Hudson Hunslet Build Progress

While most of the focus has been on the layout recently, I have made occasional progress with the Hudson Hunslet kit. I managed to fold up and solder together the bonnet and radiator weeks ago, I was very pleased to get this right as it is a tricky shape, the two parts of the bonnet are partially overlapping and partially aligned.

 

The side panels are then attached, along with the handles/catches at their top. As you can see in the picture I used a piece of card with notches and a strip of masking tape to hold the handles in position, some solder had first been applied to the bonnet side, the iron was then applied to the inside of the bonnet. I was very relieved the rest of the soldering didn't fall apart! More tricky was the rear panel and angled control panel as seen below - a picture which reveals how untidy the soldering is inside the bonnet! The sanding gear control lever can be just seen protruding from a slot.

 

At this point I was diverging from the instructions. I tried soldering the main frames to the footplate, and managed to get one end on, but I wasn't going to get them straight and perfectly aligned when soldering, and my iron isn't really up to a good job. So I continued making up the body, attaching the seat and rear bulkhead (with sand-pipes) to the footplate, and the gearbox with controls as a separate unit. This is as far as I got with soldered construction:

 

Here's a close-up of the gearbox and controls, sorry it's a bit blurry but this assembly is about half and inch tall! I'm rather pleased with the soldering. The instructions suggest soldering a handrail knob to the end of each lever and filing to a ball shape, but I figured life is too short, so I simply added a blob of epoxy glue. They may not be perfect spheres, but they should look fine when painted. I now think the long lever to the left (the reversing lever) should be the brake lever, and that the instructions have the wrong part-numbers, but I didn't realise until too late.

 

The frame was finally assembled using epoxy glue. Purists may sniff at this but if Jaguar and Lotus can stick their cars together I'm not worried, it will be plenty strong enough given the surface area to bond. It was also easy to do without burning fingers, and with a few minutes to adjust until everything was aligned. At this point I was going to glue the bonnet in place, but then had a better idea...

Spikes

First here's an explanation for the limited progress for the last couple of weeks! The view from our Hotel room in Crete. It's rather bright because there was a funny yellow ball in the sky...

 

Since I've been back I've been concentrating on building the track for the layout - after all it won't be much of a model railway without rails! The track at Thakeham was pre-fabricated industrial track with steel sleepers, essentially 2' gauge train set track. The KB Scale Hudson track sleepers are ideal for this, albeit with a different profile but good enough for me. However looking at the photos it seems the track was laid on top of wooden sleepers, so I am using wooden coffee stirrers underneath the plastic "steel" sleepers.

 

The approach is then to spike the rails (Peco IL-115 code 82 flat-bottom) to the sleepers using KB scale spikes. Although the sleepers have the holes pre-drilled, the coffee stirrers don't, so a drill in a pin vice was used, tedious but easy enough so far. Then I discovered the spikes didn't fit! The head   is too deep, meaning it didn't clear the head of the rail, and if it did it pushes into the web moving the rail out of gauge, and making the second spike impossible to fit. They fitted if turned about 80 degrees, but then they did't grip the rail well either... After some experimentation the answer was the big pair of side cutters seen above!

 

This close-up shows an unmodified track spike (left) with one that has had the head cut down (right), only about 1mm needs removing but it has made fitting them much easier, and the track stays in gauge. Also visible are the pencil marks used to locate the plastic sleepers as the wooden sleepers obscure the printed template. With plain track now sorted, and I have to say looking quite good from this close, it is time to move on to the points!

A gaggle of wagons

I'm not sure what the correct collective noun for a group of wagons is, but anyway I've finally completed the 11 you see here, which should be sufficient for Landswood Park. They are all KB Scale kits and based on the Hudson "Rugga" Skip, but using some of the KB Scale variations (including brake ends) plus my own interpretations I've made a variety of different wagons. My intention is to use different loads too, so they all look different, having visual interest in the wagon fleet is important to such a small layout, and is one of the reasons I chose a farmyard as a subject for the model.
















