Sorry I’ve not posted recently but family visits have taken priority.

Not only that but the boredom caused by my decision to block-build five brake vans has lowered my normal desire to be in the workshop; therefore, not much progress.

The “fiddly bits” of the title are the brake assemblies for these brake vans. I think I said earlier that the BR built version of the Toad Ds carried totally different brakes to those built by the LNER; very long brake shoes for the latter but double shoes for BR. So only one of my models would use the plastic hanger/shoe units of the kit, and, because of the space being taken by the etched ‘W’ irons, these could not be fitted as the kit designer had intended.

Luckily for speed of progress I had the mould I made for a previous build of an LNER Toad D and was able to quickly cast the 32 hanger/shoe units required for my four LNER versions. The casting is for one hanger with one very long shoe, and with clasp breaks that’s two per wheel or eight per vehicle. I still needed a method of fixing each hanger to the chassis and I played around with several ideas, eventually fixing on a brass strip, ‘U’ shaped bracket across the chassis that would carry two hanger/shoe units, one for either side of the vehicle. On the opposite side of that axle would be a similar unit so each axle would have the four required shoes. Now I’ve got sixteen brackets to make!! Actually twenty brackets because I’ll use the same method for the BR version’s plastic moulded brake units

I’m going to upset Bill again! Marking out all those brackets did not appeal so I made a little jig which allowed me to simply snip the brass strip to the correct length and to bend up the ends at the correct place to give me the flat ’U’ shape required. I now needed to glue 32 castings to 16 brackets and eight mouldings to four brackets.

These bits are vulnerable to knocks in handling so the glue used for this hanger-to-bracket fix needs to be a strong one and the area of contact is small. This needs araldite to allow a larger contact area but araldite takes too long to set or I need to make 40 setting jigs or one setting jig and wait forty nights! I decided on using cyano to get an initial weak grab and then reinforce with a good blob of araldite. One picture shows the arrangement I set up while the araldite fully cured on all the strap brackets. Others show how the bracket was held while I adjusted the cyano’d brake hanger to its side of a bracket – good old Blutak!

Incidentally for those who don’t know about the stuff, the buff coloured paper on which all these gluing operations are displayed is actually silicon baking foil. This is truly remarkable stuff that withstands extremely high temperature, ~(well beyond our soldering values) and to which just about nothing will stick – very helpful material.

"Clangers"?

Somewhere I measured wrong! The da***d brackets would not fit across the chassis!!!! I was not very pleased after all that work.

My answer to my clanger was to snip every bracket in half and snip a little from each peice and this meant I now had 64 bits to fix on rather than 32.

There was a further clanger but that can be put down to doing some modelling rather than just thinking about a project. With more thought before starting I might have made the working chassis spine longer such that the outer brake bracket could have been soldered to it. It's ended up with the inner clasps fixed to the central chassis spine but the outer ones are fixed to the cosmetic chassis floor.

Nearly done now; just the lamp irons to make and fix. Right at this moment my brain does not want to know how many but its five times nore than six!