DLT's SR Locos - Beattie WT Westward Kit

[number6]

Pickups can be the single most frustrating element of building chassis - I can often obsess about the noise they can make - a sort of soft scraping sound sometimes which can be confused with gearbox noise and definitely the break effect you describe when they bare too hard on the wheels. So when looking for good running qualities I've learnt to check or redo pickups first rather than pulling apart the drive or coupling rods. 

 

Helps having a couple of locos you've built to refer to: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

[Tony Teague]

Amazing that such a small change of specification would make such a significant difference to performance.

[DLT]

The Beattie is fresh from a good long run on my Group's somewhat battle-scarred testrack last night.  So called because if it will run on that, it will run on anything!

[DLT]

Here's the complete (I hope) chassis.

 

When I say "complete", it still needs wheel balance weights adding, and some paint here and there.

[DLT]

Usual problem with a whitemetal smokebox; some lovely fine rivet detail, but moulding issues.  Not so much a moulding line, but a massive step all the way round, where the mould was mismatched.

Nothing for it but to file it all off and wrap it.  A 10mm wide strip of 10thou brass, riveted along each side with my Metalsmiths Riveter.  Then rolled around decreasing diameters of rod, and rolled outwards again at the base.  A good amount of trial and error produces approximately the right shape.  This is then Araldited on, manipulated into place by hand and held with a clamp while it sets.

 

 

 

Do not overtighten the clamp, you will squash the casting.  Just tight enough to hold it.

The new rivets are slightly bigger, but I think its ok.

Edited August 2 by DLT

[DLT]

Been quiet for a while, because I'm doing all the fiddly bits.  Boiler fittings, injector pipework, clack valves, handrails etc.

[DLT]

One-piece handrails are another fiddly job, a large amount of trial and error, but you get there in the end.

Very long steam pipes to the injectors, but shorter to the clack-valves.  All made from copper wire.

The valves themselves are whitemetal from the kit, and really rather nice.

 

Lamp-irons on the bunker are thin brass strip (about 0.8mm)  bent and inserted through holes and soldered from behind.  Good idea to hold them against a spacer while soldering.

They are not quite the right pattern, but close enough I think.

 

 

 

The other bits are the fire-iron rack, again bent up from narrow strip and soldered on.

[DLT]

There'[s a very good reason why all this detail fitting is done to the bunker before fitting it to the loco.  Due to the tiny size of the bunker I wont be able to get a soldering iron in, and thus I will have to araldite it together anyway.   This work would be impossible once fitted, and aralditing means no risk of re-melting all that solder.

Err, does that make sense?

[Blandford1969]

I love reading your builds as there is always something like doing the lamp irons that gives ideas on how to get things built more easily. Thank you. 

[Arun Sharma]

Whilst not wholly relevant to these 4mm builds, the Marsh C3  I designed is currenly also being designed and built in 7mm scale - It isn't a straightforward scaling up of my 4mm design though that can work with some of the lost wax castings. The 7mm model is etched from thicker metal so that affects the etch width of fold lines as well as margins for holes , half etched lines to position frame spacers and so on.

 

The other major visible difference is that the C3 has frame extensions which act effectively as an inner splasher. Because 7mm FS is closer to 4mm EM in proportion rather than 16.5mm 00 scale, the 4mm kit has to have an additional compromise built in to widen the firebox and smokebox saddle to somewhere approaching prototypical visual appearance by extending them sideways outside the frames and thus absorbing part of the first and third driving wheel splasher. This compromise is not required [well, perhaps only a little] in 7mm [or in 4mm EM/P4 for that matter].

 

Anyway, this is what the 7mm footplate/cab/chassis looks like at the moment:

 

The smokebox, boiler, firebox, backhead and smokebox saddle are 3D printed masters which are currently being cast in polyester resin. Whilst waiting for them, the next stage is to attach the various steps, splasher tops and sandboxes etc to the footplate.

Edited August 17 by Arun Sharma

[DLT]

At last reached the painting stage with the Beattie.  The bunker rear will be Araldited on after the first coat of black is applied, as its too small to paint internally.

The primer shows up any blemishes, there's a bit of filler needed on the boiler barrel.

Vaccuum pipes are PDK brass castings replacing the awful whitemetal parts in the kit.  As expected, the very vulnerable whitemetal guard-irons on the rear buffer beam eventually broke off (well, one broke and the other was snipped) and were replaced with brass.

 

 

Edited September 4 by DLT

[Arun Sharma]

The 7mm Marsh C3 is just waiting for the return of its polyester resin backhead-smokebox [and inbetween bits] from CMA-CSL but the chassis is complete with rods mounted - and they worked first time without any tweaking with hole enlargement!

 

The tender as befits a C3 engine in early BR days is from a long scrapped B2X engine.

 

 

Edited September 4 by Arun Sharma

[30368]

2 hours ago, DLT said:

At last reached the painting stage with the Beattie. 

 

Lovely job DLT - such an interesting prototype with a very, very long history.

 

Kind regards,

 

30368