Airfix 48xx with High Level Kits chassis

[steve howe]

I had a similar problem, I cut a bit out of the 'link wire' (which doesn't really resemble a chain either!) and bent the end of the pipe up a couple of mil. then re-soldered the link. I wonder if fine twisted wire as a replacement might look better?

Merry Christmas

Steve

[grovenor-2685]

Perhaps you could copy the real one in this post above.
https://www.scalefour.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=81128#p80785

[Paul Willis]

I have found that the steam heat pipe on mine hangs to low and catches on point blades etc. I wondered about cutting out the 'link wire' and bending it up but reading what's been said about it representing a length of chain I'm not so sure now.

Thanks Paul. I haven't had the wheels in my chassis yet, so I don't know yet how the bottom of the pipe will sit. Checking with a steel rule, they are at about the level of the guard-irons, so they may be okay. It depends how much clearance the kit builds up with.

I am wary of trying to bend the pipes now they are in situ. They are remarkably tough, being castings. They may not bend that easily, and I'm more likely to pull one off. If the clearance issue is just a fraction of a millimetre, I may well look to file back the bottom of the pipe, to improve clearance.

One area where I have had to perform some surgery is here:

When fitted, the rear of this casting didn't quite clear the end of the spacer in the chassis. The easiest way to deal with it, given that it will be hardly visible, was to nip a couple of millimetres off the end to allow the chassis to swing into place - it is located by a peg at the rear end of the body.

On the detailing side, a little more patching was required. The early locomotives don't have a whistle shield fitted. Whilst this is easy to remove, when it is unclipped, it leaves a mounting hole in the top of the firebox. This was filled with a sliver of plasticard strip, flooded in with Mek:

Once it had a couple of days to set really, really solid, some careful work with a needle file smoothed it back, whilst still retaining the cladding strip:

One more step on the detailing and the backdating completed.

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Willis]

Onwards, toward completing the body works!

I think that I already mentioned elsewhere that I had made up a set of fire-iron hooks from nickel-silver strip. These are they, with little tags or tails for placing into pre-drilled holes in the bunker to secure them.

I made them out of nickel-silver for strength, but it wasn't the easiest of games to furtle some suitable strip out of my scrap boxes to bend to shape.

So in a remarkable degree of pre-planning, I've included some lengths of plain strip, of various widths and in both full and half etched thickness on the edge of one of the pieces of etching that I've done recently. I've even put them in the correct box to find them next time.

The finished hooks look the part to me, and will only be loaded up (following some prototype photos rather than guessing and making it up as I go along) when the locomotive is finished and painted.

The other piece of work needed on the bunker is to make a replacement fill for the bunker. I already have the additional lamp-iron fitted in place:

And needed to make something that would be less prominent than the original bunker cover when eventually covered in real coal. So I used the original as a template for a simple piece of plasticard. Curved corners to fit in tightly, and a small notch for the lamp iron.

And then glued into place:

Another couple of tasks ticked off...

Cheers
Paul

[steamraiser]

I would put less than a full bunker unless you want the space.
Leave the sides built up with a slope down to the middle behind the bunker coal door.
With the fireman on the left side the middle would go first with coal from the sides tumbling down followed by the right hand side behind the drive - assuming the fireman was right handed.

Gordon A

[Enigma]

I often use old staples to make fire iron hooks.

[Paul Willis]

I would put less than a full bunker unless you want the space.
Leave the sides built up with a slope down to the middle behind the bunker coal door.
With the fireman on the left side the middle would go first with coal from the sides tumbling down followed by the right hand side behind the drive - assuming the fireman was right handed.

Hi Gordon,

I see exactly what you're saying, and that would be a good way to show a locomotive halfway through a turn. However, the limitations of the model mean that there would be quite a lot of work involved.

There is no bunker front or lower rear cab sheet. As you can see from this picture, the cab rear stops pretty much at the level of the top of the bunker.

So if I took the level of the coal down much lower, I'd then need to start making the bunker front, and blending it in and so on. You could argue that the bunker front should be there anyway, but with the cab roof on, and a couple of crew inside, it's going to be so gloomy that you won't notice it anyway.

So I'll go for a moderately coaled look, and see what impression it gives.

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Willis]

Following my comment to DougN about extracting digit, and getting on with finishing some projects, I should crack on with the story.

