Putting a brake on it

Jinty chassis with brakes
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

I’ll be honest, chassis work isn’t my favourite part of building a locomotive and doing the brake gear is my least favourite part of this.

Brakes have to go on after the chassis has been painted which makes the soldering difficult – you can’t clean flux off the metal any more without dunking the motor in water. Even I know that's a bad idea.

So, I made up the brakes and hangers and attach them with the smallest amount of solder possible. I had to use a little flux and in this case, solder paste. But lingered with the iron to boil as much off as possible.

Fitting the pull rods strengthened everything up a lot and certainly makes the whole thing look better. Perhaps it’s because RTR when I was a newer modeller didn’t have them but I find pull rod appearing in front of the wheels looks really “finescale”.

Sandboxes are glued in place. I ignored the pipes fearing they would just get in the way. It’s tough enough to keep the cross wires on the pull rods out of the pickups without any other fiddly, but difficult to spot, bits near electricity.