Nick Mitchell

I had exactly the same conundrum. Followed @Nigelcliffe's advice and identified the pads as follows:

You'll enjoy lining the tender, Jerry...

Congratulations! Hopefully you'll be winning with an LMS Crab next year...

5702 Progress Report #9 - Finished So... after the burning of copious quantities of midnight oil (even better than Welsh steam coal), 5702 Colossus finally made it to York only a year behind schedule but not without drama! Having placed the loco on the track before the Derby Expo opened, all we got was a nasty smell and a sinking feeling. The tender was very hot to the touch, and I'm glad I replaced the plastic Farish one with a lovely metal kit! A convenient windowsill became my impromptu workbench for 20 mins. I wonder when the last time a Jubilee was repaired in an LMS facility at Derby? Anyway, on opening up the tender, this is what I found: One tantalum had evidently had a tantrum, which explained the smell and lack of movement. Fortunately, it had done no damage to the decoder or any of the other components - and being the end one of the block of four capacitors wired in parallel, I was able to simply snip the electrical connection to just that one, and the loco could rapidly enter service. I'm generally pleased with how the loco has turned out. Running is silky smooth, but tractive effort is not everything I'd hoped - something I can't test properly at home. Although I have filled all available space in the body with lead (total weight is 75g ) I suspect the balance is not quite right yet. My PECO-based Jubilee (that will become 45604 Ceylon) weighs less in total but seems more sure-footed. Nonetheless, Colossus looked very much at home drifting up and down the centre roads of York station all day, generally improving the ambience of the place and demonstrating how much prettier Jubilees are than A4s... A day that could have been a complete disaster (from 5702's perspective) ended in triumph when it was awarded the Groves trophy. From every other perspective, Expo 2024 was a fantastic day, and I'd like to add my thanks to the organisers, exhibitors and everybody else who helped make it so successful.

"As is" is now weathered, and yes, we'll both be taking a detour off the Central Division (hopefully via the coaling stage!) to be at Derby:

5702 Progress Report #8 Thankyou Simon - as usual you are right when it comes to my Jubilee-related happiness! Below is my second attempt at lining the tender. Once again it is done with Fox transfer lining, with overlapping yellow and black stripes applied separately and the black edges painted in. I think the result is probably finer than I could have achieved with any other method, but what a tedious process it has been! Across both sides, steps, frames and rear panel of the tender, I counted 110 separate pieces of lining transfer. The loco steps and cylinders have been lined using the same method... I think I need to build (or rather finish) a couple of unlined black locos to get my sanity back. No, wait... Thankyou also to whoever was behind the 3D printed Fowler axle-boxes now in the Association shop. They're brilliant. (Imagine if I'd finished off this tender 15 years ago when I first built it for an as-yet unfinished 4F and had to put Stanier axle-boxes on it??? Poor Simon might have been compelled to ask me how I could sleep at night! There is a good reason why things take me so long!) In case you're wondering, the white lump in the coal space is a cover for the decoder which sticks up above the motor. It will be covered on coal.

