Backwoods Steam Crane wheelsets, and an antique

I have done a little more work recently on the Backwoods Steam Crane which I started (like most things) many years ago. The kit is based on a split frame chassis of which I made a particularly poor job and which never ran properly, mainly because the wheels weren't square on the track and it had a distinct wobble. It also had fairly small 8mm drivers which I thought looked a bit too small for what is a fairly large vehicle - like the oil-electric, it's getting on for OO loading gauge. I've decided to replace the drivers with Slater's 10.5mm wagon wheels (which happen to be what's used in many of the early Backwoods 009 loco kits). One of the first tasks is stripping the not-very-straight frames and removing the old bearings. I think one of the causes of the poor running and lopsidedness was that I'd opened out the bearing holes too far and consequently the bearings were not central in their holes.

Here the frame has been stripped, the new wheels are ready with their worm gear
and the blanks for the new bearings lurk in the background

I've made up a new set of bearings as it was quicker than ordering some, and I get the nice chunky components I want. The bearing holes have been cleaned up and the outside of the new bearings turned to about 0.2mm oversize so I can get a nice central fit. They were then carefully broached (yes, I need to invest in a 2.0mm reamer) to be a slightly tight fit on the axles - they can be opened up slightly when everything is nice and square.

The new bearings sitting on their axles - the worm gear is on the remains of
the old split axle insulating muff

The bodywork hasn't had much attention for a while, but to be honest most of it is finished with the exception of odd details and the chain work for the jib.

The body with the floor and gearbox unit. Yes, I do need to clean up some solder...

I also came across this while rummaging about in the stock box recently, and thought it deserved to see the light of day for the first time in many years. There's been very little done in finescale 4mm scale narrow gauge (three layouts, to my knowledge) and this was my one and only attempt from around 20 years ago. It's a bog-standard FR 4 ton coal wagon from the ancient GEM/FR whitemetal kit, but with added compensated W-irons using an old etch from the 2mm Scale Association, together with Association wheelsets. I also tarted up the brakes by removing the cast-on handle etc. and adding new brass details and brake shoes. At the time I thought - probably rightly - that I was a very lone voice in the wilderness and I never did any more, but given Alex Duckworth's excellent recent WDLR models in finescale 4mm I wonder whether I may not have been completely nuts after all.

The body is nothing special, except that the brake gear is a little better than the original kit

The running gear is all 1990s 2mm Association parts regauged to 8mm.
The right hand whilst is the compensated one, hence the odd angle - it is
tipped over on the three-point compensation pivot.

(The three 8mm layouts I had in mind were Pete Wilson's slate quarry layout, Peter Holmes' "Borth-y-Gest" and Alex Duckworth's WDLR layout recently featured in NG&IRMR No.100. Anyone know of any others?)

Back to Blogger, and the Box Cab again

Well, my experiment with Wordpress didn't work out too well. It turns out that hosting it myself was a much bigger headache than using Blogger for very little gain, so I moved the blog back here some time ago. In the process a number of the the image links broke, and I've spent a few hours fixing these so they should all be OK now. Please comment if you find any that aren't.

I don't have a great deal of new stuff to contribute - there is some progress on the JZ bogie coach from my Yugoslavian post but not enough to be interesting yet. So I'll fill in with a couple of photos of the Backwoods box cab in its current guise. It's just about finished - remarkably for one of my projects - and I'm quite happy with the yellow bodywork paint job. It's been rubbed down with T-Cut which has unintentionally given it a rather nice streaky and faded look which isn't at all obvious in the photos. I'm not as happy with the roof, which will have to be re-done. It's a combination of black, silver and blue (I think) which was supposed to be a weathered greying colour but has come out too glossy.

The rivets are a bit too big and the strong sunlight makes these look worse, but there's not much I can do about these now. Also a couple of the handrails aren't quite straight...

Progress on Lancashire - and Wordpress!

I've been making a little progress on my long-suffering Backwoods "Lancashire", and the photos here show the new smokebox mounting plate. The original kit makes no provision for dismantling for painting etc., so I've done my best to make sure I can split it into sub-assemblies. There are a couple of little lugs soldered onto the inside of the tanks to support the sides of the firebox which you might just be able to make out in the photos, and the smokebox support is milled down to 0.4mm thick in the middle to hold the boiler perfectly level. It will eventually be soldered into the recess underneath the footplate formed by the valances and have a hole drilled for the smokebox locating screw.



