Airfix 48xx with High Level Kits chassis

[Paul Willis]

So, back to the preparation of the body, and I'm still going through the removal of moulded detail.

Next off were the four moulded lifting rings from the top of the side tanks. I used a miniature chisel for these - a new tool that I bought recently as an experiment. It worked well, but I think I chose the wrong tip shape for this job. It wasn't quite as easy as it could have been.

On the other hand, it did the trick as it would have been difficult getting a scalpel blade in there.
l

Iain Rice mentions a leatherworker's tool for this job, as they are razor sharp, I've yet to find one but will have a look online.

Steve

Steve,

Whilst I was buying some weathering washes and powders online, I had a skeg around this website: https://www.gforcemodels.co.uk

And I bought one of these:

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Which has a blade like this:

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It's razor sharp, and I chose that shape because I thought it would be useful to manoeuvre around rivets. As it turns out, it does that well, but for plain vanilla carving like this, I would have been better off with something like this: https://www.gforcemodels.co.uk/trumpeter-tools-model-chisel-f3-1893-p.asp

The chisel lives in its little box in my toolbox, and it used more often than I anticipated. I'd recommend one, and G-Force Models as well. No connection, etc...

Cheers
Paul

[dclift]

Being a cheapskate, I made up the tools shown below from broken hacksaw blades. The business ends can be ground or honed to a razor sharp edge. I am amazed how often I use them. I am certain that this is not an original idea of mine. I probably got it from from someone on the Forum.

[Philip Hall]

I am a cheapskate like David! I made a little chisel from the broken end of a square needle file and it has been one of my most useful tools. I have made scrapers and the like from old files which I use for clearing away excess solder etc.

I am intrigued by the shape of your chisel, Paul, any idea why it’s that way?

Philip

[Will L]

My favourite tool is a scrawker with a chisel end ground out of a Xacto craft knife blade. It still has a remaining bit knife edge too. I don't break many (any) hacksaw blades and my ground knife blade still fits the Xacto handle.

[Paul Willis]

So, after the carving off, sanding down, and various other removals of details, the Airfix body was looking in pretty poor shape, but in a good place to start the improvement work. Here is is at pretty much the end of the stripping down process (a phrase that came back to haunt me).

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You'll see that I've used the fibreglass brush to knock back some of the printed lining as well. It's not raised, or prominent, but I felt that it would be better treated like this in case of any future impact on painting,

One of the elements that had been removed were the cab side handrails. These were fairly chunky, and had left much larger holes than would be needed for the replacement Alan Gibson handrail knobs. So what I did was fill the holes that were left behind with Squadron plastic filler - any similar filler would do just as well.

And in what is for me a remarkable act of foresight, I drilled pilot holes in the centre of the filler before painting over them and losing sight of where they were located.

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Most of the other moulded-on handrails terminated in raised dimples, so it was easy to identify where the new ones should go, and drill accordingly.

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This took me to the next stage of seeing just what all this carving about work had produced.

Cheers
Paul

[bécasse]

I have one that looks just like that, although it is matched with a Perseverance chassis with full handmade auto-gear added. The trouble is that it has looked just like that for 30 plus years!

[Enigma]

I promised some photos of my effort at the chassis etc. and here they are. I hope they're of use to you but of course you don't have to copy me!

First my method of attaching pickups for the rear drivers and trailing wheels. I attached (ie glued) a shortened copperclad sleeper across the top of the chassis over the rear sandbox 'spacer' and soldered a length of very small section U-shape brass channel with (I think) 0.33mm NS wire bearing on the tops of the wheels.

14xx rear pickups.A.jpg

Front pickups are on the underside as there was no room on top and I didn't want to use the sprung ones suggested by Chris. Again 0.33mm NS wire wound into a small coil and soldered to a length of CC sleeper attached to the chassis under the front brake pull member.

14xx front pickups.1.A.jpg

14xx front pickups.2.A.jpg

Next - body fixing. When I revisited the loco to take the photos I realised that I had attached the body to the chassis using an 8BA screw attached to the cab floor near the firebox passing through a hole in the floor and to which an 8BA nut was screwed from below. All this was positioned immediately under the brakegear and was very difficult to access. I have therefore re-engineered (!) this to a more accessible position by soldering a piece of thickish brass across the rear of the chassis uner the bunker, drilling it 2mm and used a 2mm self-tapper into the lead weight I have stuck into the inside of the bunker. Much easier to access! Why I didn't do this in the first place I have no idea! (Please note that these photos are slightly out of order as for some reason I hit 'Submit' rather than 'Preview' whilst writing this part of the post )

[Enigma]

Forgot to add a photo of the whole loco so here it is.

