Quarry Hunslet: The Italian Job

So having put the main body of the cab together there are just a few detail parts to add it which revolve around the sliding doors in the rear wall. I'm going to model these doors closed as I'm not intending to have the loco permanently coupled to a coal truck.

According to both the instructions and photos of a number of Quarry Hunslet locomotives, the runners should be attached to the outside wall of the cab. The problem is that if I do that they will completely obscure the rivet detail you can see above the hole. Not only does it seem silly to hide the rivets, but I'm a little worried that the glue won't hold well as the rivets will keep the two pieces slightly apart. I could glue the runners to the inside of the rear wall so that the doors still fill the hole, but this wouldn't be at all prototypical.

I'm guessing the only real solution would be to file off the rivets fit the doors and then use rivet transfers on the runner, but this seems like an awful lot of work so I'm wondering if I've missed something obvious. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Quarry Hunslet: The Cab

So having a bit of time for modelling today, I've turned my attention to the last major piece of the superstructure; the cab. This is made of 9 pieces of etched brass, and there are two different ways of assembling it. Essentially each wall is made up of two layers. The inner layer is the full thickness of the brass sheet and doesn't have any detailing. The outer layer is half-etched to give rivet detail etc. You can either assemble the four inner layers first or you can assemble the four sides first. I choose to assemble the inner layers and roof first.

In the left hand photo you can see the main walls and roof assembled, the second photo shows the half-etched detail outer layers, and finally you can see the cab resting in place on the footplate. The hardest part was shaping the roof as I don't currently own anything to help me roll the brass. In the end I used the shaft of a screw driver with the brass on my leg to shape it, which worked reasonably well, but I'm going to look into a tool for doing this easier before I build another kit.

There is a little bit of detailing to do before the cab is complete, but that will come in the next post, mostly as I have an excellent title for the post!

Quarry Hunslet: Covering Up

It's been another busy week for work, including three days of being away from home (teaching a course at the Financial Times in London) so there hasn't been much time for modelling. I did manage almost an hour of modelling yesterday though, so I've moved the Quarry Hunslet on a little further.

When I fitted the cylinders I managed to do so without remembering to fit the etched covers so I had to dismantle the motion again to fit them. In theory the end of the cover should peek through the footplate and appear as a slopping surface either side of the smokebox.

My worry is that, if I did use the etched covers as intended, it would be difficult to remove the motion in the future (the instructions reckon you can slide the crossheads out of the slide bars but on mine there isn't enough clearance) so instead I've added the covers around the cylinders than used a small piece of plastruct (cut from a 0.3mm x 4.8mm strip and filed down slightly) to provide the part of the cover above the footplate, and I think this looks pretty effective from just about every angle. The gap you can see in the photo isn't as bad in real life as it looks, and is also filled with glue, so hopefully when painted will vanish completely.

While I had the motor out I made use of the access to the inside of the large whitemetal casting to add some more plastruct (again cut from a 0.3mm x 4.8mm strip) to act as the bottom of the boiler and to hide the inner workings. On the real thing this would be a curved surface, but I've gone for just angling the flat strip as a) that's easier and b) it leaves room for the motor etc. It's not perfect but there needed to be something there to fill the gap. Hopefully once everything is painted it should look better as the eye won't be drawn to the white surface but to the coloured saddle tank.

Quarry Hunslet: Completed Motion

Getting one of the crosshead pieces the wrong way around, and the slightly misshapen cylinder bracket where only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the problems I've had trying to finish the assembly of the moving parts in this kit. I've lost track of the number of times I've fully assembled and then fully stripped down and cleaned up the parts for both cylinder assemblies, but it definitely requires two digits to write down. This isn't to say there were any specific problems with the kit, more that as the first locomotive I've assembled there were probably a few things I simply overlooked or didn't think through fully. One thing I did learn though was a simple way of attaching the cylinders to the frames.

