Front bogie

First job with the lathe was to make two spacers for the front bogie, 28mm wide, 4mm diameter and with an 8BA thread inside. Made for a good way to try out a couple of basic lathe operations, such as setting the height of the tool in the toolpost, 'facing-off' the ends of the rod to make them flat and square and then reducing the length of each rod to exactly 28.00mm, followed by centre-drilling each end (with the drill mounted in the tailstock) and then drilling the holes to 1.8mm, ready to be tapped 8BA.

Piccy below shows the bogie after fitting the spacers, I have since silver soldered the frames. Next job is the axleboxes and springs.

Parts and tooling

Another 3 weeks have passed and very little progress on the loco itself although I now have a lathe set up and am gradually accumlating useful-sized bits of metal for turning. The wife was particularly bemused at the arrival of a length of 2 1/4" diameter pipe (the shortest length i could find was two foot long) which is intended to be cut down and used as a smokebox!

Anyway, lots of bits stacking up to be progressed, just waiting for work to calm down a bit to get some free time to get busy with the lathe!

Update - Sourcing more parts

A while since I last posted. Work is still very busy so no time for working on model engines! Insomnia and being miles from home in hotels gives me time however to source more parts... Have got lots of imperial tools from a variety of places over the last week, including drill bits I need and imperial hex keys. Have also got an 8BA tap set and a tap wrench. A new shed which was delivered this morning is awaiting my attention tomorrow and over the weekend for assembly. The old one is slowly falling through the neighbour's fence....

Arrived back from my travels to find lots of parcels, including a very exciting one from Model Engineers Laser containing a tender kit, cab kit and lots more bits for the main chassis including slide bar kit, smokebox supports, motion brackets, connecting and coupling rods, cab kit, rear pony truck kit. Basically - lots to keep me busy and occupy all these rainy sunday afternoons we've been having lately! Will upload some photos soon!

I am very pleased with the laser cut kits so far. The main frames are perfectly square and look superb. They are so accurately-cut that I think it must be impossible to get them wrong, and they offer a superb short-cut for the 'time-poor' which in all honesty is probably most of us!

Have also joined the G1MRA (see link on the right) which processed my application to join in 2 days and sent a nice package of info including the last two journals which contain a wealth of v useful info.

Time for glass of red (Durif) and a read through all the drawings and notes that came with the parts today.