LBSC's Designs

I think the concept of design right does not apply to designs made before the introduction of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and I don't know if or what the equivalent rules were before then.

Adrian

Hello Russell,

Sorry I'm being sloppy.

Yes you are right unregistered designs have a 10-year lifetime, so people can freely adapt or use LBSC's designs.

It's the copyright in his plans which still exists.

You are probably right, assuming that any new digital version is a complete redrafting - tracing over a scan of the original plan would still be 'copying'.

Neil

That's my understanding.

A complete redraft will be owned by the person who drafted it.

The words bit in ME articles expire after 25 years

I also vaguely recall LBSC falling out with a photographer in the 1930s/40s over photographs of his work

Edited By Ady1 on 24/08/2017 14:37:18

Excellent questions, I'll try to do a better job at answering more of them as they are posted. Right now my drafting skills vastly outpace my skills as a machinist- and I am still saving my pennies if you will for the tooling to start on my first solo steam engine build. My first steam engine will be built with a client- we're also friends and decided to build a pair of steam engines which he designed. It's a monster- a 7.5" gauge, 2.5" scale early American 4-4-0. I prefer smaller scales though, and really only planned on doing that one and a mogul along the same lines with him. Again, another early American style locomotive. After that though, all British.

I think I know who you are talking about when you mentioned that other draftsman, if our brains are on the same wave I admire his work very much- but can see the potential for mistakes in it that might only be caught during the build process. I haven't designed a locomotive from the ground up- most of the work I have done comes from modellling parts for CNC/water jet production. I've done the full assemblies for the purposes of updating the drawings, catching maths errors in the drawings etc. Thus far, a good friend of mine who also works for my other client has checked over my work, which has all passed inspection with flying colors.

I do try my best to ensure the parts are designed so that they can be machined with out headache, are made from practical material sizes and given what ever diligence I can to ensure the designs I work with will work- and if not- not as a result of my error.

As far as actual drawings are concerned, I understand completely what you mean by missing or hard to work dimensions, some of the drafts for the Chloe and Fitchburg Northern had that same issue. The metric conversion could be an issue- Im not too concerned with it right now as much as I am simply tracking down the articles, I can't do a metric conversion with out a design to need it, and until I have that it can't even be attempted

I do believe I can find working examples of most, if not all, of Curly's designs. Knock on wood, fingers crossed on that one. Some of his designs are super easy, using oscillating cylinders and the like. I'll do the best I can to ensure the designs that I produce aren't stinkers- thankfully the client I am building the 4-4-0 with is a Curly fan too, has built more locomotives in 7.5" gauge than most people would build in a lifetime, and at 37 years old that's no small feat.

Short answer: I can't be 100% sure, but I won't feel comfortable with anything being put out or the like until I'm 99.9% sure.

Neil, your words are wise and eloquent. Writing to people in the U.K. always made me feel self conscious about my writing and my accent for some reason. (If I ever have the privilege of meeting anyone here in person, be warned, I do say y'all, use American euphemisms and stand an imposing 1.7 meters tall)

One idea I am toying with is just making 3D models of the designs that have drawings already- and hoping I could garner the support of a vendor, after all if this does capture people's attention it's free advertising*. For the models with out current drawings that's another matter, but it's just an idea.

*Granted, if they believe in the old saying "If it's for free it's for me!"

I want clubs to have my work when it's done- granted the 2 1/2" Gauge Assocation would be the ones to receive all of Curly's work in that gauge, etc.

Dean, I would also like to see LBSC designs drawn in 3D CAD and converted to metric. I am a metric system (the SI system to be more precise) guy, and I only learnt about the existence of something else (imperial) in recent years. I mean, I knew that an inch was 25.4 mm, but I never thought that this was something that was used in practice, specially on engineering plans. When I first ordered locomotive plans from Reeves, I became highly disappointed at learning that fact. So that's to make clear that I REALLY would like to have model engineering plans in mm units rather than something else.

Now, said that, I want to make the point that converting existing plans in inch units to mm is not as easy or straightforward as it might seem. Yes, it is of course just a matter of multiplying everything by 25.4, but the problem is that the imperial system is fractionary, not lineal. Dimensions in inches are often expressed with fractions, which means they are not actual exact measures, but just approximations.

The 3D CAD itself will essentially work because computer numerical precision goes up to at least 10 decimal places and therefore approximations may be good enough, but they will still be approximations, and accumulation errors may appear when adding dimensions, possibly causing trouble in assemblies.

The fractional nature of the inch system is problematic because you do not enter a fraction to a CNC lathe or CNC mill. Also a CAD-CAM program will not generate fractional output but numbers with a limited resolution (several decimal places).

Furthermore, plans that were originally drawn in inches will become really odd when translated to mm. To begin with, you will have to carefully round part dimensions to exact numbers in order for the CAD system to avoid accumulation errors. This is difficult, because it is easy to make a lot of assembly mistakes. If you chose to keep the parts dimensions as they are with all their decimal places, then you will either have very long numbers over the dimension lines, or they will appear rounded anyway, not reflexing the actual measures, thus causing further trouble.