I'd already followed Paul's suggestion and filed down the ends of the mounting screws to give a thin point onto which the bolt could be slid with ease, but with the small amounts of clearance, and podgy fingers it was still difficult to get the bolt onto the screw. I tried placing the bolt with tweezers, but the slightest change in pressure and the bolt would be pinging off in a random direction; hopefully somewhere inside the frames so I could find it without spending an hour searching the carpet. In the end the solution was simple; blutack. Simply use a long piece of blutack to gently touch the bolt and then deposit it onto the pointed screw. Simple but it works every time!

I'm not sure I have many tips for anyone else who assembles this kit, other than to take it slowly, do one step at a time and check for smooth running at every stage. The one suggestion I would make concerns glueing the cylinder connecting rod to the crosshead. The instructions suggest doing this before attaching the cylinder to the locomotive by "clamp[ing] the assembly vertically, apply a small amount of [gel super]glue to the pin head only and allow the cross head to fall onto the pin head. Set aside for at least 1 Hr before handling". This sounds like sensible advise but I found that it could lead to the pin and crosshead not being perfectly aligned which would impact on the smooth movement. In the end I left glueing the pin until the cylinder was attached to the frames and the crossheads were running smoothly. At that point I applied a small blob of gel superglue to the pin and then slid it to meet the crosshead. After a few seconds, to allow the glue to start to grab, I then ran the locomotive for about 20 seconds to ensure that the pin and crosshead were perfectly aligned for smooth running and then left the glue to dry fully.

Anyway, enough words, here is what all this has been leading up to, the wonderful little locomotive shuttling backwards and forwards (a bit too fast but I do like to see the motion at speed) with all it's motion in place and moving.

Quarry Hunslet: Genuine People Personalities

When it comes to trains there is a long history of anthropomorphism. Everyone knows of Thomas the Tank Engine, where the trains are the main characters and definitely have human personalities, but there are plenty of similar books and TV programmes. My favourite is probably Ivor the Engine, who has a distinct personality without being given a human face. On occasions this even happens to preserved steam engines; some attempts being more successful than others! A couple of examples, from my childhood, were Stepney, seen at Sheffield Park station on the Bluebell Railway in 1984, and Percy and Thomas at Wansford on the Nene Valley Railway in 1986.

The idea of a locomotive having a face doesn't just imply that they have a human personality though. The worst criticism you'll find in a review of a new model locomotive will always be reserved for those cases where the face (i.e. the front) of the engine is wrongly modelled. If you get the face wrong, it doesn't matter how good the rest of the model is, you can almost guarantee it will attract a terrible review. So when building the Quarry Hunslet I wanted to ensure I got the face right.

The kit contains a nice whitemetal casting for the smokebox door, but this casting doesn't include the handles (usually referred to as a dart -- don't ask me why) which is actually a good thing as moulded handles usually look pretty terrible.

Fortunately I've played with fitting smokebox door handles in the past so I ordered a set from Eileen's Emporium. The main locating pin requires a 1mm hole so I went and drilled out the centre of the casting. Unfortunately I hadn't really thought through the fact that these handles are meant for standard gauge locmotives not narrow gauge.

I knew that the handles would be too long, but trimming them to length is easy, what I hadn't thought about was that the central boss would be way too large for the Quarry Hunslet. Once I'd drilled the hole and test fitted the main part the problem was obvious though. The central boss was unbelievably huge in comparison to the door. Fortunately all was not lost. I simply filled the hole I'd drilled, and then drilled a 0.45mm hole through the centre to take a small piece of brass wire onto which the handles threaded nicely. I also filed down the loops on the handles so that they sit closer to each other and the door.

The final step was to then glue the door to the front of the main casting. This took a couple of attempts as I found it difficult to position in easily as the hinge on the right makes it difficult to accurately judge if it is centred or not, although it does help with making sure it is the right way up! While it looks as if the door is very low to the footplate, this appears to be prototypically accurate and it does lead to a pleasing gap of roughly the same width around the sides and top of the door.