Lancashire's boiler, smokebox mounting plate and tank/footplate assembly

New mounting plate for Lancashire's smokebox

Balkan Adventures

I've had a soft spot for the Yugoslav (JZ) 76cm lines for a long time, but until a few years ago information about them was hard to come by. This was a shame since they're just about the ideal narrow gauge modelling proposition, with:

• Literally hundreds of miles of prototype (it might be over a thousand - I haven't looked it up);
• Spectacular scenery and interesting rural locations;
• A huge variety of locomotives and stock, including lots of articulateds and even a few diesels;
• It's 76cm gauge so the gauge is exactly right for HOe, so no nasty compromises there;
• Most of their steam locomotives were inside framed, and hence candidates for kit bashing from N gauge chassis;
• It was built to the same standards and some of the same designs as the Austrian 76cm gauge lines so a lot of commercial stock can be kit bashed, adapted or used direct. They even used a few locomotives which are available as ready-to-run (the Roco HFB 0-6-0TT, the Liliput OBB U Class 0-6-2T and the Bemo Second World War HFB 0-6-0 diesel, and I'm sure there are others).

Recently the information situation has changed markedly with the appearance of:

1. Dave Sallery's website describing these lines, with a large number of excellent and easily accessible photos (i.e. they can be printed, scribbled on and scaled for one's own use - unfortunately drawings, especially of rolling stock, are still a rarity).
2. Keith Chester's book The Narrow Gauge Railways of Bosnia-Hercegovina and its follow-up Bosnia-Hercegovina: Narrow Gauge Album, available from Stenvalls or Camden. Neither of these is what you'd call cheap - but they're worth every penny.

My indecisive modelling self hasn't been able to resist this, so for some time I've been accumulating stock and doodling yet another project, and I'm now starting to make a little progress. The plan isn't very ambitious, and involves an area of about 50cm by 160cm in the Ikea Ivar shelving above my workbench and machine tools. Yes, I know Ivar as a baseboard isn't an original idea, and thanks for the inspiration to those who have used it already. The photos below show the location and a few bits of track laid out to see how things will look. I'll have to do some surgery on the shelves to remove some of those cross braces from the sight lines but I doubt that they're essential - what can possibly go wrong?
It's a convenient way to get a quick start but I acknowledge that it has drawbacks, especially in being obscured by the support legs. However it has a few bonuses:

• It can easily be exhibited as a free standing layout on a new set of legs (which are cheap, available in a couple of heights and can easily be butchered into other heights); 
• It's very solid;
• The shelf above can be used to support as sophisticated a lighting rig as required;
• I lends itself to the "proscenium arch" type of display;
• It's easily extendable.

The full extent of my new NG empire....

The unvarnished shelves are to be used as the baseboard substructure

My current thoughts are around a small station with a forestry branch, possibly just a single or double passing loop, with removable cassette fiddle yards at either end for what would undoubtedly be rare operating sessions. It's just about at eye level, which I think will be a useful motivator to get things looking right - I always think a lot of layouts look fine from a helicopter and then everything starts to go wrong when you get down to a realistic ground level view.

I've also made an attempt at butchering a Chivers OBB class 399 kit into a JZ class 83 0-8-2. So far this has really only involved removing the boiler details and then wondering what to do next - it's probably best not blogged yet unless anyone's really interested.

The most progress to date has been made on passenger coaches. The JZ had a wide variety of coaches, but fortunately many of these were blessed with the same cross section and window shapes as the now-antiquated Liliput bogie coach design, which they've sold in many colours for many years and is hence very easy to find on the secondhand market. The major problems are that the vestibule ends are a completely different shape (as it happens they're about the same as those on the Roco OBB bogie coaches, but paying £40+ each for those and then using just the ends seemed a bit wasteful - and the windows are the wrong shape), and so is the roof. As far as I can tell, a few JZ coaches had the same roof form as the OBB stock with the radiused edges, but most were a simple chord from one side to the other. The window size and spacing did vary on the JZ stock, but I reckon I can produce most variants by a simple cut-and-shut job. So I've been preparing a set of patterns to resin cast myself a few parts:

• A generic JZ-profile roof suitable for their longest coach;
• A roof end, reproducing the awkward half-dome shape;
• A vestibule with its tapered floor plan, mainly using bits chopped off a Liliput coach and reassembled.

The idea is the following process:

1. Hold the body in a wooden clamping block made for the purpose and sever the roof from the coach using a slitting saw in the milling machine;
2. Reinforce the body using 2mm acrylic for the roof and new inner ends;
3. Cut the old ends off;
4. Add the new ends;
5. Cut and shut the coach to whatever window configuration is required;
6. Cut down a roof casting to length (if necessary), adding the end half-dome.