5702 Progress Report #7 A year ago, this Farish Jubilee "conversion" was almost completed. I had a few details to add, and the tender to paint and line. By the end of the summer (having taken time away from the Jubilee to complete my Fowler 2-6-4T), the nameplates I'd ordered still hadn't materialised, and I'd put the lining on the tender all wrong. However, with the long-awaited arrival of the "Colossus" nameplates recently, my mojo for this model has finally returned. I doubt I've got time to get it across the finish line in time to bring it to Derby, but at least progress has resumed. In no particular order, various details have been tackled: Etched footsteps (courtesy of Nigel H) to replace the chunky plastic ones I carved off the loco last year. The new ones match the ones that are part of the Raithby tender. Injectors fabricated and fitted behind the cab steps on each side. Rear sandboxes filed from brass and fitted between the rear pairs of driving wheels, with associated pipes "Forward" sand delivery pipes added to the front two pairs of driving wheels. Moulded-on smokebox door fastening replaced with a fabricated version Handrails replaced with finer versions This is the exhaust steam injector ready to be fitted under the fireman's side of the cab. It is much simplified from the real thing, but is the right overall shape and will hopefully give a reasonable impression filling the space in the shadows under the cab. It was soldered together from bits of rod, tube and a few washers. Here's the component fitted in place. It is glued to the loco body, as are the cab footsteps. I had to cut back the exhaust steam supply pipe quite drastically to allow the body and chassis to come apart. You can also see one of the rear sandboxes soldered to the frames in the picture below: As it came, the drag-beam at the rear of the cab was moulded very chunkily. If I'd attached the footsteps to the cab underside butting up to this chunky beam, it would have made them significantly too far forwards, and increased the gap between the loco and tender footsteps. I thought about cutting a notch in the top of the steps but instead decided to chamfer the plastic beam so that it appears prototypically thin at the edge, as can be seen in the picture above. Below is the underside of the cab, with both injectors fitted. although the edges are hidden, the original thickness of the centre section of the beam can be seen. Below is the live steam injector as it appears from a more conventional viewpoint. Again, it is much simplified, but gives the general idea: As well as the injector and sand pipes, the photo below shows how I've filled in the enormous holes vacated by the plastic handrail knobs with Milliput, and re-drilled them as close to their centres as I could get with a 0.3mm drill. I made an indentation with a scriber to get the drill started. Etched handrail knobs were soldered to 8 thou. plain guitar string in place on the loco - this was an easy way to make sure the knobs were all straight and in the right location. The photo below shows a sacrificial wooden tool (made from a coffee stirrer) to space the joint off the body to make sure it didn't get accidentally melted and to a certain extent protect it from flux. The handrail was then removed for painting. The smokebox handrail was done in the same way, and is shown below fitted in place, along with the replacement dart fastening. This latter was also made from handrail knobs, with the stems cut to length and carefully filed round with a very fine file. The front footsteps are also fitted in this picture. I thinned the edge of the front buffer beam in the same way as the rear drag beam before gluing the steps in place. I also added an etched coupling hook. I still need to fit lamp irons and make a vacuum hose for the front end. And there's the small matter of the missing bogie... By way of comparison, below are the old and new handrails - hopefully worth the effort? I touched in the white patches of Milliput as best I could using neat Humbrol gloss Crimson with a tiny drop of satin black to try and match the colour on the boiler. I'm pleasantly surprised by the result - at least from this angle! Similarly, satin black was used on the smokebox While I had the lid off the crimson paint, I put a code on the footstep backing plates in anticipation of lining them. The cylinders will also be crimson, but i want to prime them properly first, as I suspect they are more likely to be rubbed with fingers, being more exposed. Finally (for now) is the handrail re-fitted and the cylinder primed (brush painted with 2-pack etching primer). Meanwhile the tender lining is being re-worked. There is still a way to go...

When you do connect everything up, if you're feeling nervous you can separate the stay-alive pack from the loco with fairly long wires, and have it trailing behind in a (plastic bodied) wagon for testing. Then if you have got something wrong and it blows up, you won't damage your loco :)

