petesworkshop

Laurie at "Shedmaster" has been very supportive with advice and extra parts for the project, which has helped progress. The engine is running well and I’m at the stage when I’m considering the crew; they’re part of the detail of the engine and need to be designed carefully to complement the loco. I plan to make a contrasting pair; an older bearded driver and a young boyish fireman; there’s not much room on the footplate because of the oversize cab splashers; it doesn’t seem to be a good idea to mount a figure on the fallplate either; so space for figures is limited. I’ll include these in my "Heroes of the Footplate" range when they’re ready. 

The brake cylinder with its piston and crank connecting it to the braking system is absent from Peter Tatlow’s drawing in "Highland Locomotives" but the arrangement can clearly made out in Plate 40 of the same author’s "Highland Miscellany". I used this as well as information from drawings of other Jones locos as the basis of my reconstruction of the detail under the cab.

There’s a lot of detail beneath the footplate and even more under the loco that you can’t even see. The brake pull rods are held on with screws so they can be removed when the wheels are taken off. Above the splasher is the mechanism for working the sandbox; a long rod with an elbow and spindle to tweak the sandbox into action, which by LMS days has disappeared from these engines, presumably replaced by a more up to date system.

The buffers between loco and tender are made from telescopic tube and are sprung by a wire from above which passes through a slot in the tender floor. When travelling in reverse the buffers take the weight, rather than allowing the loco to push the tender along by the drawbar. I hope that this arrangement will make some difference to the locos performance in reverse.

 I’ve added support brackets at the front of the tender for the brake gear; as far as I can make out from my drawing this arrangement follows the prototype. You can see a little bracket mounted on the horizontal rod which these brackets support, with a thinner rod that leads up to the brake wheel, which is mounted on the tender superstructure. I’ll have to mount the tender brake gear inside the hornguides and away from the hornblocks themselves to prevent electrical shorting out; too far inside for my liking, but I’ve really no choice. The tender sandpipes also use the horizontal rod for support.  

The tender sides supplied with the Shedmaster kit were a very long, thin, one-piece wrap-arround affair which was soldered to internal strengthening pieces. I just couldn’t manage the thin metal at all; the curved corners turned out all different radii; I couldn’t get the sides to fit the tender footplate correctly; and the thin metal just wouldn’t stand handling at all. I gave up and made four seperate sides out of 0.4mm nickle silver sheet and soldered them in place on the footplate; a much easier solution. The rounded corners were a problem, but I found that simply thickening the corners with scrap and filing them to shape worked well and produced a solid structure. I’ve had some help researching the arrangement of the brake levers under the tender footplate, I understand what needs to be made to represent these now, so I intend to tackle this next.

There’s been a lot of work done to the chassis, much of it out of sight, since the last photos of my Skye Bogie appeared in this blog; in fact the chassis is nearing completion and I’m happier with the model now than I have been at any time since I started it. I intend to work the project through to a finish now without getting too distracted by other projects. There’s still a lot to do and I was dismayed just now to discover that the smokebox door casting supplied is a couple of millimetres oversize. Well I can’t just trim it down without ruining the hinges and the door straps are wrong too I see, so I’ll just ask LG at Shedmaster for something more to scale, a useable replacement that is, and see what happens.

A well designed Zero-Zephyrs kit was the basis of this little 7mm loco. I fitted an ABC gearbox inside, and though I could find no space for a flywheel it runs well. Recently I took it to Carlisle for an outing on the local 0 gauge group’s layout where it proved its worth by hauling a quite incredible number of trucks. I airbrushed the engine with fairly dull black then tried to line it with transfers with no success. Assembling all the cut up lines and corners just didn’t work, so I bought a lining pen. Eventually, after a good deal of trial and error, I managed to line out the engine which I then weathered in an attempt to disguise my rather inexpert lining; you can judge for youself whether I was successful.