Burrell Special Scenic showman’s road locomotive
Win’s award-winning Burrell Special Scenic showman’s road locomotive has featured in Australian and English model-engineering magazines and been compared to the 1921 Lord Lascelles, regarded as one of finest on the UK rally circuit. The four-inch (103mm) model of the early 20th-century English traction engine is about eight feet long, or one-third fullsize, and took Win around 5000 hours over six years to build.
“I got a set of drawings out from the UK but there were quite a few mistakes in them which was frustrating,” he says. He also realized that it was going to be a mammoth task involving making 86 wooden patterns before construction even began.
He started off with the wheels, fitting spokes to the centre castings before attaching rolled rims to the strakes and sending the wheels away to be rubbered. After machining out the front and rear axles, he got to work on the boiler, which was constructed to SGS M&I (General Society of Surveillance Marine and Industrial) certification standards. Win had the barrel plates rolled and welded before forming the tube plates, which involved drilling holes for the 18 tubes to be inserted. Once the firebox and stays had been formed and the tender bolted on, he set to work on the horn plate, rolled and fitted the smokebox, cast the cylinder block, and attached the pistons and rods.
Win undertook all the motion work himself, fabricating the three-speed gears along with the final drive and differential in his workshop. The biggest machining job on the traction engine, apart from the cylinder block, was the crankshaft. This was made out of a hulking piece of 4340 high-tensile steel, six inches round and 28 inches high (154x718mm), lathing it down from each end as it was too heavy to lift off the floor. At the other end of the scale, he hand-filed the small bronze bell after forming the outer shape on his lathe, and used a regular cross-hatch wood file to imprint the tread on the step. Once the crankshaft and bearings were in place, Win rolled the chimney, finishing it with a brass rim, and attached the gauges and sight glasses.
One job that needed a little more consideration and help from his son, Mark, an electronics expert, was how to