In the true spirit of this blog, a) this is my first posting for months and b) it's about something I haven't quite finished yet. The little 0-4-0T is sold as a "Feldbahn" by Yoshiya Kobayashi (see his website). I think a few people have interpreted this as meaning it's "Feldbahn" as in a WW1 German Army prototype, but the term is also used in Germany to designate any small industrial railway, and that's what this appears to depict here.
It appears to be a fairly accurate copy of the original Eggerbahn "No.2" locomotive - I do have a scan from an old Egger catalogue of this loco but was wary of reproducing it here, as I'm not certain of the copyright since a Swiss firm started to produce very expensive replicas of the old Egger range under the same name.
I think it's probably based on a small Koppel, so that's what I'll call it for clarity's sake. I've made a few modifications to the original, some of which you can see in the photos. The first was a tool to hold the crankpins, which featured in my blog back in November - this was made purely because I couldn't assemble the kit any other way as the parts were so small. The fact that the crankpins are screws with no slots doesn't help. Other modifications include:
Cutting a vertical slot through the motor bracket so that it could be removed along with the chassis. The chassis - the main portion of which is a Japanese 3-axle motor bogie with one axle cut off - is slightly odd in that while it screws to the bottom of the footplate, the motor screws separately to the top. This means that if you build it as supplied, once the motor pickup wires are soldered on at both ends, you can't drop the chassis out. This slot allowed me to do that. The photo below just shows the slot in the front of the bracket. The next photo down shows the main body components.
Making a completely new pair of crossheads. The originals, while being only about 3mm x 3mm, were designed to be soldered up from a flat piece of N/S sheet, with a U-shaped strip soldered across the back which had a 0.3mm N/S wire soldered into it to represent the piston rod. Once this was done, the whole lot had to be kept in one piece while soldering in the con rod small end crankpin. Needless to say, I found this impossible. I milled a new pair out of solid brass, and they work just fine.
The cylinder castings are meant to be glued to the motor bogie-derived chassis, which is made from some sort of ungluable nylon. After a few attempt with epoxies, I managed to get them to stick with Dr Mike's - a fantastic product which, whilst a bit expensive, is the only thing I know of which will glue this stuff.
So there you are - a nearly finished Koppel. Since I took the photos he's had the awful mistake of the gloss black cylinder paint rectified and wears a neat set of "No. 2" number plates as supplied with the kit. And lastly, a photo of the little feller wandering through the foothills of Snowdonia - how bizarre...
