Ping!

The Y14 tender is now making progress. I've just gone "ping!" with the first 0.6mm drill that I've broken since I purchased my Proxxon drill stand. However that is nothing more than I deserve as at the time I was pushing sideways on it to use it as a mill to cut out the coupling hook slot!

All that to save me digging out the pliers to adjust my piercing saw :-/

Lesson learned, and I've now done it properly. Here's the tender top (refered to by Chris correctly as "a big b*****d piece of brass" with the coal space cut back to the correct size, and the buffer beam in progress.

 And this is the old and new buffer beams tack-soldered together to enable me to drill through the coupling hook slot. Giving rise to the "ping" moment... You can also just see at the right hand side of the right buffer hole the pilot hole for the correctly placed buffers. They're off-location by quite a bit!

And finally the old and new buffer beams separated, cleaned up, and side by side for comparison:

Now back to the soldering iron!

Flymo

Love me tender...

...as we would say in the Black Country.

Aren't they easy to put together?  This is the result of an hour or so of work.  Compared to fiddling about with tiny, tiny components on 0-4-0 locomotives, this is the equivalent of moving to 7mm.  Big pieces of metal!

It's not all plain sailing though.

Compared to the warm, luxurious, verbosity of a set of High Level Kits instructions, the ones that you get in a Gibson kit are somewhat sparse :-/   Still, there's nothing too complex about this, so referring to the exploded diagram is pretty much all you need.

However there are atill one or two "gotchas" in the kit.  I've just soldered the first outside frame to the tender dragbeam.  The slot in which it located is drawn (the kit isn't badly etched at all, so this is clearly how it was drawn) so wide that you have the choice of soldering to the left or the right side of it, and leaving a space on the other side.

I clearly guessed incorrectly - the answer should be the "inside" of the slot - as when I placed the frame against the tender body it put the dragbeam out of line outside the body on the other side by around a millimetre.  I could have takenit all apart and resoldered it.  However a gentle push into place and a bit of tack solder (visible in the first picture) will hold all in line as I construct the rest of the underframe.

"Bodgers 'r' Us", as they also say in the Black Country!

Flymo

As I had a somewhat frustrating experience last weekend in trying to do more on my Coffeepot (perhaps another post if I can face the memory of it...) I took on a small diversion of fettling another wagon.

As with the recently completed LNWR wagon, this was one that I built some time ago and needs checking over and any faults resolving.  Fortunately time had not wounded this one, so all that it needed was a spot of weathering, which I did over a couple of days before going to work.

And here are the results:

 
Now to raid the stock box to see what I fancy working on next.  Oh, and tonight might see a Y14 tender come together :-)

Flymo

Lining out...

A few days delay in posting this...  Between Christmas and New Year, we actually had decent enough weather for me to try lining out my tram locomotive.

This was done using my new Bob Moore lining pen, which I acquired at Scaleforum in September.  I've never really succeeded  with a traditional bow pen, so on the recommendation of my Area Group I decided to give this a try. 

The first attempts to produce lining on a panel of transfer paper to then place on the model were singularly unsuccessful:

However I decided that there was nothing to lose from trying, and went on to lining directly onto the model:

And this was the arrangement that I used.  The idea for the painting cradle came from an article in MRJ.  I recall that it is how Alan Brackenborough paints his models.  After the vermillion lining was in place, I used a brush to go around the outside of the panel with black, which also helped tidy up the slightly uneven patches:

There's been a bit more done since then, so hopefully I'll have another instalment for you soon...

Flymo