At Expong, Japanese modeller Yoshiya Kobayashi expressed an interest in my vertical boiler locomotive. I decided to do a write-up of its construction and share that, not just with him, but also with you.
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So here goes.
Jock was originally built at sea in 1978, without the overall roof it had for most of its existence. The chassis is the Fleischmann rail cleaning locomotive which is very similar to the 0-6-0 industrial diesel. The size of the loco is 56mm over headstocks, 46mm tall including flanges, and 27mm wide.
The roof was added after the loco had to be rebuilt around 1993 when my young sons got loose in the rolling stock case and it dropped to pieces on the laminate floor. The dent in one of the headlights and on the lip of the Seuthe chimney are the result of that incident.
The body shell was built from 1mm styrene. The boiler is a piece of styrene tube which was closed at one end with a laminated styrene disc sanded down to a rounded contour. Inside this, a heat insulation bush was fitted which came with the Seuthe smoke unit that I installed in the boiler.
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On the off side there is a vertical steam engine which is driven from the pinion on the motor shaft, via an intermediate gear. The steam engine rotates very fast indeed, at the same speed as the motor. A reduction gear would have been better, but space didn't allow this. Probably if the model had been fitted with much finer gears it would have been possible. Another improbable detail is the chain drive cases under the steam engine. Shay-type drive shafts would have been more probable because the axis of rotation of the crankshaft is wrong for a chain drive.
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The gear visible on the crankshaft is a Fleischmann nylon intermediate gear that came with a steel shaft and two bronze bearing blocks. The bearings are a push fit into the styrene bracket sides I made from 1mm styrene. The piston and connecting rods are in one piece and were made of wire with the insulation still attached. The cranks are discs of styrene punched out with a paper punch. They were drilled and are a push fit on the crankshaft. The crankpins came from a 1960s Minitrains Baldwin.
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The chassis had to be modified. Originally there was an intermediate gear fitted inside the body shell, but I found this tended to push the body upward off the chassis. So I rebuilt the intermediate gearing, using two brass brackets with bearings soldered on. These were glued to the plastic top of the chassis. The gearshaft is glued into the bearings - the intermediate gear is loose on the shaft.
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Finally, the LEDs in the firebox which show through the open firedoor, and the connections to the smoke unit. This is shown in the next photo. The LEDs are connected in parallel and in opposite polarities. They have a common series resistor of 1K value. They were soldered to the pickup spring strips on the top of the plastic chassis cover. The smoke unit is fed over two phosphor bronze springs soldered to the connector clips of the motor - a tiny piece of PCB on the chassis top. When the chassis is pushed into the body shell, they make contact with the wires of the smoke unit.
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The photo album is here: http://www.009dutch.nl/archive/2015/album/2015jock/index.htm (http://www.009dutch.nl/archive/2015/album/2015jock/index.htm)
To complete this post, here is a youtube video showing Jock running on the layout. Note that the whirling rods seem to go more slowly than they really do - it's the frame rate of the video that lags behind!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4tpOPYqK2A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4tpOPYqK2A)
An excellent loco Ted. Thanks for the pictures and explanation.
I have also used the exellent rail cleaning chassis. You can also get a non-cleaning version and even a rack one if that takes omeones fancy for a future project. They have a fairly long wheelbase but are good and reliable runners in my experience. Beware of the DCC ones as it will not work straightaway on DC without changing the CVs.
Thanks, Jim - the main drawback is the noise they make. I used several of the 6-wheel ones in tender drives and other locomotives, and they are excellent runners. I didn't know there were DCC versions.
By the way, I found the actual resistor used for the LEDs isn't 1K, it's 470 ohms (coded yellow, purple, brown). It depends on the type of LED used, and these are very old ones. I suppose I lowered the value till they shone brightly enough! Since they have been all right for almost 40 years, I suppose the value is all right.