangular box, cast with etched front and coal space.

At Telford they had the Dukedog on display and it is almost all resin with some brass castings. The market they are aiming for are those who think they cannot solder and that etched kits are too difficult!
Ian.

Yes, I can see the merit and understand what they are going for, it just doesn't work for me as I say. All resin JLTRT diesels, no problem, have two; a Pilot Scheme Class 22 in construction and a Class 24/0 on the shelf - very nice. Steam, not so much. Had a good look at resin examples on their stand last year but decided not to buy in future.

Hopefully Finney7 will put a Dukedog kit together from their associated parts and I can challenge my soldering skills. I don't really have a need for one but I do want one, so I will find an excuse. Mind you, I have to do something with their Spam Can kit first...


Andrew

 

[adrian]

The boiler and firebox on this kit is a resin casting, it's going to be strange because my natural inclination is to solder everything but the casting looks good, it's clean, smooth and the rivet detail is sharply moulded so I'll see how it turns out.

The focus has moved to the cab. This is in 4 parts, the spectacle plate, 2 side sheets and the roof. There was little to no rivet detail, none on the spectacle plate and just the 4 in a square on the lefthand sheet and one line across the roof.

So once the rivet detail was added the top of the side sheets needed rolling over, this was started tapping it over a steel bar but the rear portion being short just twisted and didn't bend. As I didn't have a former I resorted to drilling a hole in a block of steel and then cutting the top half off to form a U channel so that I could press the side sheet in to form the curve. This was then all soldered up and the roof blended in.



A quick test for fitting on the footplate shows one of the reasons I chose Scale7 modelling. It does make some aspects of loco building easier. You can't do this in finescale, in Scale7 there is room to fit the firebox in-between the wheels. For finescale you would have to cut chunks out of the side of the firebox to fit in-between the wheels.



Next was the beading around the cab side sheets. In the kit this is supplied as a flat strip with a half etched slot for location.

Unfortunately the beading is half-round so I wanted to replace it. I flatted the end of some half round beading and then drilled and filed it for the handrail attachment before soldering it position. The vertical handrail is a length of brass wire with the end filed to have a small taper from base to top. I cut off small sections from some copper tube to make the ferrules either side of the beading.



Then finally some rather splendid half etched side panels from Ragstone Models (thanks @demu1037 ). An absolute spot on fit and finishes them off nicely





Just a little more detailing to finish off on the roof now.

 

[john lewsey]

Superb Adrian

 

[Ian@StEnochs]

Adrian,

When I built the JLTRT 4f I had the same problem bending the cab. I had a bit of 50mm square bar lying around leftover over, from making a rear toolpost for my lathe, so used it to make a former for the inside and formed the whole cab over that with a hide mallet to persuade the metal to behave. I did need to anneal around the top of the cut out to get it to lie flat though.

I fully agree about the clearances in S7 and remade the cab floor and splashers at the proper spacing.

Ian.

 

[Stoke5D]

Great work, particularly with the half-round beading on the cab side opening, it's a really noticeable feature of Midland locos. and a simple strip won't cut it.


Andrew

 

[Martin Field]

Your first post in this thread said about modelmaking keeping you sane.
I have had three huge depressions in my life. Alas the black dogs circled regularly then, but each time, modelmaking or some form of it got me out of it. On one occasion thinking up a plan for a layout and drawing it in intense detail did the trick, on another, discovering and reading from cover to cover at one hit, Tom Rolt's Landscape with Machines did it and on another it was doing a Gresley teak entirely in Swiss pear veneer. Sometimes it still drives me nuts, but that's because even after decades at the bench I still cock stuff up. But those decades make me crafty as Hell in correcting stuff quickly. I don't get depressions any more. I suppose having a small heart attack and some kind of mini stroke focus your thoughts in a more positive direction.
All I know is I drive faster now than I ever did!

Cheers,
Martin

 

[adrian]

All I know is I drive faster now than I ever did!

I hope that is a metaphor for life rather than your actual driving style. In some way that appears to be my attitude to this build at the moment.