I painted all the wagons as a batch, starting with Halfords Red Oxide primer as an undercoat (all wheels, couplings etc. removed and blue-tak in the bearings). I used a trick I hear of for rust, spraying them with water and liberally sprinkling salt over them. Once dried they were sprayed with Humbrol matt black (aerosol can), then rubbed until the paint came away from the salted areas. Although not quite as effective as I'd hoped it did reveal patches of red oxide and peeling black paint.

A couple of washes of rusty brown to tone down the red oxide and dirty the black, plus a dusting of weathering powders and a spray of Testors Dullcode matt varnish finished the job. Woodwork was washes of grey/brown and the barrels picked out in militay-ish green, they must be MOD surpless! The photo below could have better lighting, but hopefully shows the effect, which I am quite proud of.













These wagons are little bigger than those I am used to building in 009, and being plastic are quite light, so I have packed them with as much lead (old roofing offcuts) as possible. This is easy for the flat and open wagons, having a useful floor, and I did remember to put some lead in the barrels, but open skip chassis have had to have strips of lead put under the centre and end bracing bars. A strip is also added to the bottom of the V skips too, which I hope to be able to hide.

Wheels popped back into place, couplings fitted and adjusted, V skips held in place with a dab of PVA, and they are ready to go. Apart from those loads of course ...!

More from the wagon works

Modelling activity has been a little confusing of late, switching between 009 and 014. There is a batch of items being painted, 009 stock being checked over, and various small tasks on the boxfile. In between I have built a few more of the delightful KB Scale wagons.

The fuel bowser wagon and barrel carrying wagon set are superbly detailed, and while a little fiddly to assemble they will make an interesting change from skips and flat wagons. I actually have another pair of these to make up, but they will probably be bashed into something different again.

Talking of flat wagons, I've made up three more, except that a couple of them have gained ends made from plasticard and scored for planking to match the deck. This gives them a nice agricultural feel, and again ads variety. Another feature is the brake stand fitted to one of the wagons. One reason for choosing a farmyard setting was the variation in wagons and loads that can be justified, whereas industrial lines would usually exist for one traffic. Being a small layout Landswood Park will be more interesting - visually and operationally - with a selection of different wagons, than it would with identical skips.

I've also added some lead under the framing and in the skips of the skip wagons, the flat wagons will have lead under the floor after painting. Which reminds me, I have a lot of wagons to paint now! They also all need couplings, although they are all ready to have them fitted, and I think I have enough couplings made up already too.

Detailing the Lister

So here is the finished article, with all the details added, cleaned up and ready for painting. All I need to do now is find a suitable primer, normally Halfords' works for me, but I am not sure it is best for brass?

Assembly has used a mixture of methods. I have soldered where I could - for example the bonnet assembly, sand pipes, lifting rings, driver's seat and sanding levers. However the mass of the footplate assembly has made soldering practically impossible for my 25W iron, and also I didn't want other parts coming un-soldered while I soldered new ones on! So most of the details have stuck in place with superglue or epoxy.



















The gearstick used a pin from the wife's sewing kit, a little filing made the head more rounded. This seemed easier than filing a handrail knob to a ball shape as suggested in the instructions. I hadn't fitted the clutch pedal at the time of the photos, having checked some photos and where the driver's foot will go I can glue it in place before painting.



















The holes in the buffer beam weights for the couplings can be seen, the buffer/coupler casting has been mounted about 1/2mm high to clear the couplings. The mis-casting of the sideframes has been rectified with a little filler, although from normal angles it was barely visible.

The Lister Chassis

Having assembled the frames to the footplate it is time to add the electrical pickups and assemble the chassis. The pickups are made from phosphor bronze wire, and on one side of the chassis block they are soldered directly to the block, thus making the whole loco live. The other side (shown) has the pickups soldered to a small piece of PCB (there is sellotape behind the pickups too, to prevent shorts).

