Innehållsförteckning för January 2023 från Engineering in Miniature

As soon as the cab footplate was ready and finalised it was time to sort out the loco to tender coupling arrangement. The exact design is largely immaterial as it's not visible, and I tend to leave them coupled permanently except for extensive maintenance or repair work. I used most of the original pieces I had acquired but I modified them as they were originally coupled much too far apart. I think it looks better to get the distance from cab side to tender side correct (I made it about 16-17mm depending on the drawing you choose) and to make sure that the footplate of the cab and tender match in height and extension and don't clash on your minimum radius curve. The original tender coaling plate was about 5mm…

I recently had to machine 12 bearing carriers for the carriage bogies at the Fairbourne Miniature railway – the lathe I have does is not yet set up with a digital read out so to make my life easier I added a couple of extras on the lathe. One is a simple bed stop that clamps onto the lathe bed to halt the carriage at a set position. The other is a dial indicator – this is held on a magnetic base on the carriage with the pointer contacting the cross slide. I carefully machined the first bearing carrier to get the final set positions correct, zeroed the dial indicator, then proceeded to machine the rest of the carriers with minimal fuss and maximum accuracy. ■ Do YOU have a…

Okay, having read the first part of this series last month you have decided on which loco to build. You have your machines and hand tools. You have your set of plans and some materials to hand and you are keen to make a start. Firstly, if possible get the plans scanned and saved as a PDF file. I have used my home A4 scanner to copy small sections of plans. Using one of the many drawing programmes out there (you can find many free ones online – I use a programme called Inkscape which is open source and is free to download) you can clip just the bit you want and print it out to a very accurate actual size. I found doing this to be of great use…

At the start of 2022 the availability of future coal supplies was raised as a potential problem, with all heritage railways suddenly finding themselves in doubt as to what fuel they'd be able to buy and burn. Welsh Dry Steam Coal is the perfect fuel for steam locomotives, however the washery at Ffos-Y-Fran colliery in south Wales, the only company still mining this coal, had broken down. As the planning permission for the mine was scheduled to end in October 2022 and the coal is only washed for the heritage sector, the company had deemed it uneconomical to repair the washery and so supplies were about to dry up. The supplies were always expected to end in late 2022/early 2023 so the inevitable had just happened a few months early.…

After the heady heights described last month of delivering the new Simplex locomotive into traffic, followed by an evening train to Penrhyn Point to watch the Barmouth firework display, life in the Fairbourne Miniature Railway workshops returned to normal, with a report coming through of one of the brake van's hand brakes “feeling weird”. Upon inspection it was found that one of the ears that transmits the force from the thread on the bottom of the hand wheel to the bell crank had fallen off. This combined with a known fault from the pull rod of the brake gear resulted in me lifting the carriage and removing the offending bogie and the bell crank – this proved to be hard work due to the crank being a single welded piece…

Stationary engines offer a lot to the model engineer – they are generally not that difficult or time-consuming to build and when complete are great to operate or simply display on the mantelpiece, allowing one to say proudly “I made that” in response to the inevitable questions from visitors. In this excellent new 176-page hardback Stewart Hart describes in detail everything you need to know about building such engines, even if this will be your very first model engineering project. The book opens with an in-depth description of what the stationary engine is and how it works, with plenty of easy-to-follow diagrams making understanding the processes much easier. Stewart then details what one needs in the form of workshop equipment to build such a model, before going on to describe…

Elsewhere I have described the making of a flat-bottomed pocket. To produce this I did not have a milling cutter of the right size available, so I made the tool that is described here. I started with a taper-shank drill that had suffered the destruction of its edge and tip at some point in the past, so was pretty useless as a drill without major work being done to it. I turned down the taper on the lathe to fit the largest ER32 collett chuck I have before starting to grind the tip. I ground the whole thing completely flat to start with, before grinding the rake on the cutting edges to about 10 degrees. Further uses The suitably-modified drill then performed excellently as a flatbottomed boring tool and it…

The displays, clubs and societies are the backbone of any exhibition and this is certainly true about the Midlands event. This year's show at the Warwickshire Event Centre on 13th-16th October was an excellent presentation by all concerned and made for a real tribute to the originator of the exhibition Chris Deith. The opening day saw the entrance queue stretching right back to the car park before opening time so a good attendance was anticipated. It turned out to be a great day for the organisers with the old exhibition atmosphere quickly being generated and the visitors filling the hall. The 2022 exhibition was slightly smaller than in previous years simply because of the aftermath of the Covid pandemic – it was not known what sort of reception the event…

GENERAL NEWS Plans are underway to revive the spirit of a line that was once one of the UK's premier miniature railways, with the first step restoring its locomotives and rolling stock to operating condition. Built in 1907 to 10¼-inch gauge as a fairground railway in Sutton Coldfield, east of Birmingham, the Sutton Miniature Railway was regauged to 15-inch just a year later, and operated until the First World War. It was then revived in the late 1930s on a longer route through parkland, and ran until 1962 when it closed and its stock, including 4-4-2 Atlantic locomotives ‘Sutton Belle’ completed in 1930, and the 1950-built ‘Sutton Flyer’, was put into storage. In 2000 the collection transferred to the Cleethorpes Coast Light Railway with the aid of a Heritage Lottery…

Notice Board is a free service that readers are welcome to take advantage of. If you have something for private sale, are searching for that elusive casting or drawing, or just want to alert your fellow model engineers to something of potential interest to them, then send in details to the address on page 3, marked ‘Notice Board’ and we'll put it in! FOR SALE: Myford Super 7 Connoisseur lathe, one of the last original company examples. Exceptional condition, little use, considerable amount of tooling all virtually as new. DRO fitted to two axis, unused since 2007 and continuously stored in dry heated workshop. Email for full specification to EdParrottMyford@outlook.com OIRO £14,000…