On The Decks

My customer took umbrage last week when I described him on these pages as demanding.

Well, you can read through this post and decide for yourself!

As I have mentioned before the interior of the Disco Car is pretty much empty but there are a few fixtures which remained such as the cabinets which enclosed the gas heating gear at the top end.

These were added when the carriage was first refurbished for the push-pull train.

In Disco Car configuration the top of the low cupboard was used to support one end of the shelf upon which the DJ's decks were placed, while the other end rested on the window ledge.

Naturally my client wanted this included as part of his model and I obliged.

Was he happy? Was he hell!

Some snaps, like that above, were taken and emailed off for approval and back came a list of faults so lengthy that the only option was to rip it out and do it all again.

This time, thankfully, he was satisfied.

Customers, who'd have 'em, eh?

(Editor's note: This post is not to be taken literally)

Greenwich, Meantime

I've had a change of plan with what to do next on the carriage.

Instead of adding the vacuum pipes I got out the soldering iron and added the couplings to the bogies the other night.

We have standardised with the fold-up brass Greenwich couplings on our rolling stock and they are the default option for any stock I am building for a client too.

Among their advantage is that it is very simple to re-position them, you just apply the hot tip of the iron and melt them off and fix them back in place.

I don't know what the client has planned for his Disco Car yet, and whether it will ever run on a layout as part of a train, so it is hard to know whether to set them in a close-coupled position or not.

So I have played safe and set them very generously so to reduce the chances of things like the corridor connections or the vac pipes locking with those on any other stock it is coupled do.

It's possible, after all, that it may make a guest appearance on Dduallt or Bron Hebog one day.

Garratt Gives Up Its Secrets

A couple of weeks ago I posted that Himself has taken in a Backwoods NGG16 which a friend had bought second hand, and discovered didn't run very well, to see if he was able to improve matters and I thought you may be interested in reading about what he's found so far.

I'm posting this not to denigrate or humiliate the builder, whoever it was, but because one day it may be that that someone who is struggling to build one of these kits turns to Google for advice and might just benefit from what I've posted here.

It would appear that the person who put together these power bogies was struggling to fit all the valve gear into the available space and thought the solution was to slice the cylinder block assembly and the motion bracket in half so they could be positioned further out.

The effect, however, was the leave the brackets floating free whereas they should be joined together and attached firmly to the frame with a beam running along the top.

You may just be able to see the fault in the picture below.

At the front end they spliced the cylinder block back together with a piece of brass sheet...

But crucially they failed to solder it in place, so as the power unit ran the forces pushed the cylinder blocks upwards.

In the picture below the bogie on the left is as-constructed, the one on the right has been soldered into place.

The different attitude of the cylinders is quite obvious, you will agree.

Himself has found other errors with the assembly of the valve gear, although nothing that will stop it running, but a more serious flaw, and one that would not be fixed without deconstructing the entire bogie - which he is not about to do - is that the builder did not pay careful attention to setting the back-to-back measurements on the driving wheels when he assembled them.

Take a look at the the right hand leading axle and compare it to the other two....

Only when we get the locomotive reassembled and running again will we be able to assess whether this is a fault which will merely hinder silky-smooth operation or scupper any chance of this Garratt ever passing through a set of points.

Bits Beneath

The Disco Car has reached the stage where there are all manner of small details inside, outside, above and underneath to add to it before it can be declared finished.

Two of them are the bits that hang from the frame, but you have to look closely to see them.

Truth be told this is the first time I have put any underframe detail on any production Tin Car I've built because until now I'd always assumed that they sat so squat on their bogies that you couldn't really see anything.

(110 was a different case because it was built up on a central spine rather than the bulky ex-Isle of Man frames used on 117 onwards.)

When it came to this model I was looking at a photograph closely and I could just make out two things lurking underneath - which I presumed to a vacuum reservoir and a battery box - on the 'engine side' of the carriage.

Knowing that I am working for a very demanding client I had no option but to knock something up to represent them.

I think the next task will be something more obvious, the two sets of vacuum pipes.

Two sets? Yes, and if you don't know why that is I'm going to leave you in suspense until next time.

One Hour's Work

So having had a play about with the positions of the new buildings Himself decided to request an alteration - he thought the garage wasn't long enough.

Once upon a time the would have involved a trek to the post office to send it across the border for me to fiddle with.

Now that he's just a couple of miles up the road it was simple enough to collect it, bring it home with me, and I enlarged it by 15mm at the back in the time it took my youngest to have an afternoon nap.

I'm not going to pretend that you can't see the join, but even so it's a neat enough job for me and once it has been given a lick of paint I hardly think that anyone's going to notice.

(Unless, of course, they read this blog and make a point of looking for it.)

So the next day I dropped it back over at his place and popped it on the layout to see how it looked.

And the good news is he's perfectly happy with it.

Another satisfied customer, indeed.

The House In The Corner

A little bit of scenic work has been taking place over the bank holiday weekend.

Himself had started work on fixing the position of the house in the top left corner of the Oberon Wood scene and the double garage which goes with it.

The tricky thing here is attempting to estimate where the rest of the houses in the row will fit.

I have another two of them finished but the next one along is still on the Artistic Director's drawing board (he assures me) so nothing can be set in stone - or in this case plaster - just yet.

Feeling Blue

There are some signs that Himself is getting back into the groove after an enforced six month modelling moratorium.

He's started work on painting the farm house which is going to be quite a distinctive feature on the layout.

Around the period when the railway was reopened through Beddgelert there was a lot of work done on the exterior of the house with the windows replaced and the rendered walls on the front and back repainted from a mustard-colour finish to this pale blue.

Selecting a colour such as this is always a tricky business.

The research photos can be rather misleading. Some were taken on a bright, sunny day when the blue looks a deep colour while on others, shot on an overcast day, it looks much more pale.

The danger is you could end up with something that looks very gaudy and unrealistic if the colour is too bright so we have aimed low, if that makes sense.