Friday, October 19, 2007

Squeezing things in


jinty gearbox
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.
The Jinty build is a bit ahead of the blog so I’ll bring things up to date.

Firstly the tanks have been soldered to the footplate. Once in place I removed all the cross pieces as these were going to get in the way of the motor.

The boiler was then prepared from the supplied brass tube. This has to have a chunk cut out of it. Needless to say I cut too much and once I’d fitted the smokebox wrapper, which gives me the height, had to restore some bits of tube so there wasn’t a gap on the top of the tanks. This was achieved with a combination of bits of brass and gobs of solder. Smoothed down this isn’t bad but I suspect the first coat of primer will show I need to do more work here.

The cab was assembled next. Getting the bends right is a matter of trail and error. I didn’t anneal the roof and got away with it. If I had there would be doubtless be a load of extra, unwanted bends as the flexible brass took every teak of my fingers .

To position the cab I fitted the firebox. This comes as a whitemetal casting, which I found about a millimetre too low. A shim of brass cured this and everything was attached using to melt solder.

Then I tried the motor and discovered it wouldn’t fit. The smokebox is hollow as supplied but my shim filled the bottom in. Off it came for alteration (low melt makes this easy, just heat near the area with a big iron) by removing the middle section.

Even then I had to chop a bit off the gearbox to reduce the height. I think it will all fit now.

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