I haven't posted much about anything here for ages - mostly because I haven't been doing much of anything. However, after leaving it to languish for a year, I recently revisited the L&Y-built Rectank. Having solved most of the problems with this model (at least in theory) I found myself contemplating the lovely Stephen Harris designed bogies: The one problem I had left un-solved was how to fix them to the wagon with the brass drive bushes that they were designed for. The hole in the bush is a nice fit over a 12BA bolt, so I needed to contrive a means of connecting one of these with the underframe. With an appropriately sized drill bit twiddled by hand, and a lot of care, i opened out the hole in the wagon bolster to accommodate a 12BA nut: The nut was screwed onto the end of a cocktail stick and soldered in place. The cocktail stick both prevented solder entering the threads, and acted as a handle to make sure the nut was at the correct height and also that the bolt would end up perpendicular to the chassis. Because the brass bush is quite chunky, it allows a lot of vertical movement of the bogie. I added some bolsters from Nickel Silver rod for the top of the bogie to rest on, and set the ride height of the wagon appropriately. With the bush screwed up tight, there is still just enough clearance for the bogie to rock fore and aft... almost as though it was designed to be the perfect size and not requiring further washers/packing. On the track, I found that the wheel flanges were just rubbing against the chassis cross members nearest the bogies. in the picture below, which shows one bogie bolted in place, you can see where I had to file notches in the cross member to guarantee free movement: The wagon can be seen below finally sitting on its bogies. It rides very nicely. Amazingly, considering the passage of time, the little collars I'd made to centre the buffers in their over-sized holes were still in the Pringles lid on my workbench where I'd left them, and I was able to fit the buffers and three remaining brackets for the screw jacks as I'd previously worked out. But what about the screw jacks themselves? The etched fret contains very tiny hand-wheels, which looked as though they would be useable. I found some 16BA bolts which, incredibly, were able to be screwed into the holes in the brackets! Perfect. In my watchmaker's lathe, I turned down the bolt head in both diameter and thickness (removing the slot) to represent the feet, and at the other end formed a 0.3mm diameter spigot on which the etched handwheel could be fitted. Here the handwheel is loosely placed to test the fit: These are really small! Obviously the screws had to be fitted before the handwheels could be soldered in place, which was a rather ticklish operation. I ended up managing to place the handwheels on their spigots with tweezers, then gently wedging them in place with bits of wooden coffee stirrers while I added solder from underneath and behind. They seem to have turned out okay: The next parts I added were the tool boxes, which had rivets to punch out before folding up. I had to guess as to the designers intention regarding how to fit these. In some photos, it looks like they are resting on a planked floor, but the kit has no provision for this. Either the top or bottom (depending which way up you put it) of the box has little protrusions - wings? After trying it every which way, the position that looked most plausible to me was to hang the toolbox by its wings from the cross-girders. If need be, I can slide some plasticard "planks" into the small gap between the bottom of the box and the tie rods. Thee are more screw jacks in the centre of the wagon. The kit provides brackets for these, which fold up and locate in half-etched grooves in the bottom of the girders. I used the left-over lengths of the 16BA bolts for the screws, and filed them flush with the bottom of the queen posts. This still leaves them nearer the rails than the feet of the buffer-beam screw jacks. I'm undecided about soldering feet on these screws, which I would make from etched crankpin cap washers. Without shining a light under the wagon, they are almost impossible to see, and I'm worried about clearances. I've been adding the securing rings (some in the "up" position ready to secure a load) with two still to go. The photo below is where I'm up to. I need to add some planking to the sloping ends, which I will do with plastic strips, and also do something about couplings. i think I'll get away with soldering bearing tubes for Electra couplings to the underside of the buffer beams. Having fussed over the screw jacks, I have looked a pictures of wagons in railway company service decades after the war (as opposed to those which remained with the MoD), at least some of them seem to have had the jacks and associated brackets removed. Did this apply to all of them? I'm wondering now how to finish the wagon in c.1950 condition. I've seen some photos of these wagons with chunky bolsters fitted, and I was thinking along those lines - painting it LMS grey, and having a load like old rails chained to it. I'm not planning to remove any of the detail I have added (besides the time it took, they give the wagon most of its character) but would that leave me with an implausible model?

I use one of these for locos: https://www.plazajapan.com/4957265125220/ No idea about current shipping costs from Japan. You can buy the identical item in the UK with a Gaugemaster sticker on it for 4 times the price: https://www.gaugemasterretail.com/gaugemaster-gm47.html Gaugemaster also do a version of the Minitrix brush @Caley Jim mentioned: https://www.gaugemasterretail.com/gaugemaster-gm59.html I also use an unpowered version of the Japanese cleaner for stock: https://www.plazajapan.com/4957265125237/ I don't suppose it would be too difficult to make something similar to this. Nick.

Traditionally I have used Precision 2-pack etching primer, sprayed from a single action airbrush, and following Ian Rathbone's advice of thinning it with cellulose. Like the little girl with the curl, when its good, its very very good, but when its bad it's horrid! Recently I tried UPOL Acid8 from a spray can (bought in Halfords), and am happy with the results. I'm not convinced it is quite as smooth as the Precision primer at its best, and spraying from a can always feels more fraught somehow - especially outside when the wind always seems to know what I'm about to do and comes from nowhere!!

Hi Angus, I acquired mine privately from @CF MRC many moons ago. My understanding is that the N Brass ones are a slightly larger scale.

4' 8 1⁄2" gauge is where it's at! And for anyone else crazy enough thinking about modelling it in 2mm scale (oh, yes he is!!!) - I'm oiling round some Joy valve gear. This is the view in the other direction:

Sorry, @65179! You're absolutely correct about 18" - a typo I'm afraid.