The Liliput chassis requires some minor butchery but nothing compared to the body. The photos below show my progress to date. I'm hoping that it will become something like the coach in photo 5 on this page of Dave Sallery's site.

Roof master balanced on cut-down Liliput body

Vestibule, roof end and roof centre masters tried for size. The masters aren't finished and have just had their first coat of paint to detect bumps and holes better

With original Liliput chassis ,which requires work around the steps and ends

The modified coach with an original Liliput OBB coach from the same secondhand batch

A running chassis, at last!

The gearbox is in, the motor is secured, it's wired up, it's on the rolling road, the power's on and there are NO BINDS! Here's a photo of it in motion:

Here it is static, complete with grubby bits of white insulation for crankpin washers and ridiculous oversized screw holding the gearbox in:

This is what I did to the gearbox. My obsession with it-must-be-able-to-be-dismantled-ability meant that I wasn't happy about having it captive around the driving axles, so I cut a slot into the front of the gearbox which allows it to be fed into the chassis from underneath. It's secured by the screw at the back which makes the mesh adjustable. The axle bearings in the gearbox are just to keep the last two gears in mesh and there's still enough left this way to maintain this properly, and cutting in from the from the front means that it's not affected by up-and-down torque of the box - the only possible movement is fore-and-aft, and the locating screw takes care of this if it's tight enough. I cut the slots VERY carefully with a slitting disc, and was careful to use a bit of scrap 2mm silver steel in the bearing holes while doing it so that I didn't slip and carve a big lump out of the bearing. Even so, I had to file out the final bits and there are a few marks on the bearings, but they look like they'll be OK.

Since doing the photos in the previous post I've cut a small slot in the locating ring nut on the motor to allow it to be tightened. When it came to the crunch this wouldn't tighten up fully, so I've had to add a 6mm inside diameter x 0.5mm brass washer between the motor and the mount - this takes up the thickness of a small boss moulded onto the front of the motor. Yes, I [b][i]know[/i][/b] there's a crack in the solder joint between the gearbox and motor mounting plate (again).

"Linda" - gearbox and motor mount progress

Well, after a long interlude for a holiday in the USA and a few other things, I achieved a smooth rolling chassis. It had a slight bind for a long time which I think was down to:
1. The cranks which I thought were firmly attached, actually weren't. It seems that one of them moved slightly on every revolution. A tiny dab of Loctite B638 retainer solved this.
2. One of the front bearings was slightly too far back in the frames - it was set up with the coupling rod and an alignment jig and pulled forward slightly.

I've now started on the gearbox. I have to confess that I can't actually find the instructions at the moment (that accounts for a lot!) but I think the advice is to glue the motor into the gearbox. I din't like this as I'm more than likely to get it wrong, and it's not adjustable/removable for mesh or maintenance. The little coreless motor has a threaded boss on the front and I'd originally cooked up a rather rough arrangement with a thin nut soldered onto the gearbox etch and the motor screwed into that. I recently stripped down most of the gearbox and replaced it with what you see below.

I've made a small nut (although it doesn't look like one, as it has no flats and concave sides) to attach the motor to the gearbox. The strange shape is because it's dished to only just clear the large idler gear - space is very tight here. It's made from a nut from an old miniature toggle switch, i.e. the nut which is used to clamp the switch into a control panel via a threaded boss. The next photo shows a similar nut and the mandrel I made up from a very mangy old switch to turn down the motor mounting nut. The nut will eventually have a couple of notches to make it easier to tighten up. If you attempt anything similar, beware - these small switches have a wide variety of different thread diameters and pitches, and there doesn't seem to be a standard. I just happened to get lucky and find one with the same thread (I've no idea what standard it is but it's about 5mm diameter).

Lastly, a grainy photo (not sure what happened there) or the motor, nut and the idler shaft. The latter is a bit of 2mm silver steel tapped 8BA at one end and with a head soldered onto the other, to make the whole thing removable. It has a little 1.0mm brass bush to stop the gear wandering sideways out of mesh. 

Backwoods "Linda" Chassis

I've been posting progress on my Backwoods "Linda" project on the NRGM forum, and it only seems fair to add details here for those who aren't members (although it's well worth it if you are a narrow gauge modeller of any sort...)

I've dusted off my own long-stalled Backwoods "Linda" project. I last worked on this about six or seven years ago, and its sojourn in the draw has just gone to prove that you really should take care in removing all the flux, or your kit will fall apart after a few years. It was up to the badly-running chassis stage - the quartering was and out there were several binds, but there were so many problems with the soldering in the chassis I decided to strip it back and start again. The photos below show how far I've got.