This PCB has to be connected to the motor - which is mounted above the footplate - with a piece of fine wire. However that means un-soldering the wire from the motor every time the chassis is removed from the body, making lubrication and cleaning pickups a pain. My solution was to make a brass contact from the PCB on the chassis, which acts on another small PCB contact under the footplate, and that is connected to the motor. Thus electrical contacts between chassis and motor are made as the body is assembled, hopefully the photos make this clear.

The underside of the footplate, the PCB contact and black wire to the motor can be seen at the top. The holes under the bufferbeam weights are to locate the microtrains couplers. The sand-pipes have been soldered into the sand boxes.

The chassis assembled, the motor will be hidden under the bonnet. The black wire on the near side goes through the footplate to the PCB contact seen above, the bare wire simply connects the motor to the body electrically.

Initial running tests revealed a problem, there was a mechanical lurch every inch or so. This was probably a gear mesh issue, but I couldn't fix it. However David Janes at KBScale offered to take a look, and it has just returned working perfectly (that kind of service seems to be typical of Dave). It now runs very smoothly and very, very slowly. The gearing of this model is 196:1 via the double worm drive, meaning the motor is screaming away but the motion of the loco is realistically slow.

As well as posting a number of useful pictures, CF sent me this useful link, which includes a copy of the 1933 instruction book. Apparently the top speed of these locos was 5mph! I'm glad I only have a box file, anything larger and that speed could become tedious!

Wagons Roll

Sorry about the rather predictable title, but this week I have mostly been building wagons. Here is the total fleet so far, although I do have some more flat wagons and a fuel bowser wagon set to make up.

These KBScale wagons are all based on prototypes made by Hudson using the "Rugga" skip chassis. Most industrial lines bought their wagons "off the peg" from Hudson or one of the other manufacturers of similar equipment, rather than have bespoke-design wagons made as many of the better known narrow gauge lines did. The kits are nicely detailed and not at all difficult to assemble, although like any kit they do benefit from a little time and attention.

Although I haven't yet made enough couplings, all the wagons are prepared and ready to have them fitted, as previously described. So they are just about ready for painting, but first I will distress the deck of the flat wagon a little, and I need to find a way of making those skip bodies look battered and used. I've heard of people using a blow-torch to soften the thin plastic but even if I had one, I'd be sure to melt or burn the plastic instead!

The Lister Build begins

So with track made, laid and wired, and a couple of wagons to experiment with couplings (and set their height), it is time to start on the big Christmas pressie, the Lister RT locomotive.

Now my wife might not be that impressed with it, preferring the steam locos as produced by Paul Windle, and she has a point that it isn't the prettiest loco ever made! However to me these little industrials have bags of character. For starters the fact that it looks like a lawnmower, and far too small to be motorised! In fact a lawnmower isn't so different, Lister were making factory tugs like this, a useful tool in pre-forklift days, when some customers asked for a version to be put on rails and the Rail Truck variant came about in 1928. Ideal for lightly constructed lines they were popular for peat bogs and factories, and I think it would have been an ideal loco for a farm/estate railway.

In the box are a good clear set of instructions, lots of black tissue paper containing shiny brass parts, an etch, bags of wire and other parts, and the ready-assembled milled brass chassis. More on the chassis later ...

Most of the kit is made up from lost-wax brass castings. Here are the castings for the mainframes, buffer beams and ballast weights, and the footplate (upside down). As can be seen there is a considerable amount of metal to be removed from the casting process including those arches on the frames, which also show some slight mis-moulding along the top edge where they chamfer to fit the footplate. Nothing a spot of filler won't fix later, but the crisp detail of the cast parts is superb.

As a result I have spent a lot of time lately in the garage at the bottom of the garden hunched over a mini-drill with a cutting disk. The instructions suggest a piercing saw and a file, but I'm impatient! The frames and footplate required some serious fettling to get a good fit but it is worth the effort. A number of holes for details have had to be drilled out too, which is slow as brass is very hard! (well, I usually work with plastic or whitemetal!).

