Passenger Truck Question

[Bill Gill]

Eric, your work is the best kitbashing by far that I've ever seen!

[lab-dad]

Ingenious!
-Marty

[EZnKY]

Thanks guys.  We're all "special" here in our own way!

I will have to admit the need for 8 or 16 copies of everything has slowed me down on this project.  When I started I wasn't looking past this pair of trucks.  I probably should've been making masters to have castings made, but such is hindsight.

The worst will be over once I finish the upper springs seats and have functional equalization gear.  The brake gear will be relatively easy since I can use some of the Hartford parts and things like brake shoes are readily available from several sources. 

[Hydrostat]

Eric,

very beautiful work and interesting to follow your steps. This is going to be a lot of repeating work. I like that  . Do you use a jig for bending the brass wires?

Volker

[EZnKY]

Volker-
Initially I used a scrap piece of the brass tubing as a jig to bend the wire, but I just couldn't get the bends tight enough to fit well.  After some trial and error, I ended up filing a shallow notch in the rod at each bend location, using a small triangular file.  (60° notches.)  The notch allows me to bend the brass with a very tight radius, and the notch isn't really visible after the brass is bent.  I un-bent the first one that fit well and marked the notch spacing on my work surface so I could make all eight of them consistent.

[lab-dad]

Putting the rods in a fixture and making the notches on the mill would make them exact. Not sure you have a mill to go with your lathe though.
I seem to use the mill more than the lathe.

Making multiple parts all the same builds character - and skill!

Marty

[Russell]

Baeutiful, beautiful work with some stunning thinking outside the "box".

[EZnKY]

Marty,
You're correct on the benefits of using a mill.  I do own one - it's a very old and heavily worn Index model 40, made in 1941.  I have very little tooling to go with it, and my skills are novice at best.  ("Hack" is more accurate.)  The machine has a No. 9 Brown & Sharpe taper in the spindle, which complicates things, and I'm finding several of the bearings are too worn for the accuracy I need for modeling purposes.  My grandfather used if for facing steel castings for farm implements and such, and I'm sure it was fine for that.  But not for what I need.  Plus, it's really heavy and takes up a lot of room in the shop.  Rather than buy tooling for it, or having the spindle reground and the bearings replaced, I'm considering buying a smaller CNC setup. 

At this point most of what I do - for good or for bad - is done with the simplest of hand tools. 

[Bill Gill]

Eric, What you accomplish with 'the simplest of hand tools' is inspiring. My modeling is restricted by space, budget and very limited mechanical experience, yet watching your fabrications gives me the idea I can do some of it too. Thanks for posting your process and progress.

[EZnKY]

Folks,
It's been quite a while since I've posted any progress on my passenger car trucks.  I took a break on them to practice my painting and weathering skills.  You'll have to tell me if they've improved once I finish the fabrication and start the final painting and weathering.

Since the last update I have finished all four equalizer beams and all eight sets of upper and lower equalizing spring seats.  Here's one of them with a coat of primer on it.

[EZnKY]

Once the equalizers were done and I assembled a truck, I realized I didn't like the appearance of the 24" diameter wheel sets I originally planned on using.  So I'm using 26" wheels instead, which means I needed to make a new set of larger brass overlays for the raised lettering.  It was easier the second time I guess...

[EZnKY]

Last weekend I shifted my attention to the pedestal braces and tie rods.  Many companies made their trucks with the pedestal braces and the tie rods as separate pieces, bolted together.  The Ohio Falls prototype I'm modeling has these fabricated as a single piece.  (I think they originally started out as two pieces of bar stock with a rod between them, and then the three were forge welded together.)  You can see the tie rod is tight against the equalizer bars.  I decided to leave a little space between the face of the equalizer bars and the pedestal tie rods.  I don't know how much the trucks are going to "spring" and move around since I haven't built the car these will support yet. 

[EZnKY]

I made the pedestal braces first, bent them to shape to fit the pedestals and the end beams, and then filed an "S" curve on the ends toward the center of the truck.  The S curves were my starting point for the transition from flat bar to round rod.  A short section of brass rod was cut to fit, with the right amount of overlap with each pedestal brace.  You might be able to see that I pre-rounded the ends of the rod to save me some tricky filing later.  While the pedestal braces on each side of each truck were bolted in place, I cut a chipboard spacer to fit exactly between the tips of the S curves.  This allowed me to remove the pedestal braces and clamp them to a scrap piece of wood, using the chipboard template to get the spacing between them correct.  Once everything was spaced correctly, I soldered the brace rod to the two pedestal braces, using a lot of solder to create a fairly large fillet between the pieces.

I wasn't able to find brass flat stock that was the right width and thickness for the pedestal braces, so I ended up having to anneal and flatten square brass tubing. 

[EZnKY]

Here's how they looked after massaging the soldered joints with files and sand paper.  Each piece differs slightly, but this is also true on the prototype!

[EZnKY]

And here's how they look with some black primer on two of them for comparison.