Member postings for Vincent Shaw-Morton

Silver soldering, on a hot summers day.>>

Well I had all my bushes prepared and ready. Read Don's articles on the boiler construction, and found myself ready to do my first bit of silver soldering. I have soldered before, when I did the Polly course at SMEE. I also practiced on some scrap. However this was a different league. >>

WIth some trepadation I set up ready to go. Two cyclone burners and a massive cylinder of gas. Lots of flux and off I went. I had one burner burning down the middle of the barrel and took my time allowing it to build up to temperature. It was a mistake. The advice I had about preheating the barrel with a second burner was good advice, but completely unnecessary at this stage of construction as I simply didn't yet have the mass of material that needed a huge amout of preheat. I ended up exhausting the flux, and nothing would flow. Too slow a build up of heat, and then too fierce local heat when it was too late.>>

After a re-pickle and clean up (6% Sulphuric) I tried again. This time I used just one burner. I didi preheat the whole job, and watched the flux turn nice fluffy white. (I was doing this job outside in the shade btw) I then saw the whole barrle start to darken and take on the 'oily, irridescent' look. I then focuussed the heat on one bush. Pretty quickly the darker colouring spread out and the flux turned to a 'dirty washing up water.' I broght in the solder and with a bit of persuassion it suddenly flashed round, with my rod of solder rapidly vanishing into the joint.>>

In one sitting I managed to solder the dome bush and joining ring. After another slow cool, pickle and clean up I tacked the remaining bushes.>>

I found a few voids on a couple of bushes so, tried again, this time using far too much solder, but got good penertration. Phewww!!! I feel like I've been barbecued. However I think I've been succesful so I just need to get my work checked. >>

I'm glad to have finally had a go at a large soldering job, and whilst I can't say it was fun, I feel more confident in progressing the boiler.

Checking the dome bush is parallel
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Dome bush; soldered.
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Too much solder!
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Joining ring and good penertration on the dome bush
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>>

AN APOLOGY

Well, there is taking a break, and there is blinking and finding over sixteen months has gone past.

For reasons I won't go into model engineering was no so much put on hold, but very nearly killed stone dead.....well not quite. Not even to access the forum. Its too long and dull a story to go into, and anyway I am now back to building Newport.

Having not logged onto my account for over sixteen months I see that several people e-mailed me over a year ago, and all I can do is apologise, and I will be in touch with everyone who mailed me about construction articles straight away.

In any event I started working again this week back on the boiler, exactly where I left off, and have manged to put a fair amout of work in; in terms of bush making. I have been using phosphor bronze for all the smaller bushes, and gun metal for the larger dome bush on top of the boiler barrel.

The attached pics are on progress so far. Including the boiler barrel bush, which has been soft soldered to the dome bush in preparation for drilling of the pair, and the subsequent taping of the boiler barrel bush.

It took quite a bit of practice to get my eye in with the first two smaller bushes taking several hours and a handful of cock-ups. The following day I could create a bush in a little over twenty minutes.

I had my hands full in creating the boiler barrel bush as with my first attemtp at boring I found that after a couple of minutes the boring bar refused to cut. I then found that the Glanze tip had snapped off and vanished i inside the work. DOH!. With a new tip I was soon sailing throught the boring, creating a real shower of chips.

Various bushes. All bushes have only been tapped three or four turns.
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Dome bushes and dome tube
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Anyway I'm back building after over a years delay. Once again apologies to anyone who got in touch and I will be in touch with you straight away.

BTW, with some sound advice from my good friend John Dean I have been silver soldering outside in bright light using some scrap material, and in actual fact I found it easier to silver solder in direct light than in a shaded room. No longer looking for the cherry red glow I waited for two stages. The first for the flux to 'Puff Up.' and then simply for it to turn into 'Dirty Water' At this point I brought in the solder, and zip I was creating nice thick fillets of solder with no problem at all.

After an hours practice I feel quite confident in soldering in direct light, in fact I don't think I will ever bother solderingt in dim light again. That's all for now

Best Wishes
Vincent

Edited By Vincent Shaw-Morton on 15/01/2011 07:34:11

my mistake, it's not that I don't want to say Hi to you twice, too tired and on my sherry nightcap.. I've just found the edit button, so fixed that error.