So next stage was fitting the cab to the footplate and making up the rear splashers. No real difficulty with this stage.



So then my attention turned to the detailing inside the cab - this did not go according to the instructions. Where to start?

Well this is the diagram in the instructions - I have not pixellated this in any way - this is as supplied. To start with the etched frame (Io25) under the roof is a different profile to the spectacle plate so a new one had to be made to fit under the roof.

The main problem is the box splashers inside the cab, Io29 and Io30.


The problem is that as supplied they block the fitting of the back head casting. This can be seen from the works drawings



If it is a simple square box then it overlaps the back head on the lefthand side. On the righthand side at the bottom the box appears the same width as the lefthand side but above that the box is narrower so misses the back head.

Looking at the works drawings the box on the lefthand side does not extend the full length of the cab. It is labelled as a toolbox and stops short of the back head and there is a plate at a lower level. So my tweaked cab boxes look like this.


and fitted with the floor plate in place and the cast back head just placed in position to check that it fitted.





I can only presume that others building the kit as supplied have cut chunks out of the side of the back head.

 

[adrian]

A small update to keep me motivated. It's starting to slow down a bit as I go through some of the detailing parts and decide which ones I want to use and which I thought needed replacing.

Unfortunately I went through Laurie Griffin's website for some replacement parts and very quickly ended up with £70-£80 worth of parts in the shopping basket. This was going to end up an expensive kit at this rate so I decided to be a cheap skate and see what I could make with what I had.

So first on the list were the sandbox lids on the top of the footplate. In the kit are supplied some fairly decent lost-wax brass castings unfortunately they are of completely the wrong style, they have the sunken handle.

So this was my solution, an hours work this evening. A length of brass bar in the lathe turned down to just over 3.5mm. The drawing says the diameter is 6" and a fraction but I can't work out what the fraction is, so it's somewhere between 6" and 7"! They were drilled for a length of wire and when parting off I put a little shoulder in to give the impression of a lid over a tube. The top corner was smoothed off with a needle file.

The wire was held in the lathe and using a square needle file to make a small groove and round off for the handle.



When soldered in place we have this.



Just for comparison this is what is supplied in the kit



So that's £6 saved.

 

[Scale7JB]

So much more satisfying when you've had to put a bit of graft in..

JB.

 

[adrian]

As posted in the workshop area I've moved over to the lamp-irons.

Build details here : Very Little Gravitas Indeed*

There were some lost wax castings supplied in the kit which were not too bad to be honest with a little fettling. However the real thing isn't cast and I prefer my method as something slightly more in the style of the original.

As always with this kit you have to double check the details. There are a couple of holes in the footplate to locate the castings but they are in the wrong place! In the kit it would place the lamp iron over the centre of the buffer, whereas on the real thing the inside of the lamp iron lines up with the outside of the buffer square base. Loosely placed where they should be.



So before fitting the holes were filled by using a 12ba screw in from underneath and then filed flush. The idea being that if I was soldering other components in then it wouldn't fall out. Once that was done the buffers and lamp irons soldered in place.



So that's another £12 saved!

 

[Scale7JB]

Very neat.

How did you do the shelf half way up? Just a seam solder and file back?

JB.

 

[Scale7JB]

Sorry Adrian, just seen the other thread. Very impressive!

JB.

 

[adrian]

Sorry Adrian, just seen the other thread. Very impressive!

aww shucks - it's nothing special, just a little soldering with something at a little higher melting point. It's not difficult at all, the biggest barrier is just having a go, that's all I'm trying to do with these posts is to encourage people to have a go. If you just have a go with a bit of scrap etch from a kit then you've lost nothing if it doesn't work.

 

[Martin Field]

Excellent advice, Adrian. I always tell people," I never made a model boat until I made a model boat". It's exactly the same with any discipline....car, boat, aircraft or, of course, railway subject. Or, in my case, full sized car, for the Germans, who were paying me obscene sums to do it! Blag, blag, pay off debts, put smile on face of bank manager, actually all go away for a holiday,etc. Thanks, Volkswagen.