Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Starting the chassis

Chassis start

While the Class 26 has a body, there is nothing supplied in the way of a chassis. That's not a problem, this is a modellers scale after all, I just need to copy what the RTR manufacturers do. So I went out and bought a £100,000 injection moulding machine and got stu...

Hold on, no I didn't. I'm not spending that sort of money - I could buy the real thing for leass ! The basic idea of a RTR chassis is sound though - you have a separate tray holding the motor and unpowered bogie in place, on to which the body is clipped.

To replicate this all I do is cut out a rectangle of nickel silver and bend down the edge 1.5mm to reduce flexing. Out of this are cut two rectangles in which the bogies swing. I won't bore you with all the measurements take but the most important is working out the bogie centres. Everything else for the whole is relative to this. The bend up flap near the flywheel is what happens when you get the dimensions a bit wrong and need more hole. Of course if you ask, I'll swear it's a safety feature in case the flywheel explodes under high revs !

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