petesworkshop

I think the Wee Ben is really begining to take shape now, gloom and despair has given way to albeit restrained pleasure in the progress I’ve made recently. I’m managing to get a couple of hours work in most nights and I think I’m keeping the lid on expenditure which hasn’t reached anything like the level of that of my previous Skye Bogie project.

The boiler is not fixed in place yet as I need to make the splasher tops before I can solder everything together. The splasher tops in the kit won’t fit of course now that I’ve "waisted" the boiler, or firebox I suppose it is really, between the splashers; you can see this characteristic feature quite clearly here. Note too that the vertical part of the firebox leaves very little clearance above the wheel tread and that the flange is actually inside the firebox, so no side play is allowed on the driving wheels at all! 

I mentioned in an earlier post that I found that the boiler supplied in the kit was too short, and I’ve just noticed that the holes for the handrails are in the wrong place too. Now, despite protestations to the contrary in the instructions supplied, the boiler is not "vertical from the front of the cab"; it’s one of the characteristic features of the Wee Ben that the boiler is "waisted" between the splashers, it doesn’t just go straight down. Anyway I determined that the best course to take, was to make a new boiler using the Tatlow drawing; so the boiler from the kit joined the ever growing pile in what I euphemistically call the "spares" box. Once the boiler is shaped or waisted-in between the splashers there isn’t much clearance above the driving wheels, so a lot of care has to be taken to ensure that the wheels will turn without fouling the boiler, yet enough material has to be left to fit the splasher tops without leaving a gap.

I cast a block of lead weighing 200g in the workshop and filed it to shape so that it fitted nicely between the sides of the ashpan and glued it in place; the tender also brings some weight to bear on the drawbar which is sprung, again using a Nick Baines method. The front bogie has a coil spring between it and the loco chassis which may be too strong at the moment though I may leave it until the loco is more complete before I add any weight to the front end.        

I built a U-shaped cradle on the chassis to take a blob of Blu-tack which holds the motor firmly in place; I know that Blu-tack is disapproved of in model engineering circles but it works really well in this case. The two motor terminals are connected to the copper-clad insulation board glued to the lhs of the motor by a black and a red wire respectively. From the CCIB a red wire connects to the loco body and a black one goes to the insulated draw bar pivot in the cab. You can see that the rear splasher sides don’t allow much clearance above the wheels, so it’ll be a tight fit when I come to fitting the splasher tops.

The Wee Ben is up and running on my test track in the studio now, and though it’s early days, it’s running quite well. The cast rods arrived from LGM, and though I’ve not finished cleaning them up, I used them in my Hobby Holidays chassis jig to finalise the setting up of the chassis. I fitted an ABC Mini Gooch gearbox with a Cannon motor and a 6mm x 16mm Branchlines flywheel, though I think this is too small and intend to fit a larger one later. The pivot for the drawbar is insulated from the loco body and carries the current from the tender which picks up through the shorted out wheels on the lhs; the tender end of the drawbar doesn’t need to be insulated. A wire from the top of the insulated pivot,  which will be under the cab floor eventually, goes direct to one of the motor terminals, the other is connected to the loco body and returns current through the shorted out wheels on the rhs of the loco. A useful drawing of this system, the so called "American System", can be accessed on Nick Baines’ website at… http://ncbaines.co.uk