Those who have built one of these will notice that the gearbox isn't fitted - I wasn't keen on the captive gearbox idea so I've decided to either adapt the current one to be removable or build a new one. Also, I've made a set of replacement cranks in 1.0mm brass with press-fitted steel crankpins. These aren't perfect but I'm quite pleased with them, although making them - even cutting them together in a batch of four - is a bit of a pain and I don't want to do it again. You may also notice that I've removed the compensation and rebuilt it with rigid bearing - sorry, far too fiddly for me.

At this point I got really ambitious and designed a set to be laser cut, which you can see in a couple of the photos. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that I've actually had them cut to completely the wrong size. I've no idea how I managed this since I had a very precise set of dimensions - I'll order up a few new sets and see how they come out. If they're OK, I'll be using some to replace the cranks on my Backwoods "Lancashire" (no, I haven't finished that yet either).

Regards,

Chris

Checking the bearings for parallel

Checking the bearings for parallel and level

First fit of wheels and new cranks

Chassis with unsuccessful laser cut cranks

Close shot of the laser cut cranks. Well, they look nice anyway. The bottom left hand one has had the pilot holes drilled out 0.5mm - the rest are as they come from the cutter

Split Infinitive...

...because it takes me an infinitely long time to finish anything?

Anyway, here are a couple of photos to prove that 1. I can work on more than one kit at a time and 2. I can write more than one post per day.

I decided that I didn't like the idea of Lancashire being rear-heavy and having to weigh down the front to keep it on the track like most model 0-4-4Ts, so I'm having a go at actually carrying some of the weight one the rear bogie. I reckoned that if it was carry weight, it would hold the track well and could usefully pick up current, so the next two photos show my attempts to split-frame the trailing bogie to provide wiper-less pickup.

The bogie link arm has been split by soldering on a small strip of PCB, cutting the insulation slot and then filling everything with epoxy to avoid getting dirt in the insulating gap. The bogie is split similarly but there's a paxolin boss tapped 8BA in the centre - this will take a screw with a large head (not the one on the left) which will act as both an adjustable height bearing pad and the conductor for the insulated side of the bogie - the loco has uninsulated drivers on one side, so there are only two pickups and the frame is live. I'm sure it'll be clear when it's all put together...

The wheels are the originals with the centre replaced with brass and stub axles inserted. Yes, the little black thing is an axle muff and yes, that means there's one missing. I've lost is somewhere, but it is only 4mm long so I think I that's a reasonable excuse.

Up On The Roof

(Well, everyone else uses either awful puns or song titles for their post headings).

I have a little detailing job on the roof of the Ingersoll-Rand Oil Electric (Did I call it a "gas-electric" previously? Yes, I did, but I now realise that it says "Oil Electric" on the box). The cooling unit is a big lump featuring what is presumably a large fan with a radiator on either side. This has six water pipes running into the roof and these locate in little cast plugs - basically these are small bits of tube which form part of the main roof casting.

I've built the cooling unit to be removable for painting and it's held with an 8BA screw from inside the roof casting, and the plan was to fit the pipes to the unit and have the ends loose in the roof fittings. My rather heavy handed assembly and the natural softness of whitemetal means that several roof fittings have been mangled, so I've worked up some replacements which hopefully look a bit more elegant. Anyone else would have just bought some brass tube, but I couldn't be bothered. And the shops had closed.

The pipework is 0.9mm brass wire, so I produced a couple of lengths of 1.6mm brass rod with a 0.9mm hole (i.e. the bit of brass tube that I didn't buy). This was cut into six lengths and the ends faced off in the lathe to be nice and presentable. I've started to slice off the original fittings and replace them with tube as shown in the photo on the left. Hopefully these now look like pipe flanges fitted to the surface of the roof, and won't leave unsightly gaps when the paint goes on. You can see where I've broken one of the original fittings on the inboard side of the cooler in the photo.

This shows the flanges a little better on  the two front water pipes. I wanted to make the pipes as close a fit as possible to be able to paint and weather the the cooling unit separately before fitting it to the roof. I've tried to make the roof modular as it has a lot of surface details and lumpy or overdone painting would show up badly (sets standard to fail be in near future...). 

This shows the inside ends of the pipes ready to be cut flush with the bottom of the roof. The brass screw in the centre holds the colling unit in place and below and to the right of that are the original holes for the other four coolant pipes. 

Finally, this is a view of a bit more of the roof including the exhaust units - the centre panel holding these is also removable and fixed by a 10BA screw from underneath. The collection of brass tube in the foreground is the other four cooling pipe flanges waiting to be fitted.