Whatever approach you take, the converted dimensions will be bizarre, as opposed to simple and clean of newly drawn plans, making it evident that the original plans were in inches rather than millimetres.

The International System of Units (formerly metric) is exclusively used elsewhere except the UK and some USA. It's a superior system, which has greatly facilitated the latest developments in physics, and it is definitely the way to go.

Steam locomotives in continental Europe where all built in metric units, and model engineers there only use metric units for their models. But if you have some old British plans in an alternative system, then keep them as they are because attempting to do otherwise calls for a lot of trouble.

Edited By John Lluch on 03/09/2017 19:07:33

A brave man indeed. I'd fetch my tin hat if I were you John

I was just going to leave that comment, but I think I ought to respond to you claim that fractional dimensions are all 'approximations'. Not true at all.

It's also far easier to design things in fractions than using infernal metric preferred sizes. Add up a series of sizes in preferred metric sizes and they NEVER seem to come to a convenient number, fractions make it easy to design with good proportions and to achieve sensible cumulative sizes.

Try laying out a slide valve and its eccentric in fractions; it is dead easy as all the cumulative dimensions make sense, but you do need to have grown up using fractions

Neil

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 03/09/2017 19:13:32

Having followed this thread from the beginning, it appears that most of the comments are about copyright which not being a lawyer I won't comment. My thought is perhaps more important. If it is the intention to keep the creations as CAD models and drawings, what format will be used. I worked as a designer all my life, and went to CAD in 1989. With changes to the core of the CAD systems old files become unreadable unless you convert immediately after the change. Also later minor changes make for incompatibility. The only sure way is to create jpg scans or similar, even PDF may not be an option. Just a thought, but been there and got the tee shirt on reading old files!

Hi Neil, I appreciate your comment and to be honest I sort of expected something like that. I can't fully agree with you though.

I meant the SI is a superior system in the sense that physical properties have single measurement units as opposed to the imperial system, which is more inconsistent in that respect. . For example power unit is 'watt' in the SI regardless of thermal, mechanical, electric... as opposed to 'HP' and 'btu/h'. There is no clear unit for work in the imperial system, the equivalent to 'joule' in the SI. There is a difficult distinction between force (or weight) and mass in the imperial system, which is not the case on the SI where force is 'newton' and mass is 'gram'. The SI also completely avoids conversion factors in formulas of practical use, as opposed to the imperial system that often requires them. This is among other advantages of the SI.

Fractions are of course exact while they remain fractions, but my point is that they can not be reliably represented in decimal numbers. Specially when converted to mm. Decimal numbers is what CAD/CAM and CNC will use, so when converting from inches to mm it all becomes a mess of dimensions with infinite (to be exact) decimal places. That causes trouble due to accumulation of errors and rounded display of dimensions. If you keep what is already in inches as it is, then there is no problem. CAD systems will handle fractional inches gracefully, and CNC machines will have anyway some working tolerances. This obviously works and have been for long time, and this is also my point.

I suppose I do not fully understand the problem you explain with laying out a slide valve and its eccentric, but I can imagine what you mean. I concede that if you are grown up using fractions it may have sense to apply them in some cases. But the industry has evolved to avoid them for some of the practical reasons mentioned above, and not using them is not a design constraint at all. Virtually everything is drawn in metric units nowadays. I have drawn a freelance locomotive from scratch (in mm of course) and I never felt the need to use any fractional dimension. In fact, from my background point of view, fractions are rather an inconvenience. In plans drawn in inches with fractional dimensions I have seen that sometimes decimal numbers must be specified to account for accumulation of fractional dimensions (specially in assemblies) that don't really add to a nice number. This never happens if everything was specified as decimal numbers already.

Edited By John Lluch on 03/09/2017 20:03:17

John Lluch raises a good question about metricating Imperial and English measure designs. Are there recommended ways and means of doing it?

Dave

PS Be interesting to know in 2017 how much professional design in the UK isn't metric. I'd guess commercial design in Imperial fractions is very rare, and that Imperial and Thou are only used for compatibility reasons.

That's indeed an important point and one which is very difficult to place a proper suggestion for. Both jpg and pdf are nowadays pretty standard file formats and ones that will hardly be broken or made incompatible with other formats in the future. However, they both are meant to hold 2D information (such as pictures or printable content) and they are not editable, so in case an error is latter found the original CAD file will always be required. Between the two I would chose pdf, provided the purpose is only to distribute static content to be printed by the end user

About CAD, I am not aware of any format that would open (in an editable form) in all software platforms. However, for the purposes of dynamic display only, there are several file types that will open in most CAD systems. This does not solve of course the problem of maintaining an editable version of the 3D plans, which will be required to keep future compatibility. I am used to SolidEdge from Siemens because that's what I learned, and that's what I would chose, but I suppose SolidWorks can be considered a better choice because I understand it is more widespread. Other CAD systems have options to import SolidWorks files, though generally in a non fully editable way.

