NSWR D50 Progress

Recent progress on my current modelling project has been held up due to a fairly busy patch in my life with lots of things happening all within the space of a few months. I’ve also been carrying out some long overdue DIY home improvements that have eaten up most of my free time. Over the past few days I’ve been working on some machining tasks on my milling machine and lathe and working to get these done in preparation for carrying out a few tasks on the my current locomotive project (the Century Models NSWR D50 kit available from ModelOKits when in stock) and an upcoming modelling project that’s in the pipeline. This project will involve scratch building two locomotives and as such I’ve been working on getting some machining fixtures installed on my metal work machines and getting the Myford lathe up and running so it can be used to get a few jobs done that I know I’ll need to carry out as I work through the project.

However, this morning I decided I didn’t feel like struggling with my crummy Seig X2 mill as it wobbled about having a heart attack as I try to get it to come at milling some mild steel and instead went into the modelling room and applied a couple of details to the D50s tender. The accompanying photos show how far along I’ve got with this.

The tender is coming along but taking a close look at the photos I took this morning do show up what I would describe as the flaws in the parts that I will need to address. The holes left by air bubbles in the resin casting and holes in the oil boxes I caused as I drilled them out for the brass bearings will all have to be filled and filed prior to painting. In spite of this the model is starting to look more like a tender.

It may just be my imagination but the tender does seem to be riding high and this photo seems to emphasize this. I’m going to do some checking before I go much further to see if this is the case or whether it’s just an optical illusion.

The handrails at the front edges of the tender aren’t yet attached permanently because I’ve arranged things to allow the body and the chassis to be separated to provide access to the inside where some electronics will be housed. I haven’t yet decided whether glue will be applied to the bracket at the top or to the bottoms of the rails but they will need to be straightened up a bit before I come to a final decision.

One of the jobs I want to carry out on the Myford lathe is to do some turning of the buffer castings that come with the kit. I’ve put a lot of these castings together and getting them to operate smoothly is very reliant on whether you’ve been able to drill out the cast holes central to the casting and how parallel and true the buffer shanks are. They certainly can be made to work with hand tools like files and taper broaches but I feel this job would be made so much easier if I could just come up with a way to hold the parts in the lathe securely. I’ve come up with a plan to do this, work holding is always the major issue in lathe and mill work, but implementing it has turned out to be quite costly and time consuming. Anyway I’ll provide some details of the outcome of these efforts if, and when, I manage to actually get the parts I need to implement it.