Inspector Meticulous called...

A good friend of mine and fellow live steamer of great skill and attention to detail had a little conversation with me about my work.
Taking it in good stride, I saw eye to eye with him and decided to revisit everything that I have done thus far.

By everything, I mean EVERYTHING with LBSC.

It was a good idea to say the very least, I caught myself slowing down the pace a lot and focusing more on the little details to really make these designs stand out and appear complete.

Here's how Pixie is coming so far.



Of course there are little bits and blobs that have to be attended to still, but all the same I feel much better about slowing down with the pace that I was going at and this idea of revisiting what all I have done.

The next locomotive I will be drawing will be Annie Boddie, probably, or the Six Year Old's 4F.

Since I am on the kick of doing the 2 1/2" gauge locomotives, the next up for the meticulous treatment will be Rose of course. There are a lot of locomotives in this gauge that will need to be drafted I'm afraid, more than any other gauges combined in fact.

However, there is some good news: I have found drafts for a hand full of the locomotives I had considered "lost" once. Also, I have most of the information I needed to draft the locomotive I was very excited to get my hands on: Zoe.

Of course, I will draw her twice, once in each scale.

The 3 1/2" gauge boiler will probably be the most complex boiler I have ever drawn, it's massive, its different, it's weird, its beautiful all at the same time.

Take care everyone!

PS: I still really need scans/copies of English Mechanics stuff. That is where I am hurting really badly.

So the level of detail has been increased on this little locomotive but this time I did it more correctly.
I have found myself doing quite a bit of reading through other locomotive articles and taking notes of Curly's methods to do little detail parts here and there. Prime example: the hand rails are held on by using little split pins that have been threaded.

The back head fittings and bits inside the boiler are all that remains now, the lubricator and outside piping was put into place after this rendering was made.

I really don't regret the decision to go back, slow down and do this in a much more meticulous fashion than I had before.

Although at times it does try my patience.

I think mention of the Inspector has frightened people off...

So here she is, effectively done for the time being.
The back head bits are sourced from other models, and since I would rather not go digging around through a bunch of other designs at the time being I will wait until I have proper valves for the back head.
Other than that and some other small parts where the sun doesn't shine (such as the blower pipe) she is ready to go. In a matter of speaking.

I decided to do the Six Year Old's 4F because it literally shares a mountain of parts with this beauty and Rose.

PS Neil, you are still getting a caterpillar out of me.

But with an American twist.

Here begins the Six Year Old's 4F.

Curiously it's a lot (and I mean A LOT) like Rose- but at the same time with a few annoying differences.
All in good fun- I guess?

There is good news about the 4F:

It's basically rose to a large degree. A lot of the parts are carrying over, such as the crank axle, cylinder, pistons, steam chest, piston, lubricator. Some of this even came from the Pixie.
The bad news?

This is going to be a fill in the blanks project AGAIN. I think that I am going to end up drawing it both with a Belpaire firebox (like the prototype) and with out (like the LBSC design) which won't be too bad. I haven't done a Belpaire firebox yet, this should be exciting?