Gladiator LNER/BR J6

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With the end in sight for the J79 my thoughts have started straying to the next build which is to be an LNER/BR J6 (ex Great Northern Railway) This is to be built from a Gladiator Kit which originated in the George Norton Connoisseurs Choice range (according to the etches). Extras include full inside motion from Laurie Griffin along with a few of his detailing parts. Once it's painted (by Warren Haywood) I will then be weathering it and adding the finishing touches.


We start with what's in the box.



 
First the brass castings and turnings





Then the very cleanly cast white metal details.








 


Then the etches, 


The chassis etches are quite substantial nickel silver etches, but the body etches feel much thinner so I suspect that they will require a bit of careful handling until they are soldered into a rigid structure.
 



 Wheels and Pick ups





Finally the extras, These are all from Laurie Griffin and were my suggestions to the gent that I am building it for to not only enhance it but to replace the vulnerable etched lamp irons.




   To Visit Rob's Coaching stock thread go             HERE




    To Visit Rob's Wagon Kit Bashing Thread go      HERE

                                                                                                                                             âœ”   B
                                                                                                                                                     



Regards Rob
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Blimey!  There's no stopping you is there?  Marvellous stuff.  One of these days I might just get inspired to tackle my 1F.   :lol:

John

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Great stuff here.  Hope you will give us a blow by blow account of your progress Rob.

reg
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Hi Reg,

 Yes, that's the plan.

The J6 is is officially underway,

I decided to build the tender first to get a feel for things and the plan is to use the tender for the pickups so hornblocks were fitted. The good news for this plan is that there were etched cut outs for fitting them with certainly simplified things.

All the wheels are blackened but I need to stock up on steel 10ba csk screws because I haven't enough to do the drivers.
The horn guides are Finney but I seem to have misplaced the strips for retaining the hornblocks so I used a trick borrowed from Warren Haywood and used surplus 12ba nuts and bolts from Slaters crank pins to create retainers. In fairness I could have probably just soldered strips of scrap etch across the bottom because the Slaters wheels are easy to remove.

At the minute there is a lot of side play. I plan to leave this for the moment because the finished model has to negotiate 5' radius curves. 














You will note in the last photo that I shimmed the spacers with some scrap etch I am not sure whether I really needed to but it helped to level the space with the top of the frames and to get a tighter fit with the rear spacer that goes through the frames mid way. I suspect that if I had tested it without removing the etching cusp I may not have needed it.


Regards Rob
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Although it looks to have been a little quiet on the J6 front things have been progress albeit that it's taken a slight detour. 

After careful study of the tender in the photo v's what came with the kit, my client decided that he would prefer a different tender to make the loco match the photo. The alternate tender is now on order from David Hill at Gladiator but won't be available until March. I plan to continue to build the original tender, if for no other reason than to make sure I don't lose any of the bit's off it. - I have made a little more progress which I will share at some point.

Which means that thoughts have turned to the loco itself. I am very gratefully receiving help and guidance from Paul Pen-Sayers (@Locomodels) on building and fitting the inside motion in the chassis and I have been given Carte Blanche by my client to replace items in the same manner as I would if building it for myself.

So far I have elected to obtain some Premier coupling rods and some driving wheel springs from Ragstone. The latter I will need to modify but they will look a bit more like springs than the rather 1D etchings attached to the frames. In fairness to the kit, the etches are labelled 1992 and things have moved on a bit in the detail stakes since then.

This is what I mean  by 1D they are a single layer etch with just the outline of the strap that retains the leaves.



The reason I elected to go for the Premier rods is similar, in that the rods provided are only dual layer with the back layer half etched and they are designed to pivot on the crank pin rather than the knuckle joint. I could perhaps have modified them to pivot on the knuckle but without adding another layer from scratch, I felt that they would still be a bit on the delicate side for coupling rods. Paul of course made a superb job of those for Heather's build and I am guessing that he made up some additions in his workshop.

Moving swiftly on, I have started to clean up the inside motion parts and slipped some of them onto an axle to see how they fit.


 

 Much more work to do on them of course - including attempting to straighten those straps…





Last edit: by Rob Pulham


Regards Rob
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I'll be watching this inside motion thing Rob.  Very neat.  This is where handbuilt models soar above RTR.  My J50 has inside motion.

John

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Hi John,
Much as I might fancy my J50 to have inside motion, I have kit's with much more space visible under the boiler than the J50 and at around £90 a set I need to be a bit choosy which I put it in. 

So far I have 3 kit's with inside motion put by, an F3, an F8 and a J25. The F3 and J25 are variations on Stephensons motion (single slidebar as opposed to the 4 slidebar version on the J6) while the F8 has Joy type.

Regards Rob
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Proper miniture engineering going on.   Well done Rob. :thumbs.

reg
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Thanks Reg,
As mentioned elsewhere a lack of time and energy has allowed me to do a few small jobs on the J6 that didn't require anything that wasn't therapeutic.