I would have taken a more recent photo of the door after removing the stray bit if blutack, but that would spoil the next post in the sequence as it would show you what I did next.

The issue of 4mm detailing parts, such as the smokebox handles, being mainly designed for standard gauge rather than narrow gauge models, does lead me to a question. Do any of you know of a supplier who offers narrow gauge detailing parts? I'm specifically thinking of steam whistles and the myriad of other brass fittings you usually find on the outside of a Quarry Hunslet, none of which are catered for in the kit I'm building. While I can cut down some parts, such as the door handles, to better suit the smaller size of narrow gauge locomotives, I don't think the same approach would work for the majority of fittings so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Quarry Hunslet: The Crossheads Are Not Symmetrical

After a nice chunk of annual leave I'm now back at work and so consequently modelling progress has slowed somewhat. It didn't help of course that I made a small mistake in assembling the crossheads which meant I had to dismantle them and start over.

The instructions for assembling the crossheads to the slide bars and connecting rod are fairly straightforward, but they make no mention of the fact that the crossheads are not symmetrical and that the orientation they are assembled in matters. Basically each crosshead consists of a back and front which are fixed together with a screw and nut capturing the slidebars and coupling rod. Fortunately I had noticed that the insides of the crossheads were not symmetrical; in the photo you can see that on the right of the hole the piece is inset. This is so that when the two halves are held together the coupling rod isn't locked tight and can rotate slightly around the screw. Putting all the parts together is, however, a fiddly business (you really need three hands, but blutack helps), and on one side I had managed to rotate one half of the crosshead through 180 degrees, so the cutout areas no longer aligned. Unfortunately I didn't notice, as there was still some movement in the coupling rod. I finished assembling the motion and connected it to the frame and wheels of the locomotive only for it to lock solid. The problem is that the misalignment caused the crosshead to run slightly out of line along the slidebars, and when the other end of the coupling rod was fixed to the wheel this misalignment was enough for it to lock. Fortunately this was only a test fitting so I hadn't trimmed down any of the screws, although disassembling to correct the problem still involved removing super glue and cleaning the parts.

I still don't have a fully assembled set of motion to show you, as while one side is now properly assembled and running the other side is still in pieces; it turned out that the slidebar brackets was slightly out of shape, which again led to the motion locking. I've now stripped this one back and filed and reshaped the bracket so it should run smoothly once re-assembled, but that will probably have to wait until tomorrow.

Local Wildlife

As I mentioned in the last post, with family visiting for the weekend there was no chance of any modelling, but I did manage a sneaky railway visit. We'd originally intended a bit of a walk, but the weather on Saturday wasn't great, so we switched to going to our local garden centre for brunch as well as plant shopping, and then a short walk, weather permitting. The weather permitted, so we drove five minutes down the road from the garden centre and parked at the side of the road. Literally 30 seconds after getting out of the car we heard the unmistakable sound of a steam whistle.

The railway, which at this point we could hear but not see, was the Kirkless Light Railway. This is a 15" gauge railway which was built along the track bed of the old Clayton West branch of the Penistone Line. The original branch line closed in 1983 and the first section of the narrow gauge railway opened in 1991. Now it runs for almost the entire length of the old branch line, around 3.5 miles and includes a 500 yard tunnel. Interestingly for a steam railway, every locomotive permanently at the railway was built specifically for it and so there is an rather odd mix.

We headed south-west from where we had parked and picked up the railway as it appears out of the tunnel heading towards the terminus at Shelley. We'd been walking by the railway for only 10 minutes or so before we again heard the distinctive sound of a steam engine. Unfortunately we weren't in the best place for taking photographs.

Fortunately all the engines are different colours so I can tell you that the train was being pulled by Badger an 0-6-4ST built at the railway in 1991. On the way back to the car we were treated to another train passing us, this time being pulled by the diesel engine Jay.

Given how close the line is to where we live I need to go back and have a proper look around, maybe on their gala weekend when there will be lots of trains running.