After spending a week teaching myself 3D drawing, I was back at the workbench today. I had originally planned to just turn a couple of appropriately sized top hat bushes, file some flats on them where they come together and job done. My recently acquired mill offered more possibilities to make something that at least looks like the original even if it doesn’t attach in the same way. This will be soldered to the cylinder front in between the slide bars, instead of being suspended from a substantial bracket between the frames.
This is my first real item produced with the mill and I am happy with how it turned out.
This is where it will sit in between the slide bars on the cylinder front. I have added some fastenings to make it look as if it should be there, when it’s ultimately lost in the gloom between the frames.
Although I dressed the backhead a couple of weeks or so ago, I hadn’t managed to get it to fit into the cab before now because the stub of the whistle protruding through the cab roof stopped it from sliding in. One of those little few minute jobs that seem to take forever to get around to…. I finally got to it and the backhead now fits in place as if it was made for it.
Well the tender is now primed along with the back head and I have been finishing the last details on the body to get that too ready for painting.
Getting injectors has been a bit of a challenge and having acquired through the good graces of other and bought a couple of sets none of which are strictly correct I bit the bullet and piped a set up.
I also made up the vacuum pipe that runs along under the valence which required me to make some pipe elbows. In the past I have used a square file to file a V groove in some tube and then created the bend. This time I thought that I would have a go at doing it with the mill
I set a collet block at 45 degrees using a set square and then used a 3mm end mill to cut the slot.
The next job was to fit them to the loco body. The vacuum pipe went swimmingly
Then I fitted the injectors which is where it went a little south. I made a lovely job of bending and cutting the pipes to fit to the chassis.
And completely forgot that I also needed to fit the wheels DOH!...
While doing all this I also noted that somewhere along the way I had lost the hand wheels from the lubricators so I found a couple of nice cast examples in the spares box.
I had initially primed the tender body a couple of weeks ago when the sun last shone. I took the opportunity of sun here in the dales to get the body primed yesterday afternoon.
I am greatly impressed with the finish of the Clostermans etch Primer. I have used it and the cellulose top coat before but only on loco chassis and you don't really get the same effect.
It's also an absolute b***r to light properly for decent photos.
For most things I use an Iwata Revolution, sprayed indoors into a vented spray booth. But this is sprayed direct from the rattle can.
It was done outside on a small plastic lazy Susan which sits inside a plastic crate on the top of the dustbin.