Edited By Vincent Shaw-Morton on 16/12/2010 22:07:42

Edited By Vincent Shaw-Morton on 16/12/2010 22:08:33

Edited By Vincent Shaw-Morton on 16/12/2010 22:09:10

I should have know the 'lathes in schools ' information would be incorrect. That's what I get for listening to my sixteen year old daughter!

Edited By Vincent Shaw-Morton on 16/12/2010 22:01:51

Hi everyone,

After my last post requesting help on projecting a circle onto a cylinder I’ve decided to document the building of my first locomotive;  which is Don Young’s Newport in 7 ¼” gauge. Perhaps an overly ambitious first project I can hear you say, well this is the locomotive I have chosen, and to outline my reasons read on.  (For those who are interested).

I am approaching fifty and have always felt that I would like to build a model steam locomotive  when I retired. Well this date came forward a little when I got made redundant about a year ago, and came into a little money, which coincided with a visit to Chichester & District Model Engineering Society. I just turned up at the place to see if it still existed after visiting it as a child, and on arrival I found that the club was indeed still there along with a well equipped workshop. This fired my interest further and after a few weeks of visiting I met a member who had just completed the Polly Course at SMEE.

Now my professional background is one involving the arts and computing, and I am currently a web designer, with very little engineering knowledge other than an  enthusiasm for Sky TV documentaries, in particular ’Industrial Revelations’ with Mark Williams, so I needed some kind of basic training within model engineering, so I booked myself onto the SMEE Polly Course.

Over the course of this year I have gone from no engineering experience (other than basic lathe work at school....... back in the days when Health and Safety hadn’t deemed that lathes were too dangerous to be in schools,) to having a basic grounding in model engineering; and a completed and running Polly Engine, which I was rather pleased with. (I cannot recommend the Polly course highly enough but that is a different story.)

This then lead me to try and decide which locomotive to first build. Now for every locomotive that I had suggested to me someone would shake their head disapprovingly from Titch to Simplex, everybody had a comment of some-kind. However the best piece of advice I had was from a Chichester club member who said ‘It doesn’t matter which locomotive you build in terms of complexity. What really matters is you have to really want to make it as you are going to be working on it for a long time.’

Well I have always had a love for  Victorian locomotives, and this is purely from an aesthetic point of view. To me they are objects of great beauty, and this felt to be as good a starting point as any to make my choice. Around this time I met another member, who has become a close friend, John D who built a Beattie Well tank in 7 ¼” and who won a gold with it at Bristol in 2007. His view was that a Boxhill Terrier might be a good place to start, which was also the locomotive I had begun to warm to. Well around the same time I had also started to look at Don Young’s Newport. It turned out that my friend John D had the entire set of construction articles which I gratefully borrowed and copied.

On reading the articles I discovered that Don’s intention was that the Newport should not be beyond the scope of a reasonably competent beginner.  Also despites being a 7 ¼” gauge loco, it is still comparatively small. The only down side as John D pointed out was one of weight and expense. If anything he felt that the larger scale was easier  to work in due to component size.

So after several months of thinking, along with visiting the IOW Steam Railway and the NRM (I fell in love with the Wainwright D at this point, but this is too ambitious,) I decided to build Newport. Ultimately I want to build Newport as Freshwater and paint it in the green livery of the FYN railway company.

So my decision was based on the following.

I like the design.

There is a comprehensive set of construction articles.

I have a great friend who will give me a hand and advice if I get stuck.

So far my progress has been to make a start on the boiler and it is my intention to use this thread as a diary to document my progress, including any mistakes.

My next post will includes some photographs on forming the boiler plates and the method I have used to cut holes in the smoke box tube plate. I hope this thread will be of interest, and please feel free to comment. BTW Hi Bill, I know you will be reading this; so Hello there.

Best Wishes

Vincent

Edited By Vincent Shaw-Morton on 07/12/2010 21:05:27

Edited By Vincent Shaw-Morton on 07/12/2010 21:05:53

Edited By Vincent Shaw-Morton on 07/12/2010 21:06:26