Garratt pipework

Detailed Boiler unit
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

Beyer Garratt wern't very British when they designed this locomotive. The chaps in the design office had obviously spent far too long knocking up plans for steam engines to run on johnny foreigner's railways. Just look at all this exposed pipework - it would be as shocking to those brough up in the reign of Queen Victoria (Gawd bless 'er) as a naked ladies ankle !

And from the modellers point of view, the tradition of hiding all the unseemly mechanical stuff away make for a much easier building session. However, there is no getting away from it. If the model is to look like the prototype then it must be festooned with fat (roughly 2.5mm) wire like a spaghetti tree ready for harvest.

I used some handy copper wire - which turned out to have a steel core. That made bending it harder than it would have been otherwise, although the silver lining is that once bent it stayed bend and didn't go all wiglly at the slightest touch as pure copper is wont to do.Some of the bends defeated me and so I cheated and made the pipe is two parts joined with hot blobs of solder which thanks to surface tension look OK. Even the gentle bends around the boiler were "fun", a Maglite torch worked very well as a former funnily enough...

The absolute worst part of the pipework is figuring out where it was supposed to go. At one point it dips down inside the frames - out of sign on all but one photos available to me and even that wasn't clear.

Aside from pipes there were the dreaded handrails. After fiddling around with a mixed bag of knobs (do stop sniggering at the back) some medium sized ones worked best. For a change I managed to drill holes in the front of the cab which makes attaching that end a whole lot easier. A handy hin here - put the two middle knobs on before forming the front bends, or you have to undo them to slide the fittings on - guess how I know this !