There's not been a lot happening on my workbench of late, however back in the summer I was persuaded to start building a OO gauge loco for my eldest son as a side project. The loco he asked me to build is an LNWR 18" goods (a.k.a. Cauliflower) from the London Road Models kit. It occurred to me that I had been keeping a set of "shot down" etches for this self-same kit in the "too hard" section of my gloat box for over a decade... and being in a position where I have five almost finished (bar final details and painting) locos sitting around, but none at the head-scratching stage, I thought it might finally be time to dig it out. Having gone mad some time ago, I decided it would be a good idea to try and build the same loco in two different scales. At the same time. This might not be as crazy as it sounds? Despite the old adage "never model a model", I've often looked at 4mm models to get a 3-dimensional sense of the details when building a 2mm model that drawings and photographs can't always convey. My idea is to build the 4mm model (which must surely be easier) as a learning exercise for putting together the 2mm version. Here are the etches, side by side for comparison. The brass for the 2mm version is 8 thou, which is more than half the thickness of the 4mm version, which has already brought some challenges in getting things to fit. I started with what I thought would be the most tricky bit, which is the boiler. As you can see above, the 4mm kit comes with the boiler cut out and ready-rolled, just requiring the seam along the bottom soldering. I imagined I would need to use a length of brass tube for the 2mm boiler, with the etch perhaps as an overlay, but I was able to roll it up and form the firebox, and it seemed to be okay! The comparison photos of the boilers above looked odd until I realised the 4mm version was designed to be paired with a Belpaire firebox. Unfortunately the rest of the kit was for a round-top firebox (like the 2mm version), but John at LRM was able to quickly furnish me with a replacement. The second-most tricky part looked to be the characteristic wavy footplate. Here the kit provides a fold-up frame to attach the valances to the footplate and keep everything straight. The photo below is the 4mm version, with red marks where I've needed to filed the footplate back to accommodate OO gauge wheels. I had the opposite problem on the 2mm version, where the width over the outside of the wheels was too great to fit between the splashers. I'm trying to progress the two locos step by step. Here they are with the boilers (4mm one with firebox this time!) places inexplicably back-to-front on the footplates. After 20 years, I'm starting to realise just how small 2mm scale is!!! I deviated from the instructions in the order of construction, adding the cab sides to the footplate, but the cab front to the firebox. There is a nice half-etched line in the cab front showing where the firebox should fit, and it felt much easier to fit the firebox to this line with the cab front flat on the bench. I could then line the cab front up with the sides, and file the firebox sides to be a nice fit to the footplate before fixing the boiler/firebox unit in place. While I was working on this on the 4mm version, the 2mm boiler decided to burst apart at the seam... Below you can see the boiler repaired, with the beginnings of the smokebox in place, and the footplate ready to accept it. As mentioned above, it was necessary to move the splashers out in order to accommodate the 2mm wheels. After soldering the cab side sheets in place (there were slots in the footplate to locate it), I filed the footplate away right up to the inside of the side sheets, and measured the gap. I opened the gaps for the splashers to match this dimension. When it came to adding the two layers smokebox wrapper, the 4mm version was much easier. There are holes for handrails (or something!) in the boiler and the wrappers, so I could thread a small broken drill through these to get the layers perfectly lined up. The inner wrapper goes flush to the front of the boiler "tube", then the smokebox front is soldered on, with the outer wrapper overlapping. On the 2mm version, because the metal is proportionally thicker, the holes in the wrappers didn't line up, and I had to adjust them with a broach. You can see in the photo below how the hole has become more of a slot so that a 0.3mm drill could pass from one side of the smokebox to the other. The other side (below) is a similar mess. I used a larger drill down the hole where the chimney will fit to keep everything lined up in the other dimension. With the boiler unit fixed in place on the footplate, it is starting to take on the basic shape of the loco... lots of cleaning up to do however... Below is the view from below. I soldered a 14BA nut onto the footplate before fixing the smokebox saddle in place: Here's the 4mm version built up to the same state. It is absolutely HUGE! Before I go any further with the loco body, I need to work out the chassis arrangements in such a way as the top and bottom will fit together. The firebox is roughly the same width as a standard set of 2mm frames, so I'm thinking about using the kit frames, with an inner layer added to form a gear tower. Below is a sketch of how things could be laid out, driving on the rear axle, with the worm and first stage reduction gear hidden in the firebox/ashpan. The cab has a false floor. Raising it a fraction should clear the gear on the rear axle. The universal joint housing will fit between the cab inside splashers, and should be reasonably discreet. The 4mm kit comes with a set of lovely castings, which are handy because I can measure them and halve the dimensions ready for making my own...