Backwoods Steam Crane wheelsets, and an antique

I have done a little more work recently on the Backwoods Steam Crane which I started (like most things) many years ago. The kit is based on a split frame chassis of which I made a particularly poor job and which never ran properly, mainly because the wheels weren't square on the track and it had a distinct wobble. It also had fairly small 8mm drivers which I thought looked a bit too small for what is a fairly large vehicle - like the oil-electric, it's getting on for OO loading gauge. I've decided to replace the drivers with Slater's 10.5mm wagon wheels (which happen to be what's used in many of the early Backwoods 009 loco kits). One of the first tasks is stripping the not-very-straight frames and removing the old bearings. I think one of the causes of the poor running and lopsidedness was that I'd opened out the bearing holes too far and consequently the bearings were not central in their holes.

Here the frame has been stripped, the new wheels are ready with their worm gear
and the blanks for the new bearings lurk in the background

I've made up a new set of bearings as it was quicker than ordering some, and I get the nice chunky components I want. The bearing holes have been cleaned up and the outside of the new bearings turned to about 0.2mm oversize so I can get a nice central fit. They were then carefully broached (yes, I need to invest in a 2.0mm reamer) to be a slightly tight fit on the axles - they can be opened up slightly when everything is nice and square.

The new bearings sitting on their axles - the worm gear is on the remains of
the old split axle insulating muff

The bodywork hasn't had much attention for a while, but to be honest most of it is finished with the exception of odd details and the chain work for the jib.

The body with the floor and gearbox unit. Yes, I do need to clean up some solder...

I also came across this while rummaging about in the stock box recently, and thought it deserved to see the light of day for the first time in many years. There's been very little done in finescale 4mm scale narrow gauge (three layouts, to my knowledge) and this was my one and only attempt from around 20 years ago. It's a bog-standard FR 4 ton coal wagon from the ancient GEM/FR whitemetal kit, but with added compensated W-irons using an old etch from the 2mm Scale Association, together with Association wheelsets. I also tarted up the brakes by removing the cast-on handle etc. and adding new brass details and brake shoes. At the time I thought - probably rightly - that I was a very lone voice in the wilderness and I never did any more, but given Alex Duckworth's excellent recent WDLR models in finescale 4mm I wonder whether I may not have been completely nuts after all.

The body is nothing special, except that the brake gear is a little better than the original kit

The running gear is all 1990s 2mm Association parts regauged to 8mm.
The right hand whilst is the compensated one, hence the odd angle - it is
tipped over on the three-point compensation pivot.

(The three 8mm layouts I had in mind were Pete Wilson's slate quarry layout, Peter Holmes' "Borth-y-Gest" and Alex Duckworth's WDLR layout recently featured in NG&IRMR No.100. Anyone know of any others?)

Back to Blogger, and the Box Cab again

Well, my experiment with Wordpress didn't work out too well. It turns out that hosting it myself was a much bigger headache than using Blogger for very little gain, so I moved the blog back here some time ago. In the process a number of the the image links broke, and I've spent a few hours fixing these so they should all be OK now. Please comment if you find any that aren't.

I don't have a great deal of new stuff to contribute - there is some progress on the JZ bogie coach from my Yugoslavian post but not enough to be interesting yet. So I'll fill in with a couple of photos of the Backwoods box cab in its current guise. It's just about finished - remarkably for one of my projects - and I'm quite happy with the yellow bodywork paint job. It's been rubbed down with T-Cut which has unintentionally given it a rather nice streaky and faded look which isn't at all obvious in the photos. I'm not as happy with the roof, which will have to be re-done. It's a combination of black, silver and blue (I think) which was supposed to be a weathered greying colour but has come out too glossy.

The rivets are a bit too big and the strong sunlight makes these look worse, but there's not much I can do about these now. Also a couple of the handrails aren't quite straight...

Progress on Lancashire - and Wordpress!

I've been making a little progress on my long-suffering Backwoods "Lancashire", and the photos here show the new smokebox mounting plate. The original kit makes no provision for dismantling for painting etc., so I've done my best to make sure I can split it into sub-assemblies. There are a couple of little lugs soldered onto the inside of the tanks to support the sides of the firebox which you might just be able to make out in the photos, and the smokebox support is milled down to 0.4mm thick in the middle to hold the boiler perfectly level. It will eventually be soldered into the recess underneath the footplate formed by the valances and have a hole drilled for the smokebox locating screw.



Lancashire's boiler, smokebox mounting plate and tank/footplate assembly

New mounting plate for Lancashire's smokebox

Balkan Adventures

I've had a soft spot for the Yugoslav (JZ) 76cm lines for a long time, but until a few years ago information about them was hard to come by. This was a shame since they're just about the ideal narrow gauge modelling proposition, with:

• Literally hundreds of miles of prototype (it might be over a thousand - I haven't looked it up);
• Spectacular scenery and interesting rural locations;
• A huge variety of locomotives and stock, including lots of articulateds and even a few diesels;
• It's 76cm gauge so the gauge is exactly right for HOe, so no nasty compromises there;
• Most of their steam locomotives were inside framed, and hence candidates for kit bashing from N gauge chassis;
• It was built to the same standards and some of the same designs as the Austrian 76cm gauge lines so a lot of commercial stock can be kit bashed, adapted or used direct. They even used a few locomotives which are available as ready-to-run (the Roco HFB 0-6-0TT, the Liliput OBB U Class 0-6-2T and the Bemo Second World War HFB 0-6-0 diesel, and I'm sure there are others).

