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...