GCR Class 5A - LNER/BR J63

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
In an attempt to get caught up with my backlog of builds I have taken a leaf out of Roger’s book and have decided to try to build one loco during the week and a second over the weekend. The idea is once I am on top of my back log of commissions, I will build my own stuff on a weekend.


Having made the decision a couple of weeks or so ago, I made a start that weekend on a GP Models Robinson GCR Class 5A. I previously built one of these for myself but finished mine as an LNER J63. Which the Class 5A became, when inherited by the LNER in 1923. This one is to be finished as a GCR example.


Upon opening the box I found that the gent that I am building it for had already supplied a few extras but after examination of the castings bag, it revealed that some of them were quite poor. I Although I replaced a few of the more vulnerable castings like Oilers etc. I don’t recall the castings in my kit as being too bad so I was a little surprised. An exchange of emails later had me placing an order with Laurie Griffin for a few items. The one casting that was in my view poor but not available anywhere as a replacement (that I know of) was the backhead. This is a resin casting and perhaps the moulds were worn from when I got my kit, as mine was perfectly usable.


When I saw the casting I recalled that lurking in a spares box was a piece of brass that I had cut to shape for a round top backhead prior to getting more information and making a second more accurate backhead for a 4mm scale loco around 12 or so years ago. I dug it out and to my delight it only needed a minor amount of filing and a few mm cut off the bottom, to be the right size/shape to replace the resin casting. What it did lack was depth, but that was overcome by soldering a curved strip of etch offcut to the back of it.


This is the original casting which aside from anything else is slightly lopsided.


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This is what I came up with as a replacement which should pass muster in an enclosed cab.


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Finally a side by side shot for comparison.

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Mat T

Member
Look forward to seeing this little loco being built. The lined GCR “dock” tank would be great to see. I have been trying to get my hands on one of these rare kits

Regards

Mat
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Hi Mat,

From what I understand, Tim Thistlethwaite intends to bring them to market again but he has been struggling for time to progress it.
 

Mat T

Member
Yes I had seen and am just waiting. I think these loco’s are typical dock tank engines and have a certain charm. I have a 5” gauge model (in storage) built by my late father and even as a small loco in that scale, it would run for hours and was more powerful than you would expect for a little engine. So, would be keen for a 7mm model of my own.

Hope the build goes well

Mat
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Yes I had seen and am just waiting. I think these loco’s are typical dock tank engines and have a certain charm. I have a 5” gauge model (in storage) built by my late father and even as a small loco in that scale, it would run for hours and was more powerful than you would expect for a little engine. So, would be keen for a 7mm model of my own.

Hope the build goes well

Mat
Thanks Mat, I hope so too as I have already built one of these for myself a few years ago.
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Last weekend I managed to get the basic chassis together with the compensation beams.
One thing to note if anyone comes to build one of these, is that all the spring layers go on the outside of the frames or they interfere with the compensation beams. Needless to say, I had forgotten this from when I did mine and the instructions are a bit vague in this area. Which meant that after making a really neat job of fitting them both sides, I ended up taking them off the back and adding them to the front.
The kit comes with one of the frame spacers in the form of a motor mount which I made use of in my original build but I left out because Brian (Wainwright) whom I am building it for, has supplied an ABC motor gearbox. It does mean that I will have to do something about the holes in the frames though.

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Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Another good session at the bench on Saturday saw the wheels blackened and the Derek Mundy crankpins installed. I have to confess that I am not keen on them. I am not that comfortable with drilling such big holes in the Slaters wheels with the resulting chances of something going wrong.
I enlarged the holes with the pillar drill and I also used the pillar drill to push home the crank pins to keep them vertical and despite that one of them wasn’t in square and needed a little tweak.

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Next up was the coupling and connecting rods, there is a diagram in the instructions on how to cut the coupling rod layers to allow them to articulate on the crankpin. Not knowing any better or having enough confidence to do it any differently that’s how I did mine. Sometime later, Steph Dale went to some trouble to post a “how to” on cutting the rods to show me how to make them articulate as they should.

Having stored this up for a rainy day, I adjusted the cuts and made use of a couple of the spare part rods supplied to make them articulate behind the middle crank pin as they do on the prototype.

There is an etched hole in the outer layer (presumably for a dummy pin) I used this to mark up where to drill the rear layer 6mm. Once all the layers were soldered together and cleaned up, I tapped the hole in the back layer 14ba. Then I threaded some .9mm nickel rod 14ba and made a nut from tube files to a hexagon. Once soldered to the threaded rod I was able to use a 16ba nut spinner to tighten it in to the rods making a nice neat articulated joint.

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Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Next up was looking on the etches for all the bits for the cylinders and it was at this point that I discovered a couple more frame spacers that aren’t mentioned in the instructions. Thankfully they are quite easy to spring into place having trimmed the tabs shorter. As I was doing the first one I recalled having to do the same exercise when I built mine (and that was despite having Mike Cole’s build notes which seem to have been lost In the house move). What was more puzzling was where each one was supposed to fit within the frames.
Thankfully all I had to do was look under mine to refresh my memory.

I have highlighted the two in question in the photo below.

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The one at the rear is mentioned in the instructions and it needs the hole for the brake cylinder to be to the left as you look towards the front of the loco.

In the apologies section in the instructions Garth apologises for there being no brake cylinder included. Having knocked one up from tube/rod etc. it seems that the reason for omitting it is that it interferes with fitting one of the plunger pick ups (and oddly the spacer had the hole for locating the cylinder in a vertical spacer which necessitated fitting a locating spigot in the side of the cylinder. I would have thought it much simpler to have made the frame space deeper with a fold line that would allow the cylinder to be fixed from the top. I am sure there was a reason why it was designed like that but we will never know what it was.

