James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

[Manxman1831]

Google search for 'Great Central Railway crest' - copy suitably sized image (scale down if necessary) and add to a word document and print. That was how my dad did the ones for his Barnum, but does mean he had lots of spares. Just used the search myself and I think that the GCRS crest is the one that he used.

[jwealleans]

Seconded. That's how these were done:

[James Harrison]

I'd never thought of that! My previous thoughts were of scratching the crest into the glazing and smudging grey paint into it before painting over in white. I'll have a go at it when I come to start my next GC mainline rake.

[James Harrison]

Finishing touches to the Great Central 11B have been, well, finished....



I was waiting on the numberplates- these I had custom etched by Narrow Planet. They took about 7 weeks (probably because of the Christmas shutdown) but were well worth the wait. I also added some crushed coal to the tender and touched in the brass beading to the front spectacles using paint applied on a screwdriver.

[manna]

G'day gents

A lot of work went into that loco, it shows, congrats.

manna

[James Harrison]

Thanks. The challenge now of course is to maintain that standard. Well, I'll do my darnedest to do that.

[S.A.C. Martin]

Lovely model James, well done. Very nice work, and isn't it refreshing to see some pre-grouping stock and locos?

[James Harrison]

Lovely model James, well done. Very nice work, and isn't it refreshing to see some pre-grouping stock and locos?

Thank you! I've settled on modelling the 1923-25 period so eventually I'll have a collection of models in a myriad of liveries; full-bore GCR, GCR green/ LNER markings and early LNER green. I keep finding myself sorely tempted just to go for the late GC period (say 1920-22) but it would be an awful lot of work to repaint my existing stock into GC livery.

[James Harrison]

So, onto the next project. I've been quiet the last few weeks having decided to ring the changes and build an Airfix DH.88 'Comet' to break up the run of GC/ LNER stock going through the works. Lovely early 1930s racing aircraft, hateful hateful hateful little kit to build.

The project currently on my bench then is a McGowan Jersey Lily. I bought the body already built on Ebay so the main challenges are 1) to source a chassis, 2) to procure a tender and 3) to repaint it into 1924 hybrid livery.

The chassis I am currently working on and am close to getting it running reliably. I had a Hornby 'Patriot' chassis lying around so I removed the rear axle and the valve gear, and have had to cut away large chunks of it to get it to fit under the body. I've also bought a Hornby tender drive unit to power the thing. The new valve gear is an amalgam of Bachmann O4 cyclinders mated to the connecting rods from the Patriot, it's not quite a smooth runner yet but a little work and judicious filing and cutting should see it right.

[earlswood nob]

Good morning all

If the LMS chassis doesn't work, an A3 chassis front two axles give the right spacing for the C5.

Earlswood nob

[James Harrison]

I overlooked that

The Patriot wheels and motion are still giving problems, so this evening I threw in the towel and ordered a set of A1/A3/A4 wheels and the coupling rods for same (making sure I ordered the right rods for the wheels- there are I note two sets available, one for the later China-made models and one for the old Margate chassis).

I hate chassis hacking!

[James Harrison]

New wheels and con rods arrived last night; the axles were fitted with the large old brass bearings from the 'Patriot' (the axle diameters are identical) and just fitted neatly into the slots in the chassis.

The new con rods themselves were slightly too short; however I bought them more for the screws than for the rods themselves and was able to re-use the Patriot con rods, which are now neatly and securely screwed into the wheel bosses.

So this is now a bit of a Frankenstein's monster of a chassis; the block and con rods are from a Patriot; the driving wheels from an A3; the trailing wheels from McGowan Models; the cylinders from a Bachmann O4. Somehow it all runs sweetly.... I'm not questioning that!

[James Harrison]

Now for something completely different!

I was on that well-known internet auction site last night and bought a B5/3 (I think it's a whitemetal kit, possibly from the nucast range). It just barely fits into my chosen era (the first B5 was rebuilt with a raised and superheated 4'9'' boiler in early 1926, according to the relevant Green Bible), however I would like to at least consider the possibility of rebuilding the model into the earlier B5 appearance, with the boiler mounted 7'' lower and taller chimney and dome.

This obviously depends upon the size of the motor- if it completely fills the firebox already there is no hope, if there's 3mm clearance or so it's do-able. Has anyone done such a conversion before?

[earlswood nob]

Evenin' all

Millholme produced a white metal Fish Engine. It could be built as the later superheated version with the high boiler. The instructions suggested removal of metal from the smokebox saddle and firebox to make the early saturated version. There were alternative boiler mountings to produce the early version.
I think the early version was such a beautiful engine that I had to build mine that way. 6070 lasted until 1936 before it was rebuilt.
The B5 would also be the basis for the later version of the B9 as they were all rebuilt with a B5 type boiler before 1930. I had bought a cheap Kays O4 to provide the basis for a B9 before realising that they didn't last past the twenties with such a boiler.
PM me tomorrow if you want a copy of the instructions.

Earlswood nob

PS I shall be sober in the morning said W.S.Churchill

[James Harrison]

For the last month I've been quietly working away at my latest project- a McGowan Models Jersey Lily, which I bought as a pre-built body on Ebay.

The first thing to do was to introduce the Patriot chassis to the body and to make notes of where to cut. There was a fairly large lump to remove from the front of the chassis and another hefty piece to remove from the back, so it was out with the dremel and, over the course of a few evenings, these areas were cut away and discarded. I now had a chassis block that would fit, neatly, into the body.

I was then able to reinstate the driving wheels and look to the valvegear.

This was the point when the project started going in large, slow and sadly pointless circles.

The valvegear on the Hornby chassis is screwed into the centre driving wheels and merely push-fit into the front and rear driving wheels. In this instance I had removed the rear axle, so the connecting rods pretty quickly worked loose and fell away. When the cylinders were added I also found that the coupling rods fouled the crossheads and that the whole model could just lock up tight.

My solution to this was threefold; firstly the crosshead brackets were removed from the Bachmann cylinders and replaced with those from the Hornby Patriot; then the connecting rods were swapped over from the Bachman Robinson type to the Hornby Patriot type. This loosened things up a bit but everything was still apt to bind up quickly. So secondly the cylinders were removed from the model, their tiebar cut through and a new tiebar made up of plastic sheet to set the cylinders 1.5mm further apart. This is wider than scale but not by so much as to appear ridiculous. When tested this also improved reliablity to the point that the only problem was the coupling rods dropping out of the leading axle. So I bought a set of Hornby A1/A3/A4 driving wheels and the matching coupling rods for same, which screw into all three axles. I replaced the driving wheels entirely, retained the original coupling rods and replaced the pins in the end with screws. The result is a very sweet-running chassis; we got there in the end!

Having gotten it all to run, I then had to remove the wheels and valvegear as I had decided to permanently fix the chassis onto the body.

The stage I am now at, then, is returnig the body from a 1930s/ 1940s appearance to how the locomotive appeared in the 1920s. This largely consists of removing the snifting valve and replacing the safety valves.