The next stage that I completed was the filling in of the gap beneath the boiler where the RTR chassis block had previously sat. Whilst for much of the bodywork modifications, I'd been following the Iain Rice/MRJ #1 set of instructions, this was a stage that is part of the High Level build sequence. It's part of the "preparing the body" section. I'd left it until now because of the various other bits of associated butchery going on around it.

The instructions suggest plasticard. Whilst I could have done this, to do it properly would have meant trial and error, and mucking about with hot water to thermoform a curve to make sure that it held, and so on.

It was a lot easier and quicker (and this is where the advantage of having the right tool for the job comes in) to just look for a bit of scrap brass and pull out the GW rolling bars.

I don't know exactly what thickness of brass I used. It seems around 20 thou, but the precise dimension didn't matter. You'll see from the picture below that it's a scrap offcut - there's a big hole in one side of it! Fortunately, it was more than ample for my needs. I rolled it slightly over-tight (over-small? over-narrow?) to start with, thinking that it would be easier to tease out to the correct final fit with my fingers:

I measured the length necessary, and the width (leaving a bit over as spare) and trimmed it to size with a piercing saw. It was then pushed into place, and held with a couple of good blobs of epoxy resin out of sight at either end, and a run of superglue along the seam where the brass joined the plastic:

When that had firmly dried, I used needle files to smooth the two together. I have skipped adding a sort length of boiler band on the new section. I feel that I would have probably made it more obvious rather than less, so I've left the continuation of the moulded one to be imagined by the viewer as it disappears into the gloom underneath:

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Willis]

The next stage of working on the body is to add detail to the buffers front and rear.

Iain Rice mentions this in his article, but so briefly that I almost missed it: "A further detail was to file flats atop the buffer shanks, and cement on scraps of microstrip to represent the steps. Well, looking at various pictures of the prototype, I felt that I wanted to give a better representation than just a square of microstrip. This is how the model starts with no detailing:

The first thing that I did was to go through my scrap box of etches, looking for something which had chequerplate on it. I was fortunate to find these bits, which are off a coach etch of some origin.

I then referred to the GA diagram in MRJ to measure and determine the size of the steps. Inconveniently, they weren't dimensioned, so it was out with the digital caliper and the calculator.

It turned out that they are 5.4" square. Presumably a number that is of ritual significance in the hallowed portals of Swindon. So I set the jaws of my digital calipers to the appropriate gap at the tip, and scribed the size of these onto the brass:

Fiddly to do, but soon cut to size, and safely stored in my trust Patum Peperium pot.

From here, it was a simple task to use a square needle file to complete flats on the top of the buffers for them to be glued to:

And this is the finished result, on the front and the back buffers:

However, that's not quite the end of the story of the steps. Having measured these up, and thinking that they could come in useful in the future, I quickly tacked them on to the side of an etch that I was doing (GER lamp irons, if anyone is interested in those - details at the 5522 website) and came up with this:

So if anyone out there is doing a similar 48xx body upgrade, drop me a message and I'll stick a set of four in the post to you. I'm not going to need them in the near future.

Cheers
Paul

[Enigma]

I think I used a section of throat pastile tube (or similar) for my boiler section. Happened to be just the right diameter.

[Paul Willis]

Another piece of moulded detail that came off my locomotive during the mammoth carving session was the representation of the steam lance cock-tap at the front of the smokebox. Not only did it get in the way of carving off the smokebox door, but it was a bit of a misshapen blob anyway.

The prototype locomotive has quite a refined looking fitment. Almost like a garden tap in its looks:

In the Mainly Trains detailing kit, there is just a reference by Iain Rice to using a short length of 0.7mm brass wire. Having looked at the photos, I thought that this could end up looking a bit "bare".

So not having a suitable bit of scrap lost-wax casting or similar that would be a proper representation, I decided to do something that would look a little more substantial. I started off but soldering an Alan Gibson handrail knob onto a length of brass wire:

It doesn't really matter whether it is the short, medium or long variant, and the next thing to do was to cut off the stem of the knob. Gentlemen are allowed to say "ouch!" at this point. This left the ball part behind, to represent the valve part of the steam cock:

The final stages were to drill a small hole in the front of the smokebox at an appropriate height - just below halfway, around the line of the bottom hinge is correct for the prototype. Then, the excess length of wire was snipped off from one side of the knob, to leave a small stub that represents the end of the tap. A longer length of wire was on the other side, which was glued firmly into place. I think that it's a reasonable representation, all in all.

I'm now coming toward the end of the body modifications for the moment, so the next post will be a wrap up of what has been done, and what remains to be done.

Cheers
Paul