Recently the information situation has changed markedly with the appearance of:

1. Dave Sallery's website describing these lines, with a large number of excellent and easily accessible photos (i.e. they can be printed, scribbled on and scaled for one's own use - unfortunately drawings, especially of rolling stock, are still a rarity).
2. Keith Chester's book The Narrow Gauge Railways of Bosnia-Hercegovina and its follow-up Bosnia-Hercegovina: Narrow Gauge Album, available from Stenvalls or Camden. Neither of these is what you'd call cheap - but they're worth every penny.

My indecisive modelling self hasn't been able to resist this, so for some time I've been accumulating stock and doodling yet another project, and I'm now starting to make a little progress. The plan isn't very ambitious, and involves an area of about 50cm by 160cm in the Ikea Ivar shelving above my workbench and machine tools. Yes, I know Ivar as a baseboard isn't an original idea, and thanks for the inspiration to those who have used it already. The photos below show the location and a few bits of track laid out to see how things will look. I'll have to do some surgery on the shelves to remove some of those cross braces from the sight lines but I doubt that they're essential - what can possibly go wrong?
It's a convenient way to get a quick start but I acknowledge that it has drawbacks, especially in being obscured by the support legs. However it has a few bonuses:

• It can easily be exhibited as a free standing layout on a new set of legs (which are cheap, available in a couple of heights and can easily be butchered into other heights); 
• It's very solid;
• The shelf above can be used to support as sophisticated a lighting rig as required;
• I lends itself to the "proscenium arch" type of display;
• It's easily extendable.

The full extent of my new NG empire....

The unvarnished shelves are to be used as the baseboard substructure

My current thoughts are around a small station with a forestry branch, possibly just a single or double passing loop, with removable cassette fiddle yards at either end for what would undoubtedly be rare operating sessions. It's just about at eye level, which I think will be a useful motivator to get things looking right - I always think a lot of layouts look fine from a helicopter and then everything starts to go wrong when you get down to a realistic ground level view.

I've also made an attempt at butchering a Chivers OBB class 399 kit into a JZ class 83 0-8-2. So far this has really only involved removing the boiler details and then wondering what to do next - it's probably best not blogged yet unless anyone's really interested.

The most progress to date has been made on passenger coaches. The JZ had a wide variety of coaches, but fortunately many of these were blessed with the same cross section and window shapes as the now-antiquated Liliput bogie coach design, which they've sold in many colours for many years and is hence very easy to find on the secondhand market. The major problems are that the vestibule ends are a completely different shape (as it happens they're about the same as those on the Roco OBB bogie coaches, but paying £40+ each for those and then using just the ends seemed a bit wasteful - and the windows are the wrong shape), and so is the roof. As far as I can tell, a few JZ coaches had the same roof form as the OBB stock with the radiused edges, but most were a simple chord from one side to the other. The window size and spacing did vary on the JZ stock, but I reckon I can produce most variants by a simple cut-and-shut job. So I've been preparing a set of patterns to resin cast myself a few parts:

• A generic JZ-profile roof suitable for their longest coach;
• A roof end, reproducing the awkward half-dome shape;
• A vestibule with its tapered floor plan, mainly using bits chopped off a Liliput coach and reassembled.

The idea is the following process:

1. Hold the body in a wooden clamping block made for the purpose and sever the roof from the coach using a slitting saw in the milling machine;
2. Reinforce the body using 2mm acrylic for the roof and new inner ends;
3. Cut the old ends off;
4. Add the new ends;
5. Cut and shut the coach to whatever window configuration is required;
6. Cut down a roof casting to length (if necessary), adding the end half-dome.

The Liliput chassis requires some minor butchery but nothing compared to the body. The photos below show my progress to date. I'm hoping that it will become something like the coach in photo 5 on this page of Dave Sallery's site.

Roof master balanced on cut-down Liliput body

Vestibule, roof end and roof centre masters tried for size. The masters aren't finished and have just had their first coat of paint to detect bumps and holes better

With original Liliput chassis ,which requires work around the steps and ends

The modified coach with an original Liliput OBB coach from the same secondhand batch

A running chassis, at last!