Although David had advised that it wouldn't be available until March it was a pleasant surprise when an email suggested that it could be collected at Bristol show. Warren Haywood very kindly collected it for me, so the build has resumed. Perversely I have decided not to start with the tender but to get the loco frames done next - it's to have working inside motion.

Parts of the etches do show their age and so it is with the loco springs which are a very basic etch. My client has asked me to build it as if it were for me so I have the discretion to obtain replacements for anything that I think could be improved upon.

The Hornblocks are Finney and were from stock so I will need to pick up some replacements for them from the Guys when I see them next.




The spring castings are from Andy Beaton  at Ragstone Models and will be modified to make them look more like the J6 springs before fitting.



Regards Rob
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Further progress has the chassis together and ready for the fitting of the hornblocks.

Despite the quite substantial frames there was still a bit of flex in between the two main spacers and the rear one which is just soldered to the top left the bottom of the chassis with a tendency to splay outwards. To get over this I have temporarily soldered a third frame spacer (labeled motor spacer in and I also cut one of the wider frame spacers down and soldered it upright to take out the splay at the rear. 

As is comes there are three sets of spacers, marked from when it was blown up from a 4mm kit 00 gauge, EM gauge and P4 I am using the EM gauge spacers as a compromise between getting int to go around 5' curves and having sufficient room to fit the inside motion.






Before I go any further I am going to rework the springs and fit them before adding the Horn guides.

Regards Rob
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A spring in the step,  or should that read, "some steps with the springs" (groan!)

We started with this.




I then patiently cut that down to get these separate pieces



What I am aiming for is a 3D profile of these





Then I started to re-assemble them - and to misquote Eric Morecambe all the right bits but not necessarily in the right order….




Monday evening should see them ready to fit (I hope!)

Last edit: by Rob Pulham


Regards Rob
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…to also misquote Morecambe "tiny but perfect in every detail".  I can't see a way to get in "short fat hairy legs" though.

John

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That made me chuckle John. Eric M was a comedy genius

Regards Rob
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Yes Rob, nobody around today can touch those chaps from the 60 and 70s.

John

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To conclude this chapter here is part 3 of the modification. The plan is to drill and tap the frames 12ba and use them to retain the hornblocks.



I just need to pick up some more 12 ba screws at Kettering .

Regards Rob
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The last couple of evenings have been spent removing the rest of the motion parts from the sprues and cleaning them up. All I need to do now is work out where it all goes….



Regards Rob
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Yikes, looks complicated.   :shock:  Beautiful looking bits though.  I'm thinking inside valve gear so it will be an education to see how you put everything together.

John

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Hi John,
I suspect that I could have found an easier set of motion than this to make my debut. The GNR version of Stephensons is a little more complex than the Midland version that the motion set is designed around so I will need a bit of scratch build methinks to make it work as it should. That said my client probably wouldn't know the difference as long as it works and neither would I until I started to research it….

Regards Rob
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I had originally planned to go to Kettering show this weekend with a stop over on Friday night. Taking the decision not to go has given me an extra couple of days of thinking/modelling time in which to really get my head into the inside motion.

Fellow modeller Paul Penn-Sayers had offered to cut out a motion plate for the J6 for me. Paul has also supplied lots of information and patiently answered my 'newby' questions regarding inside motion for which I am eternally grateful. While I fully intended to take up the offer events somewhat overtook me.

While studying the GA drawing to work out which bit was which on Wednesday evening I had the thought of importing it into Inkscape (the drawing package that I use to draw for the silhouette), rescaling it to 7mm scale and then highlighting the components that make up the motion so that I could see what they are.



You can see the difference in the layout of the motion compared with the Midland variation in which the motion set from Laurie Griffin is based - below is a snip from the LG instructions.



While I was doing my stuff in Inkscape, Chris suggested using my silhouette to create a template for the motion plate to test whether it would fit between the frames etc. I thought that a great idea and within a very short space of time I had drawn up and cut this



I used that to transfer the measurements onto a spare frame spacer and drilled/cut filed it out. Due to using it as a template to scribe around, some of the measurements were fractionally over size, while the internal ones were slightly undersized. I kept filing until the slide bars fit and I got this. - I added the framing top and bottom afterwards.

am, on Flickr

Looking at Paul's and Nick Dunhill's superb motion plate examples,  I realise that I will have to file some relief in the tops and bottom of the slide bar seats/openings in a similar manner to the centre opening where the eccentric rods will pass through, in order to allow for the up/down movement of the piston rods.

This is it in the frames - held by a blob of Blue tack



Although as I say I am very grateful to Paul for his offer to cut one out for me and looking at the example posted by Heather Kay on Western Thunder, it would have been of a much higher fidelity than my first effort has achieved but it's a skill learned and Paul's help has helped me to make sense of GA's which has previously eluded me  - all the lines blurring into a shapeless mass. Another skill which will only improve with practice and should translate into better quality models at the end of it.

Regards Rob
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That's some lovely engineering Rob.  Some great lessons for others.   :hmm

John

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