Hopefully this may be of use to anyone else building a Backwoods Box Cab Oil Electric. I can tell you now that - with the exception of a couple which Pete McParlin built himself - this is actually the only built one I've ever seen. Now there's a challenge.

The Boxcab - finally working

I seem to be making a habit of posting once every twelve months. I'm sure that's not what blogging it about so I'm going to make a real effort to be a bit more prolific.

I eventually got around to working on the boxcab, so here is a short video of it running on the rolling road with its new fly cranks.

Once it gets moving the loco starts to rock quite a bit - there's no binding in the cranks and this appears to be due to one of the wheelsets being eccentric on its axle.

Apologies for the wallpaper - the workshop really needs redecorating...

More crank problems

It's been almost exactly a year since I posted here so I'm long overdue for a new entry. I've made pitifully little progress and more backwards than forwards at times, but you may be interested in the latest problems with my Backwoods Ingersoll-Rand gas-electric.

In the previous post I showed it sitting on its elderly but intact and working Liliput OBB 2095 diesel chassis. These are fairly difficult to find nowadays and I was quite pleased to find this one - this was tempered with disappointment shortly after I made my last post when I dropped one of the power bogies and managed to crack all four of the plastic cranks. This was not a positive development.

You may just be able to see in the photo that there's a crack running from the centre boss up through the crankpin hole to the outside of the crank. The cranks seem be moulded in nylon and although it is possible to glue them (with the magic of Dr Mike's) this doesn't hold once the push-fit crankpins go in - I'd have been quite surprised if it had.

So it sat in the display case for months while I tried to think of a solution that didn't involve buying a new chassis. Now, I've been working on a couple of new kits recently and there was space on one of the etches for a few odds and ends, so I set to work to see if I could make a solution...

And I came up with these. They're a fold-up crank with 0.3mm pilot holes for the crankpin and the axles.

I wasn't sure how I was going to progress from there but it was a start. After the customary few weeks sitting in a drawer I doodled a design and started to turn up eight axle bosses. The Liliput axles are 1.50mm and I've bored them 1.3omm to give plenty of room for reaming out. I haven't decided on how to do the crankpins yet but I fancy some sort of screwed system rather than washers soldered on the end of plain crankpins I'd like to re-use the original plastic coupling rods if possible, so keeping them clear of the soldering iron seems a good idea. I've broken enough bits already.

The last photos show a soldered-up crank and the blank for one of the bosses, and pair of cranks, one with a boss soldered in place and trimmed and the other without its boss.

I think I've now worked out how to finish off the cranks and just need to solder up all eight cranks, fit the bosses and finish them off. I then have to work out how to fit them. I'd like to press fit them but I'm not sure about the tolerances required to get this just right so may depend on Loctite or lowmelt solder in the end. I also have to work out a plan for the crankpins an I suspect that doing those properly may take time (and money).

The Living Dinosaur

I've restarted work recently on a Backwoods Ingersoll-Rand boxcab kit which I've had for many years now, so here are a few early shots. The kit isn't - as far as I know - based on a particular prototype as I don't think they ever had outside frames, but it gives it plenty of character on its Liliput 2095 chassis.

This the the basic body and roof assembly - the roof is a large lump of cast whitemetal which won't do its centre of gravity any good, but it gives pretty good traction. I assembled the roof with the radiator and exhaust assemblies removable. The plan was that I'd replace the roof with a cast resin copy to reduce its weight, but I'm not sure if I'll proceed with this. This next photo shows the roof dismantled into sub-assemblies.

The last photo shows the current state of progress. It's a nice runner, but there's still a long way to go...

More on the Japanese 0-4-0T

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...

Disaster - my cranks have fallen off!

It had to happen. After gloating in a previous post about how well Lancashire was running, I moved on to adding the valve gear and con rod to the left side. The valve gear is now built up into thre sub-assemblies and ready for fitting.


LHS gear ready for fitting

So Lancashire took to the test track to limber up before the first stage of adding the rods. And while trundling along happily at low speed, this happened.


Calamity on the test track

Yes, the flycrank has come off. In fact both the fly cranks fell off at the same time. Remarkable.

The closer photo below sheds a little light on what's happened. It looks as though I've soldered on both cranks with only a small amount of solder actually making the connection, resulting in a weak joint. In addition to this, there's been quite a bit of flux left behind inside the crank, corroding the axle. Presumably this has worked away at the joint until there wasn't enough left to maintain the joint. The morals of the story seem to be:

• Make the crank a tight fit on the axle to ensure nothing nasty can live in the gap
• Only add the flux from the outside
• Make sure you get enough solder on to make a proper joint
  

This ain't one going much further...