A Whole Brass Band

I didn't think I'd have anything to write about today, because I've packed my modelling stuff away for the weekend as we are having family to stay. Fortunately the post brought something interesting for me to talk about.

Some of you may remember that one of the things that grabbed my attention at Barrow Hill last September was the Model Electronic Railway Group (MERG) stand. Having signed up not long after, I received my first journal just before Christmas and found it a fascinating read. While many if not most of the members have far more electronics knowledge than I do, I did notice a lack of articles around using the Arduino to control various aspects of a model railway, something I've been playing with for a while, and so I thought I'd write and submit an article.

In the end I submitted two articles both of which were accepted, and both of which appeared in the journal that arrived with today’s post. The first article explains how I produced the flickering flame effect for the mill on Jerusalem, which I've talked about on this blog before. The second, longer, article focused on how you would go from a prototype using a full Arduino to a cheaper standalone circuit which is probably of more general use (while this was a new article it drew heavily on what I wrote on one of my other blogs, here and here).

Sorry for this being a bit of a trumpet blowing post, normal service will resume after the weekend.

Quarry Hunslet: Joined Up Motion

So having taken the frames apart, cleaned them, put them back together and discovered part of the problem was the frames rubbing on the rolling road, I now have the first part of the motion fully assembled. This involved gluing the cranks onto the axles, threading the bushes onto the crank pins and then the coupling rod. On the rear axle this is currently all held in place by a small bolt (until the rest of the motion is added), while on the front axle the screw has been cut to length and the bush permanently secured in place. There were a few worrying moments where things didn't seem to want to run smoothly, but with a little patience it all seems to be working nicely.

As you can see I decided to paint the cranks before assembly, although some of the paint has clearly rubbed off as I assembled the motion. Touching it up should be easy though once I've assembled the rest of it, and if not a little weathering powder should blend things together nicely.

Quarry Hunslet: Working Brakes

Okay, so there is a slim chance that not all the problems I had with the frames yesterday were down to not putting them together straight to start with (although that was definitely a problem).

This morning I spent quite a while making sure they were nicely aligned both to the footplate and against the wheels before gluing them back together. Once the glue had set, I placed everything back on the rolling rode, and while I got some movement, it wasn't fluid and smooth, but the clearances appeared perfectly fine. On closer inspection I realised that the problem had nothing to do with the clearance between the frames and cranks, this time at least, but that the brake detail on the frames was pressing against one of the rollers which was causing the roller to stick which in turn was stopping the wheel from smoothly turning; in other words it was acting as a brake!

Moving the whole thing off the rolling road and onto the track and it moves nicely. Now I just have to put the coupling rods and bushes back on and hopefully that will be the first part of the motion assembled and working.

Quarry Hunslet: Is This Progress?

So yesterday, with no small amount of trepidation, I set about assembling the motion of the Quarry Hunslet kit I'm building from this scary looking selection of parts. It wasn't entirely a success, but I will say it wasn't exactly disastrous either.

The first step is to add the cranks to one side of the motor unit using the coupling rod and brass bushes to correctly align them with the small nuts used to hold the crank and bushes in place for testing. I managed this without any problems and even managed to glue the cranks in place without gluing anything solid that shouldn't have been. Before trimming the front screw and permanently affixing the bush to the crank I thought it wise to check for smooth running with the frames in place, as there is very little clearance between the frames and the cranks.

Unfortunately this is where things started to go wrong. I set everything up on a DCCconcepts rolling road (I bought this when I first got back into railway modelling last year to help service the OO gauge models that had been stored for so long), so I could carefully watch the movement. I gently applied some power and nothing moved. It turned out that I hadn't got the frame perfectly positioned when I built the chassis and while there was enough room for the front crank to rotate the back one was stuck. I did try gently sanding the back of the crank down a little (not easy given it was glued to the wheel), but in the end the only course of action was to disassemble the chassis to realign the frames correctly.

Fortunately having used super glue instead of solder to assemble the chassis it was fairly easy to break the parts down again. Cleaning the old glue off though would have been a nightmare, but fortunately lunchtime yesterday saw the post arrive, which included a package from Eileen's Emporium. The order had been placed for something else entirely (which I'll come back to in a later post), but on a whim I'd added a fibreglass pen to the order, and this made cleaning up the parts really easy.

