Boom! And we're back in the room!
Extended radio silence was due to Muttley, and ever such slow work reassembling this loco. For the oddest reasons, I find that I dread reassembly more than making it in the first place. A little bit of my brain cell is certain something will go spoggly, and things won’t go back as well as they came apart, and all kinds of brown smelly stuff will hit air circulating devices.
As ever, once I’ve given that little bit of my brain cell a stern talking-to, things actually work out okay. We shall skip lightly over the things that didn’t - at first.
Right, we had a hold-up for brake shoes.
Then, one day, these arrived. They are nice. I owe someone money, but no-one has owned up yet. I’ll find them eventually.
Something really quite obvious that I had failed to clock during all the gazing at drawings and photos of small prairies is there were two brake pull rods. They ran down between the wheels and the springs. Ah, yes, springs. I’ll come to that in a while. Anyway, two pull rods were on the fret, so I checked to see if they fitted.
Well, obviously, they didn’t. If you recall, and have followed this protracted build from early on, we are using the smallest diameter wheels and have decided to shuffle the brake gear about to suit. The brake weighshaft has been shifted forwards to better suit its proper location On The Real Thing. The pull rods were therefore too long. Also, the weighshaft casting has the lever arms cast for inside the springs, not outside. Oh.
There ensued some faffing about in order to make representative levers at the ends of the weighshaft. Useful etches from the Bits Box came into play, and the adjustment plates - I want to call them slack adjusters, so I will - meant to be at the end of the pull rods were fixed to them. For the sake of sanity, and to avoid destroying anything further, I elected to pretend the inner levers as cast were meant to be there. They should be lost in the gloom when the loco is sat on trackwork.
About this point it made sense to install the suspension springs. It turned out, thanks to tiny diameter wheels, the loco ended up sitting so low the cast springs were in imminent danger of ripping out check rails! Some careful work with a whizzy disc removed something like 1.5mm from the bottom of each spring casting, and by sheer luck it proved sufficient to clear the permanent way. Sigh of relief.
Here’s one of the new slack adjusters.
Here’s the other. The mess around the sanding pipe bracket was because my shoddy soldering had allowed it to come adrift while it was off being painted. By this time I had resigned myself to brush-painted top coat to the underframe anyway. In for a penny, as they say.
Carefully drilled through to accept the cross rods, the brake hangers and shoes were glued in, aided by the wheels for spacing.
From below, you can see the damage wrought to the cast springs.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, this is where I am now. The cylinders and motion have been reinstalled, and the brake rigging is in place, pending some drops of glue to hold it all. So far, it all still rolls adequately, so I’m going to take that as a positive.
More, perhaps, later.