Finally, if the possible legal issues about ownership can be solved, a good thing to do would be to open source the 3D plans files to let everybody propose improvements or correct errors by pushing updates based on experience while building the actual locomotives.

Edited By John Lluch on 03/09/2017 21:18:52

Edited By John Lluch on 03/09/2017 21:20:13

Edited By John Lluch on 03/09/2017 21:20:50

The last time I looked computers used binary; conversion to/from decimal is only for the convenience of the operator.

Andrew

My view is that conversion to metric is not about the actual measurements of a fabricated item but what size stock is used. For example, LBSC may call for the valve stem to be made of 1/8" ground stainless steel rod. 3.175mm stainless rod is not the sensible option, 3mm probably is but all other components interfacing with the rod need to be adjusted accordingly. The situation with frame material is already a problem since the material specified by LBSC in Standard Wire Gauge is no longer available. I would be inclined to re-draw the designs in imperial (with SWG and number/letter drills converted to imperial decimals). A builder can then make the decisions about which dimensions to adjust to make the design work with the stock he has available.

I'm unaware of any serious industry in the UK that uses imperial measurements these days - certainly not in the defence/nuclear industry I used to work in.

Cheers,

Rod

Not strictly true, as imperial fractions are all powers of two, they are rather well suited for representation by computers. Even the worst case of converting 1/128ths to millimeters it's only seven decimal places, exact.

If only they had settled on 1"=25.6mm....

Also, I'm not defending the whole imperial system, I'd rather use SI for anything complex, and remember that CGS and MKS systems were 'metric' but almost as impenetrable as imperial for some purposes.

But inches vs millimeters? As the difference is just a multiplication by a constant, I fail to see what the fuss is about, they are equivalent. Imperial has fractions as an optional extra. Metric's optional extra is preferred sizes. I prefer fractions!

The real issue, for me, is availability of stock materials. The prophets of doom forecast the decline of imperial stock back in the 70s but 45 years on it is only a few areas (such as screws) where imperial sizes are starting to fade away. I would always build an odd design in imperial units using those units, and a new metric design in metric. I have started using metric for my new designs as that 'future proofs' them, with the exception of models of old prototypes. It seems a bit daft not to use imperial when modelling an imperial prototype at 1:12 or 1:16 as that means many of the full size dimensions come out as neat equivalents, whilst almost none will if modelling in metric.

Neil

If you have to add 3/64" + 1/2" + 3/32" you'll be reaching for your calculator. I know you can do it by converting everything to 1/64" but the scope for going wrong is massive. You've got to convert to decimal to use a micrometer anyway, unless you have a mic that reads in 1/1024" and a very good capacity for mental arithmetic.

I find Neil's argument that imperial makes things easier for 1/12 scale a bit difficult, it only applies if you're prepared to work in fractions based on 12 (ie 1/12", 1/24" etc). Similarly, scaling say 5&3/8" at 1/16 gives 43/128, which isn't all that handy. My ruler doesn't have 1/12" (or 1/128" for that matter) and bar stock certainly doesn't come in such outlandish units.

I'm not going to dump all my imperial tackle, but I'm not going to buy any more. If we want to interest the younger generation we are going to have to speak their language. They are not going to learn a new system of units.

I too remember doing sums in Imperial, having to remember factors of 32.2, 384, 778, 550, 33000 etc etc did not make life any easier. It is soooo much easier in SI

Edited By duncan webster on 03/09/2017 23:21:04

Hi Neil,

I am not totally sure of that because I'm not too used to it, but I recall having seen fractions in LBSC plans that were divisible by 3. This creates a periodic number with an infinite number of decimals.

As it has been mentioned, this is further complicated because computers store numbers in binary format. Indeed, numbers in computers are represented in a convened binary notation (IEEE-754) that uses a normalised floating exponent of two (also in binary). This representation is commonly known as floating point number. The reality is that an apparently simple decimal number may require an infinite series of binary digits to be an exact representation of the same number. For example the number 0.1 in decimal notation is a periodic number in floating point binary representation, in fact, when converted back from single precision floating point representation to decimal notation, the result gives errors from the 9th decimal place (0.1 converted to IEEE-754 and back to decimal turns to be 0.100000001490116). But I think this is beyond the topic of this forums and of little interest for the discussion that is going on.

Just to clarify my points on my earlier posts, my suggestion all the time was to stick to inches and imperial units for the existing LBSC designs when redrawn in CAD. I am NOT advocating any translation to metric, but just the opposite. However, I manifested my preference for the metric system in general and for any new designs, which should not become the main topic of this thread.

If you have to add 3/64" + 1/2" + 3/32" you'll be reaching for your calculator

A computer program would do it for you

Off the top of my head I would use 256 x 25.4 = 6502.4mm exactly matches 256 inches

So 3 + 32 + 6 = 41 (64ths)

6502.4/64 = 101.6

x 41

/256

= 16.271875 mm

Hmmm. Could get boring after a few hundred times...

Took me about two seconds to get 41/64...

Well you had probably just read the 41/64ths in Ady1's post