The biggest challenge so far has been opening out the ballast weights to make pockets to mount the couplings. Fortunately they are hollowed out at the rear, but there was still a large amount of metal to remove. I drilled two adjacent holes and opened them out to form an oblong, squaring out with a file, a slow job.

The instructions suggest using a mini blow-torch to solder the frames to the footplate but I don't have one, I'd burn myself if I did, and my 25W iron would never heat up this mass of metal sufficiently for a good soldered join. So I have used 5 minute epoxy ("Araldite" or in this case the B&Q equivalent!) which has the advantage of giving me enough time to adjust to ensure all is square. I assembled one side and end, then the others when hard, blu-tak is very handy here! In this photo the holes for the couplers can be seen, along with the vertical hole for a wire pin to secure them.

Here are some of the lost-wax cast details along with the etched parts used to make up the bonnet. Bending that bonnet piece took a while but I am pretty pleased with the result. More soon ...

Couplings in 0-14

There are three coupling types commonly used in 0-14:

• The prototypical link and pin, indeed the KBScale products come with the coupling pocket, a link and a pin. While highly realistic, I can see this leading quickly to insanity on a shunting layout!
• The Greenwich coupling as commonly used in 009, with a little work these can be built into the skip frames so the loop of the coupling attaches to a peg on the frame of the next wagon, indeed KBScale sell parts for this.
• The Microtrains "Buckeye" coupler, the use of which was described by Roy C Link in the Industrial Narrow Gauge Handbook.

Couplings are a personal choice and we all have different priotities, so there is no right answer, and in this scale probably no significant popular choice either. I don't have the patience for the scale links and pins, and personally I'm not keen on the loop-over-pin type couplings (like the Greenwich type) having used DG's for some years in 009. They are prone to getting bent and seem to need constant adjustment, and for reliable operation they work best with loops at one end of the stock only.

That leaves the Microtrains type which I have also used in 009 and found them to be reasonably robust, getting repeatable auto-uncoupling takes some fiddling with magnets but overall I prefer them, so I have chosen them for my 0-14 adventure. Their downside in this context is requiring space for mounting the "draft box", and while they are prototypical for some railways (partiularly American) they were hardly ever used on industrial narrow-gauge in the UK.

Fitting them to the KBScale wagon chassis is as described in the Roy Link manual, although the design of the coupling draft box has changed slightly. The bottom edge of the curved frame and lower part of the centre channel is cut away where the coupling needs to fit, and filed flat. A hole is drilled to take the Microtrains mounting screw, and the coupling screwed into place. I should cut off the protruding screw really.

This shot shows one wagon with the couplings fitted, to which I had strengthened the frame with plasticard offcuts although I don't now think it is necessary, and another having the couplings fitted showing the recess created to mount the coupling.

I have made a couple of useful gauges to assist setting up the couplings. The first is a block that sits on the track to set the height of the coupling, simply made from plasticard the "finger" needs to slide tightly under the coupling mounting created on the wagon. This is about 7mm high, although so long as they are all the same height the actuall height is irrelevant! Hence always using the same gauge. The second is a piece of 10 thou plasticard to sit on the rails, the iron tail of the coupling is adjusted to just skim the top, meaning it will not foul on points etc.

The result is reasonably tidy although it does mean the wagons are quite far apart when coupled, of course in reality the oval frames are the buffers and would touch, with a single link to couple them. I can live with that for the convenience of auto couplings. The next challenge will be fitting the couplings to the loco ...

Here we go again!

I mentioned in my post about EXPONG last October that the challenge for 2011 sounded interesting, it is to build a layout in a boxfile. The trouble is I have a weakness for this kind of thing, just look at Southon Yard and Pen-Y-Bryn Quarry - you could say I have "History". It didn't help that even my wife thought it sounded interesting, and for the next few weeks I was doodling ideas.