14xx Built.1.A.jpg

14xx Built.2.A.jpg

The eagle eyed will notice that I still have to fit a load of coal, sand pipes and a better set of rear lamp brackets but as it will probably only run chimney first with an auto-trailer I'm not to bothered about these. BTW, I don't remember having any problem with the cabside handrail knobs and the ones I used fitted into the Airfix holes. The missing underside of the boiler is a section of (I think) some tube of throat pastels or similar. Paintwork is a blast of satin black rattle can slightly 'distressed' and it is numbered after an 84J Croes Newydd loco that I often saw as a lad. Oh, and the cab/roof handrail appears to be missing. Can't remember wether I made this and it has fallen off or I never made it at all!

[Paul Willis]

I have one that looks just like that, although it is matched with a Perseverance chassis with full handmade auto-gear added. The trouble is that it has looked just like that for 30 plus years!

Come on then! this is the incentive to get it finished

I'll be continuing to post instalments as I go along, and given the sporadic* nature of my modelling, hopefully at a pace that anyone could keep up with.

Come and join the 48xx crowd!

Cheers
paul

* Other railway-related distractions at the moment include writing an Access database to record what I've actually done to models (can anyone remember what paint colour they used at a ten-year distance?), designing a couple of etches for 5522, restoring number of wagons that I previously built and have suffered at the hands of time, and planning a layout...

[Paul Willis]

I promised some photos of my effort at the chassis etc. and here they are. I hope they're of use to you but of course you don't have to copy me!

Thanks Paul - that is helpful to see. Particularly the body-fixing element.

Give that the original Airfix fitting was by a long screw down the chimney and through the smokebox, it doesn't work well on pretty much any form of re-chassis - High Level, scratch-built, whatever...

So it seems to be the area that there is greatest variety in solutions. It looks like you use a tab arrangement to secure the front end of the chassis?

I will fully admit that I have no idea on how to solve this when I reach that stage!

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Willis]

At this point, I'd reached almost the end of hacking, carving and sanding bit's off the 48xx body. I think in Iain Rice's original article, he uses a sentence like "at this point it looked just about ready for the scrap line"...

I wanted to see how bad the carving about was, and what flaws I had created which needed to be fixed. So the easiest way of doing this was to give the body a coat of primer, as a nice even coat to see the flaws.

I did this with my airbrush, in the spray booth. No fancy clamps or hooks here. For the majority of my spraying, I mount things on a block of scrap timber with some off-cuts of an old wire clothes hanger. There are a number of holes so I can vary the location. On a couple of the wires, I have fixed cheap crocodile clips so the model is held firmly, rather than blasted to the back of the spray booth.

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It's basically the no-cost version of a Tamiya paint stand:

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So using some pale grey enamel paint, I gave the body a quick whizz over. It first glance, it looked rather good:

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But the purpose of the exercise was to identfy flaws to clean up, so there were some scrapes on the tank tops and the cab sides where detail had been removed that needed some gentle sanding.

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This was done with one of the foam backed sanding pads, going carefully around the other detail.

More annoyingly, what it showed (and was not obvious because the original fittings were black coloured) was that details like the tank vents and fillers didn't fit properly. Inevitable, I suppose on a mass-produced RTR model.

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So my solution for this was to use some "gloop". This is the name that I and my childhood friends used to use for the plastic filler that we used to blend in the arms and legs of Airfix 1/32 model figures, or add detail or hise other moulding flaws. This is my little jar of "gloop".

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Basically, it is half a jar of Mek, with bits of waste sprue chucked into it, and stirred until they dissolve and it becomes a gloopy thick liquid plastic. It can then be applied with a cocktail stick, screwdriver, or even an old brush, to fill in gaps. It takes a couple of hours to dry, but then you have built-up plastic that you can cut, sand, carve, as normal.