The gearbox is in, the motor is secured, it's wired up, it's on the rolling road, the power's on and there are NO BINDS! Here's a photo of it in motion:

Here it is static, complete with grubby bits of white insulation for crankpin washers and ridiculous oversized screw holding the gearbox in:

This is what I did to the gearbox. My obsession with it-must-be-able-to-be-dismantled-ability meant that I wasn't happy about having it captive around the driving axles, so I cut a slot into the front of the gearbox which allows it to be fed into the chassis from underneath. It's secured by the screw at the back which makes the mesh adjustable. The axle bearings in the gearbox are just to keep the last two gears in mesh and there's still enough left this way to maintain this properly, and cutting in from the from the front means that it's not affected by up-and-down torque of the box - the only possible movement is fore-and-aft, and the locating screw takes care of this if it's tight enough. I cut the slots VERY carefully with a slitting disc, and was careful to use a bit of scrap 2mm silver steel in the bearing holes while doing it so that I didn't slip and carve a big lump out of the bearing. Even so, I had to file out the final bits and there are a few marks on the bearings, but they look like they'll be OK.

Since doing the photos in the previous post I've cut a small slot in the locating ring nut on the motor to allow it to be tightened. When it came to the crunch this wouldn't tighten up fully, so I've had to add a 6mm inside diameter x 0.5mm brass washer between the motor and the mount - this takes up the thickness of a small boss moulded onto the front of the motor. Yes, I [b][i]know[/i][/b] there's a crack in the solder joint between the gearbox and motor mounting plate (again).

"Linda" - gearbox and motor mount progress

Well, after a long interlude for a holiday in the USA and a few other things, I achieved a smooth rolling chassis. It had a slight bind for a long time which I think was down to:
1. The cranks which I thought were firmly attached, actually weren't. It seems that one of them moved slightly on every revolution. A tiny dab of Loctite B638 retainer solved this.
2. One of the front bearings was slightly too far back in the frames - it was set up with the coupling rod and an alignment jig and pulled forward slightly.

I've now started on the gearbox. I have to confess that I can't actually find the instructions at the moment (that accounts for a lot!) but I think the advice is to glue the motor into the gearbox. I din't like this as I'm more than likely to get it wrong, and it's not adjustable/removable for mesh or maintenance. The little coreless motor has a threaded boss on the front and I'd originally cooked up a rather rough arrangement with a thin nut soldered onto the gearbox etch and the motor screwed into that. I recently stripped down most of the gearbox and replaced it with what you see below.

I've made a small nut (although it doesn't look like one, as it has no flats and concave sides) to attach the motor to the gearbox. The strange shape is because it's dished to only just clear the large idler gear - space is very tight here. It's made from a nut from an old miniature toggle switch, i.e. the nut which is used to clamp the switch into a control panel via a threaded boss. The next photo shows a similar nut and the mandrel I made up from a very mangy old switch to turn down the motor mounting nut. The nut will eventually have a couple of notches to make it easier to tighten up. If you attempt anything similar, beware - these small switches have a wide variety of different thread diameters and pitches, and there doesn't seem to be a standard. I just happened to get lucky and find one with the same thread (I've no idea what standard it is but it's about 5mm diameter).

Lastly, a grainy photo (not sure what happened there) or the motor, nut and the idler shaft. The latter is a bit of 2mm silver steel tapped 8BA at one end and with a head soldered onto the other, to make the whole thing removable. It has a little 1.0mm brass bush to stop the gear wandering sideways out of mesh. 

Backwoods "Linda" Chassis

I've been posting progress on my Backwoods "Linda" project on the NRGM forum, and it only seems fair to add details here for those who aren't members (although it's well worth it if you are a narrow gauge modeller of any sort...)

I've dusted off my own long-stalled Backwoods "Linda" project. I last worked on this about six or seven years ago, and its sojourn in the draw has just gone to prove that you really should take care in removing all the flux, or your kit will fall apart after a few years. It was up to the badly-running chassis stage - the quartering was and out there were several binds, but there were so many problems with the soldering in the chassis I decided to strip it back and start again. The photos below show how far I've got.

Those who have built one of these will notice that the gearbox isn't fitted - I wasn't keen on the captive gearbox idea so I've decided to either adapt the current one to be removable or build a new one. Also, I've made a set of replacement cranks in 1.0mm brass with press-fitted steel crankpins. These aren't perfect but I'm quite pleased with them, although making them - even cutting them together in a batch of four - is a bit of a pain and I don't want to do it again. You may also notice that I've removed the compensation and rebuilt it with rigid bearing - sorry, far too fiddly for me.

At this point I got really ambitious and designed a set to be laser cut, which you can see in a couple of the photos. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that I've actually had them cut to completely the wrong size. I've no idea how I managed this since I had a very precise set of dimensions - I'll order up a few new sets and see how they come out. If they're OK, I'll be using some to replace the cranks on my Backwoods "Lancashire" (no, I haven't finished that yet either).

Regards,

Chris

Checking the bearings for parallel

Checking the bearings for parallel and level

First fit of wheels and new cranks

Chassis with unsuccessful laser cut cranks

Close shot of the laser cut cranks. Well, they look nice anyway. The bottom left hand one has had the pilot holes drilled out 0.5mm - the rest are as they come from the cutter