A picture of the
Broad Gauge convertible
"Armstrong Goods" 1205 .
A model of this engine is under
construction. We use the Scorpio kit as a base
for this model
Pictures of the construction
and the progress of the model will be publicized
at this page.
The Broad Gauge
Armstorng Goods is getting shape. The tender is
almost finished. We need to do detailing work at
the engine but it will take a little time before
the Armstong Goods can make her first trip at the
finished parts of the Kingswear railway. I think
before the end of this year.
Here the Armstrong
Goods in the yards of Kingswear. We put the
engine there to get an impression of the engine
at BG tracks. The axles of the tender need to be
changed in Broad Gauge so the tender is standing
a little bit steep at the tracks.
The insidemotion
of the Armstrong Goods is getting shape. We used
the M. Finney inside motion kit. This kit is not
difficult to build when you have some solder
experiance. The most difficult is to solder the
two cranks on the axle. You need to place the
exentrics between the cranks an then solder the
cranks to the axle. Scorpio supplied a dummy
inside motion with the Armstrong Goods kit. If
you want to make it easy you use these parts.
View from the
front to the back of the frame. Clear visible are
the hornblocks. When the small coilsprings are
placed between the hornblocks and de frame the
axles will be sprung.
General overview
of the frame. We use the S7 standards for the
Broad gauge railway so we turned the wheels at a
Emco Unimat 3 lathe to S7 standards. It's not an
easy job to change the wheels in to S7 but with a
lot of patience it will go. This is my first
experiance with turning the wheels to S7. I did
some practice with some wagon wheels.
Side view when the
boiler is placed there is enough space to see the
inside motion working when the loco is moving. We
did'nt use the dummy inside motion supplied by
Scorpio but used an insidemotion kit of M.
Finney. I like to see the motion moving in the
modelengines so I spend a lot of time to build a
working one.
The frontview of
the BG Armstrong Goods under construction. Clear
visible is the Broad Gauge frame. All the parts
of the boiler, smokebox and firebox had to be
shaped by hand. The material is thin so it was
easy to get the correct roundings and shapes. We
will build the roundtop Swindon boiler version.
The sideview of
the Armstrong Goods under construction. All the
parts are soldered. By using diverend types of
solder it is easy to complete the construction.
You need to have experiance with soldering.
A detail of the
rivets at the engine. The rivets are punched in
the brass and nicklesilver parts using a
rivetting tool of Metal Smith Ltd. This tool is
very good and works fine.
We made the
decision to make a splitframe for the Armstrong
Goods. The splitframe is a construction of two
isolated framesides. The power pickup is through
the hornblocks. The axles had to be diveded in
two isolated parts. The wheeltires are connected
with the splitaxle. The advantage of this
construction is that we don't need powerpickup
plungers. But like all the better solutions it
costs more time to build it. For the Armstrong
Goods we had to make a new frame. In this case we
split the first and third axle and the middle
axle isolated. It's to difficult to split a axle
with cranks. From the tender we split the frame
to and make the three axles split and sprung too.
So we create 10 sprung wheels which pickup the
power from the track.
All the parts
still in the small plastic bags and the etchings
still complete. The work can make a start to
build the Armstrong Goods in the Broad Gauge
version. With this kit a standard or broad gauge
engine can be build. For the Kingswear project we
will build the broadgauge convertible. The tender
is ordered from Broad Gauge Society. The tender
is a pure broad gauge version.
