Narrow gauge locos don't often have buffers outside of Talylln land. Mostly there is some sort of chunky centre coupling. The Barclay kit comes with some brass fold-up buffers and these look suitably industrial, so I decided to use them.
Except that in real life I suspect they would be made of wood rather than solid metal.
Not a problem, in the material stash there is some strips of hardwood. I removed the buffer sides and stuck the faces to the wood. Once dry, this was sawn and sanded to match.
For extra industrial appearance, I added bolt heads using fine brass pins. These are fitted into holes drilled in the face and wooden bloc but not through the buffer beam. Doing what I did cost me 3 drill bits which is plenty thank you.
To be honest, I'm not sure about the bolts. Surely they would stop the buffer faces sliding? However, I found real locos fitted with them and the metal faces would have to be held in place some how. It's not likely that they'd have used a big pot of epoxy glue!
3 comments:
I'll admit that this stuff hasn't exercised me before now - but I'd have expected the surface of dumb buffers to allow for sliding.
Would the bolts on the real things be recessed?
Otherwise, would there have been any way of fitting real dumb buffers from behind - perhaps before the buffer beam was fitted?
I'd imagine this would definitely need to be the case if the buffers were faced with some other material, such as leather.
Maybe they are deliberately much larger than the buffers on any stock they will come into contact with, so there's a comfortable slide area with the bolts beyond.
If you look at photos the buffing plates appear to be fixed with what are comparatively small rivet heads or coach bolts. I suspect the actual wooden portion might be retained with something more substantial. And as Andy suggests the locos always seem to have bigger buffers than the stock.
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