Although the 4MT has been progressing slowly, working on the front plate and lubricators at the moment. A couple of the brackets need tweaking for Scale7 but no photo's at the moment.
Instead, as suggested by our New Year thread, I got sidetracked with a new project.
So my effort at trying something new is this etched brass malarkey. Part of the long terms plans includes a requirement for a Midland 3F Goods tender engine so a JLTRT kit was purchased last year. When I first looked at the kit I realised it would need a bit of tweaking for Scale7. The chassis for the loco and tender are one piece etchings to fold up into a U shape, so these would be too narrow for Scale7. So these will need cutting, they also had fixed bearings. Having seen some of the postings by others with sprung horn blocks and split axles I thought I would like to try this.
So on New Year's day I dug the box out to have a look at making a start on the tender, I very quickly realised why people refer to them as NQLTRT. Just putting the axle box castings on the side frames to suss out how to set out the chassis and I very quickly realised something wasn't quite right.
As can be seen in the photo the oval cutout, marked A, is in the wrong place being too far to the right to the extent that the cutout disappears under the axle box No.3! On top of that the curve, marked B, is wrong as well, again disappearing under axle box No.3. The frames also stick out from under the axle box which they shouldn't and finally across the top are tabs to slot into the baseplate of the tender, unfortunately these don't line up with the slots!
I did contact Laurie about the errors, he acknowledged the problem but it's an old photo tool and prohibitively expensive to update although may get round to it in the future.
Anyway I wanted to try something different for the inner chassis with springing and split axles and the intention was to get these etched because if it works I'd consider releasing them through the Scale7 group to help others convert the kit.
So I looked to the various guidelines on drawing up artwork for etching, I downloaded Draftsight to try out but I struggled to get my head around it. It just didn't seem to work as I expected it to do. So looking around for other alternatives I tried QCAD and liked it.
So my first effort at etched artwork is this for the outer frames.
Still got the inner chassis to design but any feedback or comments on this would be appreciated, as this is the first time I've tried this I'm still trying to work out what works, fortunately just a flat frame so no folds required. I've still got to design a little Cherry logo to copyright the artwork but otherwise I think it's complete.
.