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I consulted with Brian as to whether to add a wiper pickup instead of a plunger for this wheel and his view was that having gone to the effort of making the cylinder it would be a shame not to use it so a wiper it is.
Having sorted the frame spacers and the brake cylinder I moved onto the sandboxes and the cylinders themselves making reasonable progress. All in all a good weekend’s effort.

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Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
What a difference a day makes (or was it the night off and a bottle of cider?)
Yesterday afternoon I scoured the etches to gather up the 18 parts required to make the two crossheads. As always one of them was quite elusive and took a couple of searches before I found it.

After a little bit of testing to ensure I had them in the correct orientation they were soldered up. They are a very clever design and they were both done in just over an hour without any of the stress of fitting the splasher tops to the J6.

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Following on from this I added the piston rods using some brass tapered clock pins that I bought a while ago. I then assembled the crossheads onto the slide bars and attached them to the motion brackets.
This was followed by the cylinder wrappers and then after cutting short the crank pins I assembled the chassis with the coupling and connecting rods with a view to giving it a test run.
Sadly, this is as far as I got because the Derek Mundy crankpins are so big on the front axle that they won’t clear the crossheads. Although the screw in caps are a reasonable thickness, I don’t think there will be enough meat in them to create the clearance just by filing them down.

At the minute I am pondering what options I have that don’t involve taking the crankpin back out of the wheels. My concern with removing them is getting them back in square without wrecking the wheels.

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Ressaldar

Western Thunderer
Hi Rob,

Yes, the crossheads are a bit of a challenge but very satisfying on completion. The etch design and instruction similarities between the J63 kit and that of the MOK Q1 became very apparent quite quickly when I opened the first Q1 box and I then discovered the working relationship between Garth Patrick and Dave Sharp and the rest as they say is history - what goes round comes round.

I'm looking forward to the next batch of progress photos.

Stay safe and well.

regards

Mike
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
I managed to sort the crank pins and get clearance. I removed the short 10 ba screw from the rear of the Mundy crank pins on the front axle and then cut the pin back to the boss.
I then filed the boss back to approx half thickness and fitted a long 10ba screw through to become the crankpin. A tapped Slaters crank pin now acts as the retainer allowing clearance for the cross heads. I ended up doing a similar but not quite the same exercise on the middle axles in order to get it to run smoothly.

It's runnning in on the rolling road as I type.

 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
I didn’t have much in the way of modelling time this weekend but I managed to make some progress.
I had cut out the footplate and valances last weekend so they were quickly put together via the tabs. The buffer beams were easily laminated and then again attached via tabs. There are four fold ups that represent the ends of the timber backing to the buffer planks these sit in a recess made up from some strengthening plates (parts 89 and 90) Parts 89 are dotted about the etch so took a bit of tracking down. Parts 90 are shown to be quite close together on the plan of the etches but despite spending the best part of an hour looking I could only find two of the four so I cut some replacements from scrap etch and cut one of the tabs off a couple of the part 89’s

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With all the parts found or made it was a simple job to solder it all up to make solid footplate. Then comes the task of chopping all the bits out of the inner cab/tanks/bunker and attaching it to the footplate.

You need to read the instructions thoroughly at this point because if you twist all the tabs you cannot get the overlay to sit in the tab holes. You also need to fit the inner tanks before fitting the overlay because you need to file off all the twisted tabs to get the overlay flat – you will note that in my photo the overlay is still loose as I haven’t filed off the tabs yet.

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Talking of tabs, there is much mention of tabs in the instructions at this point. The cab beading has slots for tabs You will note that to make life a bit easier when fitting them I removed the tabs from the door opening on the inner etch but left them on the overlay. This was a trick I learned from the last build.

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Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
This weekend was a one step forward and two back, weekend. I added the sides and fitted the coal bars to the rear cab side sheet and also dry fitted the cab front and inner cab rear.

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Where it took a step backwards was on one side, I wasn’t sure that the middle of the tank side had soldered properly to the inner former so I ran the soldering iron over it. Unfortunately, due to the very thin material of the overlay (0.1mm) it left an indentation where I had run the iron.

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After consulting with Brian, I removed the side and attempted to remove the indentation but as I suspected it wasn’t possible so I will use the side as a template to make a replacement side from nickel sheet.
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Hi Brian,

I understand where you are coming from and I do appreciate that many tank sides were rippled particularly later in life. That I haven't noticed any rippling on the photos that I have seen of J63's but I haven't seen that many individual photos

This particular loco is to be finished in lined GCR livery so quite early in it's life so less likely to have such rippling.
 

Mat T

Member
It looks like its coming along nicely. Am sure the rectification of the “rippling” will be great. From pictures of these loco’s that I have seen, they tended to be on the well-weathered side, to be polite. Only one or two images from memory of them nearly new and neatly lined in the GC livery and well looked after showed them in tip top condition. I am jealous already!

Keep up the good work

Mat
 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Thanks Mat,

Today’s model making session saw the replacement side created. I still need to solder it in place but I am going to fit a few other bits first. It would have been much extra work to add all the tabs so it will need a little more care to fit some parts in place without the help of the tabs but most kits don’t have tabs on these particular parts so it should present too much of a problem.


 

Rob Pulham

Western Thunderer
Very nice Mat,

As I understand it, Tim Thistlethwaite plans to re-release the J63 kit at some point so you may get your wish.

Regards Rob
 
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