Blimey, I think 'War and peace' was shorter than this! Indulge me with this one please. Looking at the tender for the Berkshire I had a few potential routes to go down including photo etching, laser cutting, resin casting or just scratch building. However, at the back of my workshop was a 'Taylor Hobson' pantograph Engraver. These ancient machines were designed for cutting out small parts, engraving trophies and door plaques and with the addition of a 'Javelin'head spark eroding writing into really hard metals like tool steel. I bought this heavy machine from the estate of a Gun maker when he passed away and took it back to Derbyshire in the back of a Granada Scorpio with the headlights lighting up the sky and the exhaust trailing on the tarmac! It didi sterling service when I was working in gauge 1 and gauge 3 like this Lima Hamilton switcher I built in 1/32nd scale all of the louvres and truck parts were cut out with the machine as were nearly all of the parts of this gauge 3 (1/22,5 scale Standard gauge) Lancashire & Yorkshire railway 0-4-0ST 'PUG' probably the ultimate achievement I did using this machine was this gauge 1 german BR41 2-8-2, Co-incidentally the sister engine to the Donor engine for the Berkshire chassis. Now the thing these have in common is they are all really big compared to the tiny Z scale Berkshires I am on with. The question was, will this old machine screwe down far enough tom do what I want it to do in Z?
Now the way this things works is that the pantograph head reduces the outline pattern at the top and a small D Cutter follows it below and cuts out the reduced outline out of sheet metal. The machine hadn't been used for a few years and was filthy, as you will see on the video. After a good clean and lubrication a pattern was made for the whole of the tender wrapper, sides, ends etc in Plasticard and the video shows how I use photoshop to do the drawing to make the pattern. You can use this technique to mark out sheet metal for cutting if you don't want to go down the route of scribing, just stick the paper pattern on the metal with Kwiktack or similar and cut the bits out with a piercing saw. Once the patterns were sorted I cut out multiple tender wrappers out of a sheet of Nickel Silver The bits box is staring to fill up! Video is here, Bit long but full of ways of doing things you may not have thought of, Still looking at having the Berk test running at Leyland show in August http://youtu.be/ve8ot4w3_9c cheers KEV
You are a true craftsman! Fine work! I am very impressed with this! I can't wait for the finished product!
John, I'll bet that hair cut was accidental when Kevin leaned over too close to the panto graph, Oh well, saved him a trip to the barbers and he doesn't look have bad does he?
Beer has always been my favorite reward for a job well done. Of course sometimes it takes a few to get the hands steady enough to do some work! However, once past 3 or 4 my work tends to deteriorate at a fast pace.
