Progress on the bogies hasn't been quick due in part to me not feeling at my best and then due to the instructions on the Kemilway bogies telling you to drill through the shock absorber castings with a 0.6mm drill.
This hasn't proved easy and 6 broken drill bits later, having only got through 4 of the 16 castings I abandoned that idea and took the safer route. This route had me drilling either end of the casting and fitting a stub of 0.6mm nickel rod in the bottom of the castings and then shortening the spring rod and inserting it into the top of the casting before solder them on.
This is a shot with them complete on one of the bogies and very nice they look too - they have a nice chunky feel to them now
.
I haven't made much progress on the Newbould versions beyond soldering up the springs and studying the shock absorber castings which already have a screw thread at the bottom - this is what I believe the 0.6mm rod represents on the Kemilway version.
The bogies trundle slowly forward, doing 4 at a time means a lot of repetitive tasks before appearing to get anywhere.
All the axles boxes have been soldered up and their face plates added etc. I test fit them in their respective bogies and then hit a snag.
These are the axle boxes - cruel close ups
And these are the frames
The axle boxes for the Kemilway bogies slide right to the top of the horn guides but the Newbould ones hit the curved cut out for the bearing. Struggling to understand this I moved on with other things and emailed Peter Dobson. Peter replied and explained that this was an anomaly that was due to him using a similar design to his Gresley bogies where the bearing cut out is to accommodate compensation. Whereas these particular bogies are not design to be compensated.
His suggested solution is as follows.
The suggestion is to cut of the area marked in red and either stick on or solder the axle box in place making them rigid. I am going to go further with the Kemilway bogies first to see if I can pick up any tips that might help to compensate these - albeit the Kemilway ones have a phosphor bronze spring plate for their compensation.
Having got as far as fitting the bolster to the bogie frames last night I hit another minor snag with the Newbould bogies. The Kemilway bogies are designed that you can have one fixed with a little play and one that pivot's from side to side. This is done via the three holes in the side of the bolster frames. The newbould bogies have the same holes so I attempted to duplicate the Kemilway set up and found that the fold down "wings" that have the three holes in the bogie frame are slightly too long and need a couple of mm taking of each side.
Now that I know on the rest that I have for other projects I will take it off while the bogies are still flat with a piercing saw - on the assembled bogies I had a to do it more crudely with the Dremel and a slitting disk. Thankfully it is tucked up out of the way and cannot be seen on the finished bogie.
Regarding that daigram 114 semi-open that appeared at the start of this thread, it appears to me unusual compared to most GN / East Coast / LNE digrams in as much as the walkway through the open section is in line with the side corridor past the compartments, i.e. it is at the side of the coach rather than dividing the seating into 2 + 1 or two-aside groups. Have I observed this feature of the model correctly? It is a sensible arrangement in some ways as it avoids the need to sacrifice a seating place in the coach to allow for the turn in walkway, and means that none of the pasengers have to sit looking at a door or down a corridor! It does of course mean that more pasengers have to shuffle past other seats in order to get to or from their own seat, but that's only the same the applies to seats in compartment anyway. I might use this seating arrangement in my own "GN flavour" 4mm coach as it saves a bit of work.......
Graeme
Most subjects, models and techniques covered in this thread are now listed in various categories on page1
Dec. 2018: Almost all images that disappeared from my own thread following loss of free remote hosting are now restored.
yes you have it right. The semi open sections are in reality half height compartments rather than the usual booth created from seating. I have painted the interiors for that one so I will take some more photos and post them for you.
Progress has been steady and I have to confess to getting a little bogged down with the bogies.
Not the best shot in the world but you can see where I had to hack out the ends of the bolster supports with the cutting disk.
This is what it looks like with the bolster assembled - nicely detailed.
Once I realised I wasn't making much progress with the bogies I decided to move onto the detailing of the NBR BG. I have a few more exterior photos now so I am just in the process of adding bump stops, grab handles etc.
What I have done is make up some interior details, the first is the pressure gauge? (not really sure of it's name) from some brass sprue, rod washers etc. The second is a very nice Sidelines brake standard casting which I have modified by creating a head mechanism that allows the handle to be side mounted instead of on the top. Once again scrap etch to the rescue - I based it on an outline drawing and the casting that Jim McGeown provides in his NBR Brake van kit.
Great work. I enjoy following your thread but I've started rationing that because of the time to download each page. So I have a plea to make. I've just checked the last couple of pictures and they come out at about 0.5Mb each. I know it's my problem living in the back end of beyond where we rely (seemingly) on boy scouts with semaphore flags instead of digital broadband. However, smaller images would allow us country yokels to access your work in a reasonable time without losing the detail.
When I post I use MS Office Picture Manger and resize my images to "Web Large" and they come out at about 100Kb and they're still full of detail..... and us yokels can still download them despite our slow broadband.
Just a pious plea, hoping that the crimble spirit extends to those of living in the far flung corners of the empire (near Salisbury).
I always resize to web large (1024x768) myself and up until the death of my laptop a few weeks ago I used MS Picture manager. However in the latest version of office which I get via my works home user program, MS picture manager is replaced by photo gallery.
Which to be honest is great, in that you can resize all your photos at once as opposed to one at a time in photo gallery but I hadn't checked the file sizes.
Upon checking files resized previously to 1024x768 using MS Picture Manager they are around the 200k mark but with photo gallery it is as you say around the 500k mark.
I think that this is very much to do with the current MS philosophy that everyone has superfast broadband and everything is streamed via the internet making anything on disk "old hat" in their book, which is so not true......
Edit - I have just installed Picasa and resized one of the images above to 1024 (from the original) and it comes out at 73k...... I guess that I will use Picasa in future.
