A few pics of a background project that we have in the workshop currently. We are working our way through a Modelworks Jubilee.
After the success that we have had with the Britannia and the King Arthur, we decided that a great loco could be made from the three cylinder Modelworks Jubilee. We acquired the bits for one, and it's been progressing steadily over the past month or two in between other projects. The full details of the project are our closely guarded secret,.... which we could tell you about, but would of course then have to kill you! Suffice to say that we are seeing how far we can take a basic modelworks loco without having to remake the whole thing!
First up is a little gallery of the mods that we have made to the standard Modelworks steps. The standard steps delivered with the MW kits were machined from solid blocks of brass, and crudely so! They are a dead give away for a kit built model and we think they look awful. We've retained them, but as you can see, we milled them down to broadly the correct specification, and then with a good bit of filing, drilling, riveting and punching (having made an appropriate dolly),..... we are quite pleased with the result. Much more like the real thing!
Next up we have machined up new cylinder covers for both the cylinders and the valves, front and rear. These are machined up from solid but with a very thin wall section, and have been riveted and detailed accordingly. The intention is to hold the front and rear cylinder covers on with the scale cylinder relief valves that will go on later.
At the same time, the buffer beams were found to be way too thin for our liking, to an incorrect profile and with rivet detailing a long way from the prototype. So we've cut and machined up new ones to the works drawings.
The wheels were next to receive attention. Although keyed onto the axles the keys were insubstantial and brass, so we machined up new tight fitting square keys from key steel to do the job properly. The cast in balance weights were nothing like the real thing either, so we picked our full sized loco, and then made card templates for the prototypical balance weight profiles (different for all wheels). We then machined away the excess material, filed in the spokes again, and then filled back to the exact shape we required. Makes a big visual difference to the overall look of the model and well worth the effort.
Next up, the standard modelworks valve guide bracket needed some attention to make it right. However, having scaled down from the full size drawings, we decided it would be just as easy to start from scratch and make new ones. We first went to the Castings that are available for the Allcock designed Jubilee, but for reasons that will ultimately become clear in this little 'blog' we decided to machine from scratch. So that's what you see in the photos below.