So I poked it into place under the fittings to fill the gaps:

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And at the front of the side tanks where there was a gap - this is also a trick for the corner plates of open wagons, if the mouldings don't quite reach, and you need to sand a slight curve on the corner:

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And inside the body, where the separate mouldings didn't quite fit, and under the primer a gap was evident. This was done from the back of the gap, so the gloop could be splodged (another technical term) into place:

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And at this point, I was actually feeling quite pleased with myself - I was well on the way to the body rebuild. And then disaster struck!

Cheers
Paul

[Le Corbusier]

48XXcliff hanger the shilling shocker of railway modelling ....

[Enigma]

I promised some photos of my effort at the chassis etc. and here they are. I hope they're of use to you but of course you don't have to copy me!

It looks like you use a tab arrangement to secure the front end of the chassis?

Yes, there are a couple of lumps of (I think) 60thou square Evergreen behind the front buffer beam, either side of the coupling tail. Seemed to be the simplest arrangement at the time! You can just see them in the photo of the underside of the body.

[DougN]

Oh gees... I have a feeling the narrator needs to turn up with something like....

How will our intrepid hero survive the cliff hanging problem of the gloop bottle... was there a mix up between the tea and the gloop bottle.... did the old airfix shell suddenly dissolve and turn into a LMS jinty... only time will answer dear reader

Any how Paul everything is recoverable... then there is always a swap meet where another body could be found for a fiver...or was the whole thing more mundane like work saying it needs all your time for 3 weeks.

[Paul Willis]

Oh gees... I have a feeling the narrator needs to turn up with something like....

How will our intrepid hero survive the cliff hanging problem of the gloop bottle... was there a mix up between the tea and the gloop bottle.... did the old airfix shell suddenly dissolve and turn into a LMS jinty... only time will answer dear reader

Any how Paul everything is recoverable... then there is always a swap meet where another body could be found for a fiver...or was the whole thing more mundane like work saying it needs all your time for 3 weeks.

Well Doug, I did leave things with a sense of drama, although fortunately it just turned into a sense of frustration rather than disaster. And I didn't end up drinking the contents of the gloop bottle.

I've mentioned previously that I have a bit of a magpie mind for modelling, so have multiple things on the go at the same time. Sometimes it's something that's been hanging around, sometimes it's a project that only needs ten minutes to do before work in the morning. Over here https://www.scalefour.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=6988 I've written up the story of the Jidenco Calf Van, which I've had in a "Work In Progress" drawer for a couple of years.

Now it had reached the stage that needed a dunk in the ultrasonic bath to remove all the flux, glass fibre splinters, etc.

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I usually use a laboratory cleaner in the plain water - I think it was a recommendation a few years ago from someone like Ted Scannel, to whom I'm very grateful as it does an excellent job. It doesn't need much, just around about a 2% solution, which in my bath is literally a small splash:

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So having done the van, and having the 48xx body to hand, I thought I would give it a quick run through to remove all the plastic shavings, sanded powder, etc from the nooks and crannies. However, I've never tried a painted model in the ultrasonic bath with Neutracon, and as it's a fairly benign fluid, I thought nothing of it.

So I popped the body in, hit the <GO> button and left it to it. When it had finished a couple of cycles, I looked at it, and there seemed to be a couple of bubbles in the paint. Odd...

Lifting it out, under my fingers, the paint literally fell off:

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A bit of scrubbing under the tap with an old toothbrush showed just how much paint had lifted:

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Unfortunately, the remaining paint was still firmly fixed and couldn't be easily be scraped off. So it was out with the trusty ModelStrip, slather (a Jamie Oliver word, usually used in the context of applying olive oil to vegetables) all over and pop in the oven at gas mark 4, no, pop in a plastic bag and leave for 48 hours.

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As usual, the ModelStrip did its job, and after rinsing and a bit of picking of paint out of nooks and crannies with a scalpel, I was back to this:

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So back on track, a bit of a two steps forward, three steps back, but no harm done in the long term. Next time, back to hacking plastic about...

Cheers
Paul

[zebedeesknees]

I usually use a laboratory cleaner in the plain water - I think it was a recommendation a few years ago from someone like Ted Scannel, to whom I'm very grateful as it does an excellent job.

Much as I would enjoy the credit were it earned, it wasn't me guv.

