7¹₄-INCH TEN WHEELER – CAB PLATES & MORE
Photo 166, the loco driver can easily reach the reverser crank, as well as the ratcheted hand brake.
Through the doors, you can glimpse the backhead of the boiler, still in an unfinished state. The two water gauges are visible, and between them is the gland and clevis for the yet-to-be made throttle lever. The fire doors were also still missing when I took this photo.
An open roof
The ‘cosmetic’ roof of the cab (seen in place in Photo 165) is removable. This will make driving the engine much easier than reaching for the throttle through the cab doors. When sitting on the tender, the throttle lever is accessible through the roof opening.
In Photo 167 you can see the four handrail rods emerging through holes in the front wall. With handles, levers and linkages, these rods will control some of the fittings on the front of the loco, such as the drain cocks below the cylinders and the water-pump bypass valve.
The roof is painted with dark grey ‘hammertone’ paint, giving a slightly mottled surface that won’t easily show small scratches and dents, as would a smoothly painted surface. The inside of the cab is painted a light orangeyellow, just like in the prototype.
On the left side of the boiler, on the floor, you can see a clamp holding the boiler in place, while still enabling it to move slightly back-and-forth during thermal expansion. There is a similar clamp on the other side. When firing up the boiler from cold to operating pressure, it will expand by more than 2.5 mm! If there is no allowance for this expansion, severe deformation or even breakage of the boiler fasteners might occur.
The 6mm copper tube seen under the window leads to the feedwater pump, attached to the smokebox. It was described in the July 2020 issue. The cab end of the tube will be connected to a steam valve, installed in the manifold that will be attached to the boiler with a ‘banjo’ union; for now, there is just a brass plug in the threaded bushing on top of the boiler. This manifold will have four steam valves: one each for the electric turbo-generator, the steam whistle, the water pump, and one for the blower in the smokebox.
Looking down into the cab, you see a handbrake lever on the left. This does not exist in the full-size prototype, but I decided to make an easily accessible and quickly applicable mechanical brake, instead of a steam or compressed air brake – these always have a slight time lag before they can brake effectively. The brass lever has a typical ratchet mechanism made of steel.
Also seen in the top view is the reverser crank with its left-handthread, coarse-pitch reverser screw, described in an earlier issue. The frame of the reversing mechanism is a simple weldment made of flat-iron strips, attached to the wheel guard on the running board. The crank handle is oversize – but so is the engineer!
A gas valve and a pressure regulator are on the cab floor, together with a pressure gauge for the propane gas, Photo 168. The six burners are
installed in the firebox with the help of simple, removable braces, seen in Photo 169. A baffle plate closes most of the opening in the bottom of the firebox, there’s only about 3mm of space around the baffle, as well as around the burners, best seen at the burner at top left in the photo of the firebox. If I want to fire this loco with coal or wood, the burners will be removed, and a grate installed instead. That’s a big ‘if’, for sure – I like the simplicity of propane firing!
Platework...
One more addition to the cab is the ‘builder’s plate’ on both cab sides, above the road number. This time, I’ve had them made (for about £30) by a company making old-style metal printing plates. It is quite a hassle to etch them yourself – I should know, getting yellow-stained fingers from the ferric chloride I used to etch the brass plates for my earlier 4-4-0 and 0-6-0! Fortunately, the discolouring wore away in a few weeks…
A friend gave me a real, full-size builder’s plate for my 50th birthday (oh dear, almost 20 years ago – time sure flies!), see at the top in Photo 170. I’ve used that as a guide to prepare a graphic original for my miniature, seen below it.
The original plate is from a 2-8-0 engine, built by the Lokomo works in 1930. My Ten-wheeler prototype was built by the same manufacturer nine years later. From the build numbers, we can deduce that Lokomo only made some 30 locomotives between 1930 and 1939.
Ordering printing plates of magnesium metal for use as builder’s plates, it is very important to tell the company making the plates that the text should be correctly readable on the plates themselves – printing plates normally have the text displayed as a mirror image!
Photo 171 shows the result after I had sawed out the small plates, filed the edges smooth, and filled the depressions with appropriately coloured paint. After that, I rubbed the plates’ front surfaces lightly on a piece of emery paper in order to get the raised letters free of any overflowed paint. Then, I used a yellowish lacquer on the silvery magnesium surface to imitate the brass in the original plates.
On the miniature, less than 5cm wide builder’s plates, the smallest letters are only 2mm high, so I didn’t really bother getting them exactly the same as the original, but used a standard typeface. The larger ‘O/Y LOKOMO A/B’ text had to be manually modified, since there was no matching typeface available on my computer, and I wanted to have at least that text matching the original as closely as possible.
In addition to these two plates, I made a small builder’s plate of my own, with my name and the build years. This will be placed in a less conspicuous position compared to the other plates. The three smallest plates are for the tender, while the 999 plates
are for the loco’s front headlight.
All in all at this stage, my Ten-wheeler project was progressing slowly but surely – Photo 172 shows that the rest of the work yet to be done was mostly cosmetic, boiler and cylinder lagging, for instance.
In order to safely move and transport this heavy locomotive, weighing almost 200 kg, I built a ‘cowcatcher protector’, Photo 173, that enables me to clamp down the front of the loco to the track in my utility trailer – see the April 2019 issue of EIM for the details of how I modified the trailer. Photo 174 shows this simple clamp attached to my workshop ‘track stand’, enabling me to move the loco safely around the workshop without risking it rolling off the track.
For lifting the loco, I made two heavy ‘handlebars’, each having one end removable, Photo 175. Threading the bars through the loco frame front and aft, four people can easily lift the Ten-wheeler and carry it a short distance, as in Photo 176, where the engine is lifted from my track into the storage shed.
n Next month Jan-eric tackles the final details of his Ten-wheeler loco build project.
“I made a small builder’s plate of my own, with my name and the build years...”
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