I have done a little more work since cleaning up the frames (cranks attached to both sides now), but I'll wait to show you the motion in action until I've got the frames back together and everything working. Hopefully that might be later today but it depends how things go.

A Scary Story

If Stephen King were ever to write a story involving a model railway, I'm fairly certain that he'd use a set of parts like these to drive his protagonist insane:

Quarry Hunslet: Water in, Smoke Out

Only a short update today as there are lots of other things which need achieving this week as well as railway modelling. While the next step, according to the instructions, is to assemble the motion I decided to carry on with the body instead; for a good reason which I'll come back to later.

While the majority of the body above the footplate (ignoring the cab sides) is a single whitemetal casting, there are quite a few detail parts to fit. Today I've concentrated on the water filler cap and the chimney. As with the other parts I've used so far neither of these required much in the way of cleaning before being added, but I did decided to do some work on the chimney. The chimney is a solid cast piece, and while the profile looks good, the very flat top doesn't. This is easy to fix though by simply drilling down into the top. I started with a 1mm drill and then widened out the pilot hole to 1.5mm, down to a depth of about 4mm. This is plenty deep enough to give the impression of a hollow chimney, while making sure the cast piece retains it's strength.

As you can see both castings fit onto the top of a rounded surface, and gluing them into the correct position can be quite frustrating. The water filler cap had a peg on the bottom so I drilled a small dimple into which it could sit and that should be enough to keep it in place. With the chimney I felt that not only was it going to be difficult to position, but that it would be very susceptible to being knocked off. To both help position it, and give it a little extra strength, I drilled matching holes into both the chimney and the top of the smoke box and joined the parts together with some 0.417mm brass wire. There is still some work to do as the joins between both parts could do with filling, but it really is beginning to look the part now.

So with the update out of the way, I'm going to ask for some advice. The main reason I didn't start on the motion today is because I'm unsure how I'm going to paint it. I'm quite happy to leave the coupling rods unpainted, as in reality they are often left unpainted (I might tone down the shine with a bit of weathering powders but other than that...), but the problem is the cranks. On nearly every photo of every Quarry Hunslet they are painted red to match the buffer beams. This sounds like a good idea as they should look good spinning around. The problem then, is at what stage should I paint them? I could paint them before assembly, but the chances are some of the paint would rub off. If I wait until the model is assembled then getting to them, past the coupling rods, will be difficult.

In general the consensus seems to be to fully assemble any model, and then completely dismantle the motion in order to paint the parts. While this might sound reasonable, looking at the instructions for this kit, at the very least the cranks are going to be glued to the axles, and the coupling rods glued to the front cranks, making it impossible to fully dismantle for painting. So any thoughts/suggestions on the best way to proceed?

Quarry Hunslet: Building the Main Frame

I know I said I wasn't going to rush the build of this model, but the combination of a well thought out kit and annual leave means that it's coming along nicely and today saw the assembly of the main frame.

All but one of the parts (the one piece saddle tank, smoke box, and firebox casting) are from the etched nickel silver fret and such is the quality of the kit that they required almost no tidying up before assembly. The majority of the time was taken up with cutting slots in the front and rear buffer beams to allow me to fit couplings. These had to be carefully measured and then I drilled the slots out by hand using a 0.55mm drill bit in a pin vice. Given the thickness of the nickel silver this took me well over an hour, but it was time well spent as I will want to couple the loco to wagons and carriages and there is no way I could have accurately cut the slots after assembly.

For me at least, one of the selling points of this kit is that it can be assembled using super glue rather than having to be soldered together. I'm sure that soldering would produce a stronger frame, but while I'm happy to solder wires together the idea of soldering metal at right angles scares me, possibly more than the thought of assembling the valve gear. So for this build at least, I'm going to stick to super glue and concentrate on getting a free running model. I can't be bothered with doing a video for today's post, but the added weight of the frames and the whitemetal casting have definitely improved the running of the motor unit, and it really is starting to look like a steam locomotive now.

According to the instructions next up is assembling the motion, and in comparison to the four steps in the instructions I completed today, there are 11 stages to assembling the motion so it might take a while before I have anything new to blog about.