And 'someone like' ? There I was thinking we are all unique...

Ted Scannell.

[Paul Willis]

I usually use a laboratory cleaner in the plain water - I think it was a recommendation a few years ago from someone like Ted Scannel, to whom I'm very grateful as it does an excellent job.

Much as I would enjoy the credit were it earned, it wasn't me guv.

And 'someone like' ? There I was thinking we are all unique...

Ted Scannell.

Ted, you are indeed unique

I was alluding to the in-depth knowledge and experience that you have of all matters railway modelling. And the occasional leftfield idea, like using memory wire for operating 4mm brakes!

Hope that you're keeping safe, and looking forward to seeing more of your innovations at some point.

Cheers
Paul

[petermeyer]

Seems like you've lost a tank vent in the process

[zebedeesknees]

I was alluding to the in-depth knowledge and experience that you have of all matters railway modelling. And the occasional leftfield idea, like using memory wire for operating 4mm brakes!

Thanks Paul, I had forgotten that was on the CLAG site:- http://www.clag.org.uk/memory-brake.html and it perhaps needs some explanation for anyone wondering!

I had fitted several carriages with Pendlenton and subsequently Bedford sprung bogies, and they demonstrated a habit of rolling away on imperceptible gradients. The concept that with both vacuum and air brakes, the default was 'brakes on' led to the idea that it might be possible to replicate that on our models. The bogies were fitted with conductive wheels on one side alternately, (Many thanks to Alan Gibson, who carved them from the solid for me.) so that when the track was energised, so was the memory wire, and the brakes pulled off. It worked a treat. Then I learned about some real railway practices where - and this is possibly relevant to this thread - a gravity run-round was performed.

This involved usually a tank loco, after terminating a single carriage at a platform, pushing it into a siding that was on a rising gradient. The guard would wind the brake on, then the loco uncoupled would run off the siding, the points changed, and it would run past. The points reversed again, the guard would release the brake, and the carriage would roll back to the platform to be stopped by the guard on the brake, ready for the loco to back on to it for the return journey.

Another possibility would be for a working 'slip', but there are not many modelling opportunities for those...

That vehicle is now in the 'refurb' queue - those silicone secondaries need updating, and few of my tracks are powered now, so radio might be an option.

Hope that you're keeping safe, and looking forward to seeing more of your innovations at some point.

Cheers
Paul

Thanks again, we are shielding until somewhen in August or perhaps later, so time to write up more crazy ideas. But back to the thread - may I draw your attention to the 14xx item on the site:- http://www.clag.org.uk/hl-14xx.htm ? Not to mention the ideal pickup solution at the bottom of this page:- http://www.clag.org.uk/battery-radio.html

Cheers!

Ted.

[Philip Hall]

The gravity run round was the usual practice at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, where the running line sloped down towards the buffer stops. And they did it with four coach trains!

Philip

[steve howe]

Another possibility would be for a working 'slip', but there are not many modelling opportunities for those...


Cheers!

Ted.

I wonder how many people remember 'Long Suffren' when it was on the show circuit, that had a working slip coach, but I've never seen it done since.

Steve

[Will L]

The gravity run round was the usual practice at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, where the running line sloped down towards the buffer stops. And they did it with four coach trains!

Also my favourite Well-next-the-sea where two converging branches were worked this way, as explained here if you read far enough

[Horsetan]

....Another possibility would be for a working 'slip', but there are not many modelling opportunities for those......

Not even P4 in the garden

[Mark Tatlow]

Lifting it out, under my fingers, the paint literally fell off:

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Paul

As was noted in my Highland Miscellany thread or here on my blog (https://highlandmiscellany.com/2020/05/ ... wednesday/), I have had some similar experiences.

My conclusion is that the modern acrylics that now go into car paints just aren't good enough to survive a warm ultrasonic bath. Which obviously is a concern for the long term survival of the paint on the model too! I think i have detected a greater prevalence of chipping. It may be that this affects the primers worst; although given the primer's sole purpose is to get the later coats to stick on, that would be a bit poor!

I don't know if people agree with this but I will be going to the car paint factors today to buy a couple more colours and a good primer - all in cellulose.

[Le Corbusier]

wouldn't cellulose disolve the plastic in this instant?