A Tale of another dog!

This is a commission job that's been kicking about on my work bench or in the work drawer for much too long. It's really about time it was finished, although my friend who I am building it for said "no rush" I think that after 12  months I should get it done!

The model involved is a K's kit of a GWR Bulldog 4-4-0

The tender is complete and the loco body is now 99% finished, needing handrails and the smaller details to complete.
The entire loco and tender body are white metal and I assembled the kit with Car's Lo Melt 70deg solder.

The chassis was fraught with problems.
The wheels supplied by the client were a very nice set of romfords, but they were too big a diameter and fouled the body work when the body was fitted to the chassis.
I ordered a new set of drivers from W&T, These are similar to Romfords and fit on the Romford axles the same way. The major difference is that the W&T wheels have plastic centres and cost half the price!
The drive is from a small Mashima motor with a Comet models double reduction gearbox with a ratio of 38:1

 One other problem I have is with the power pick ups.To help with this I used the kit's supplied tender chassis with phosphor bronze strip pick ups to the two outer tender wheel sets.
The biggest problem with this idea though is getting power across the gap between loco and tender.
This means that the tender and loco will be semi permanently coupled.



How ever to make it removable I made a plug and socket arrangement from brass tube and brass wire.
The draw bar is secured with a couple of brass 10BA pins and nuts. therefore the tender and loco can be separated for maintenance and repairs.

 The picture here shows the tender right way up and the drawbar and interconnect can be clearly seen.  The drawbar has been made long enough to allow the loco to negotiate the tight curves of Peco set track.
The client wants the loco finishing in a mid blue colour with gold lining!
he is building a fictitious layout of a line built by a small pre grouping company using locos bought second hand from the GWR




I'll post an update once some more work has been done on this project.

Cheers
Frank