Stage 8 – Cylinders inside

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The inside cylinders

Fabrication of the inclined inside cylinders. refer Note 4 below
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Note 1 –

As work progressed on the inside cylinders I realised the risks of each operation were becoming greater and that any error could cost my considerable investment in time and materials if it was not recoverable, so each step was made only after a lot of thought, making sure that no part had been overlooked before it was impossible to go back and correct the omission.

Each machining operation was also carefully planned in my head before committing to cutting metal. Hopefully I’ve got it right and I’m not ending this project with a glass case model.

I spent many hours pondering how to draw the inside cylinder, let alone build it. Having a copy of the full-size cylinder drawing helped with the detail, but actually getting my head around putting together a cylinder that was inclined in relation to its valve chest was really challenging. I followed the concept used for the outside cylinders, but the construction needed to be different, not least because the internal support plates were inclined in relation to the ends

The process begins in the obvious way with the preparation and machining of the end plates

Stage 7 – Cylinders outside

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Outside Cylinders

Completing the outside cylinders and primary smokebox machining - refer Note 3 below
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Note 2 – The outside cylinders

After the 2013 Harrogate Exhibition, I made a start on the outside cylinders.

I eventually concluded that the cylinders would need to be fabricated because there were no suitable castings available. I had looked at the Enterprise and V2 castings for the Martin Evans designs and those for the V2 from Michael Breeze, but whilst these were well enough designed none had the ability to properly represent the prototype design used for the LNER pony truck locomotives.

In the early designs like the K3s and O2s the three cylinders were separate, the outside bolted to the frames, which had a large cut out each side into which the inside cylinder was located. This was bolted to the outside cylinders. This created a massive and very stiff assembly that I wanted to replicate on the models.  Later engines were fitted with a single casting (the monoblock) for the three cylinders

I spent a lot of time deciding on the materials and looked at cast iron, steel and bronze. I ultimately discarded cast iron due to the difficulties associated with joining it. I have silver soldered and brazed cast iron, but it is a process that can be unreliable, and I considered it would be liable to serious problems on such complex fabrications.

Steel was a much more attractive prospect but having discussed it with a number of experienced model engineers who were concerned about the cylinder friction and corrosion issues and who suggested cast iron liners in the cylinders which would have created issues with cylinder wall thickness or maintenance of scale bore dimensions, I concluded that bronze cylinders with brass supporting sections would be the way to go

I’d actually drawn the cylinders about 15 years before, mostly during lunch breaks at work, until the use of non-company software on our computers was banned. The details were put together from the H4 and K3 GAs, photographs of them under construction and a certain amount of knowledge I had from working on the full sized A4 and some drawings where a lot of the details were LNER standards. I didn’t actually get a drawing of the K3 cylinders until after I had started construction and I was surprised to discover I hadn’t done too badly and decided not to change what I had done and accept the minor deviations from prototype.

I have shown the outside cylinder GA and drawings of the individual components to give some idea of what you are seeing in the following photographs. These are the original drawings and some changes have been made to simplify the assemblies as the work progressed.

Following the 2014 exhibition work eventually got underway properly again in July. Perhaps retirement at the end of July speeded things up but it didn’t feel like it at the time. Looking through the photographs shows that a lot of progress was made, to the extent that I have only taken this instalment as far as the end of February 2015. So the following describes the majority of the work on the outside cylinders and the primary machining of the smokeboxes .

Stage 5 -Pony Truck

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Pony Truck construction

Truck assemblies including - bolsters - springing and wheelsets
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Note 1 -Pony Trucks:

Eddie mentions that Gresley was very fond of swing links for side control of bogies and pony trucks and the A1 Pacific’s and all the pony truck engines were so fitted. The riding of the Pacific’s was not particularly good with the single bolster design used and they tended to be over-sensitive to track irregularities and all the engines ultimately had the bogies modified to spring side control.