Schools back for Winter

Hurrah!

The rugrats return to school and all is peace again. Whilst I love the kids to bits, there is very little opportunity, energy or inclination to do 2mm modelling when they are at home 24/7.

So the summer hols have been spent walking, painting (not very good watercolours, but Anna enjoys this too...) joining in at the village feast etc. and so on...

Back to the D49 then. If I can remember where I put it.

• Pre-holidays, but not reported, I assembled the cylinders. The face plates had been soldered to the frames and now I proceeded to attach and form the cylinder wrappers. This was the hardest task to date and whilst the results are okay, I'm sure I should have done better! Also I was a bit befuddled by the profile at the very top; the etched faces indicate a rather rounded corner after a straight vertical. Photos of real D49/2s seem to show a rather more bowed vertical which then meets the footplate almost straight on. I'm sure I'll need to revisit this at some point. Anyway here is the progress to date:

• The profile of the face plates should be evident here. With the wrappers not following them!
  

Back to the present. I thought I would finish off the tender and address some of the problems I'd created there.

• The motor mount was made up and attached to the motor. Offering this up to the chassis revealed that there was not a great deal of room to get the UJ shaft in and keep it behind the front wheels; to satisfy the tender geometry the motor sits quite far forward. So I made one as small as I could and after trimming down the motor shaft, super glued the two together, taking care not to glue the shaft to the motor itself or to my fingers. Just about managed it!

• You may recall that I used the wrong sized muffs on the tender chassis. This doesn't seem to have caused too great a problem. However the chassis spacers have. The gaps on the underside of the main spacer were not sufficiently close to the frames so that the motor mount shorted them out. A slip of paper super glued to the motor mount solved that, but then the mount was too thick to slot into place and so I find myself carefully filing the end of the spacer to create more room. The joy!

• This is the underside of the tender showing how crowded it is with various rods etc. When fabricating the spacers, I only drilled them as clearance for the 12BA bolts. As they were inevitably not dead centre, the chassis was skew to the motor and body when assembled; electrical shorts everywhere. Opening up the holes slightly allows for some adjustment before the screws are tightened.
  

• A couple of slips of paper super glued to the body are sufficient to maintain electrical separation here.

So reasonable progress. Will it be finished for the AGM? I don't know, but that doesn't particularly bother me. I'll bring it along in any event. Next installment soon, hopefully...