Thanks, JB. Happily, I seem to be fortified by a rather nice fruit cake Best Beloved brought home the other day. Does wonders for the waistline!
The S6 kit includes cast whitemetal buffer housings which need to be drilled through. The buffer heads appear to be nickel silver, turned and then rather bizarrely plated to resemble chrome! Nothing touches the surface, so once I had glued them into the length of thin-walled brass tube that constitutes the shanks, I span them in the whizzydisc with some emery to get back to the base metal.
I held the castings in a pin chuck, taking care to try and seat each one as concentrically as possible. I ran through with a 0.9mm drill, followed up with a 1.6mm drill which gave a nice sliding clearance for the buffer heads.
Thoughts had formed on how to spring the buffers, with consideration given to a wire passed through the back of the coupling hook, fixed into slots at the end of the buffer shanks. It seemed a good time to fit the coupling hooks before attempting any spring work
As you can see, I have adopted a scheme where the couplings are sprung near the centre of the underframe, with a wire hook to each cast hook. The idea is the drag forces will be passed along the couplings, rather than concentrated at the headstock under a "normal" hook-with-spring scheme. It probably makes no real difference, but I went with the gut feeling on this.
I fitted the buffer housings, glued into their holes, aligned and square as best as I could manage. Then I tried to work out springing them. I cut a slot into the end of each ram, intending to glue or solder some wire in place. This would pass through another hole in the counpling hook, because it was in the way, I suppose. Anyway, it didn't work. The buffers didn't have any real spring to them at all.
Apart from the fact the wire had to be passed through various passageways in order to slot into the space, there just didn't seem to be enough gap between the back of the housing and the remains of the suspension unit etch. After some half-hearted fiddling with proper springs, with no real idea of how to fix them in place or return the buffer to the normal position, I took the step of carefully dismantling the whole buffer thing altogether.
I will be ordering a set of the buffers from Slater's which I used on the PLV. They are brass housings, with springs and nuts to retain the buffer heads. I may have to fill the holes in the headstocks, though. We shall see.
Not much to show for the brake rigging, or lining. Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day.
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