Friday, August 10, 2018

Ivor is Going on Hiatus

So unfortunately work on Ivor is going on indefinite hiatus.

After doing the maths this morning I thought I'd go ahead and turn the wheels down to 20mm from their original 21mm diameter. If you remember when I originally turned the wheels I said it was hard work to get them down to 21mm, well getting down to 20mm seemed nigh on impossible. I continued to take it very very slowly but the work involved looked like being too much for my lathe without substantial extra work to the wheel (thinning the depth and reducing the width with a normal cutting tool first etc.) but with perseverance I got the first wheel to 20.5mm and so decided to split the difference and stop there. All (reasonably) good so far.

Having let the wheel cool (they get quite hot during profiling) I went to undo the wheel holding fixture only to find it was quite tight. I gently used a pair of pliers to start loosening it (I did this last time when it was too hot to touch) only for the threaded rod to snap in half! This means that the wheel holding fixture is now useless. More to the point I now have one 20.5mm diameter wheel and three 21mm diameter wheels so Ivor is going nowhere anytime soon.

I think the best thing to do is simply put the kit away for a while and focus on something else. This will give me time to rethink the wheels (I'll redo the 3D model for a smaller diameter and to make them easier to profile) and probably to save up to replace the wheel holding fixture. I could continue on with the body, but I think I'd just get frustrated knowing I couldn't fit it to a working chassis (plus it might need modifying to fit the gearbox etc.) so will probably turn to something else entirely. Not sure what yet, but I'll be sure to post when I've done something new.

2 comments:

  1. Sad to hear, but I know the feeling that you don't want to build the body with the chassis still to be sorted out. Even those of us who use bought in wheels feel like that, or at least I do!

    Good luck with sorting this in the future. It's always the "fun" projects that give unexpected grief isn't it!

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    1. I think I'm more frustrated by the "instructions" with the kit than the broken tools. If the suggested wheel size o 5'3" had been correct then I'd have turned a perfectly usable set of wheels of the right diameter on the first attempt which would have felt like a real achievement. Instead I've now broken a tool and have the cost of producing another set of wheels to factor in as well.

      On the plus side the kit was bought for fun and to give me something that would keep me going for a while to make sure I stayed active in the hobby while the little one was growing up. So this setback just means I keep working on it for longer, which isn't a bad thing. Hopefully I'll get it finished long before I would trust him near an OO layout anyway -- if I leave him unsupervised with the wooden railway set things get bashed about rather than pushed along at the moment.

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