The "Dave Brewer Memorial Challenge" is detailed on the EXPONG website, however the rules are pretty straightforward. The model (narrow gauge of course) is to be built into a boxfile such that the lid can be closed, and "sticks" of track (or "cassettes") may be added to one end to facilitate operation.

I thought I'd like to do a 2' gauge industrial railway, the sort with small internal-combustion locos and skip wagons (or variants built on their frames). This is tricky in 009, but there tempting me at EXPO was the KBScale stand. As I have mentioned I have long admired the Roy C Link range of industrial 2' gauge models in 7mm scale, 14mm gauge (now in the KBScale range), and the boxfile seemed an ideal opportunity for a mini-project to dip a toe into the waters of a different scale. However I must confess I do enjoy designing and building micro layouts too, and the deadline and silly limitations of the boxfile (let's fact it, it is a daft idea) is good fun.

Now I happened accross an empty boxfile (well it is now), and so out came some track templates (photocopied from the Link manual) to see what could fit. This sort of layout is best planned full-size, it's the only real way of knowing what will fit, however I did find a novel way of "drawing" them. I photographed the paper template plan with my mobile phone, then used an "App" to doodle all over them; here are a couple of ideas I came up with.

The first uses the boxfile as the inside of a factory, with tracks entering through a door, and some dirty windows looking out to grey sky along the back - kind of a reverse of the normal approach! Sidings inside the building could serve a boiler-house, a door through to "Goods Inwards", and a loading area. Battery loco's might suit this best, so a short kick-back to a charging/servicing point has been squeezed in.

This idea is for a railway serving a nursery (the kind that grows plants, not Kindergarten), and yes there is a prototype for this at Poppleton near York. In this concept the greenhouses are served by tracks (O.K. they are only one wagon deep in reality) for taking fertiliser in, and plants out, while next door there is a store, and boiler-house requiring coal. The tracks exit left though a gate in a tall wall to another part of the nursery.

Next time I'll reveal the plan I chose ... and it is neither of these!

New Year, New Projects!

So here is what Santa brought me, courtesy of my Family and the useful ability to add items from other websites to Amazon wish-lists! Yes a nice pile of KB-Scale kits.

So I have a Lister loco, and 10 wagons - in total 3 skips, 3 flat wagons, 2 open wagons and a pair of fuel bowser wagons. That should keep me busy for a while, but first I need to make some track! Over the last month of so I've had a dose of the Flu, a Birthday Party for a 4-year-old, and of course Christmas and associated family commitments, to distract me from model-making. So I'm now hoping to find time to make some progress with my new project ...

Happy New Year to everyone!

A deviaton of gauge!

Hmm, I seem to have acquired an out-of-gauge wagon ...!

It is from KBScale, previously the Roy C Link range of industrial narrow gauge products in 0-14. Each time I walked past the KBScale stand at EXPO-NG I found it harder to resist, and ended up picking up a trial set of wagon and a length of track. This is the same kit that Phil Parker described on his blog a little while back.

The truth is that I have long admired the Roy Link range, I dusted off my Industrial Narrow Gauge Manual and found the invoice for it tucked inside ... from 1995! But 0-14 is very much a specialist scale, there is nothing ready-to-run, not even track, although KBScale make some track parts. As someone who has never made my own track (although I did make up some quarry track in 009 once, it was never operational), and uses commercial chassis, this would seem and odd choice of scale.

But there is something appealing about tiny industrial trains, skip wagons, internal combustion locos that look like they were made in a shed (and often were), a very purposeful and no-frills approach to railways. And while Nigel Lawton has shown that these can be modelled in 009, since I am clearly no watch-maker, and part of the point of modelling such an industrial railway is including the detail, to me 0-14 is the obvious scale.

So does this represent a change in modelling direction? No, probably not. But a new project? Well, watch this space ...