I built one of the Peco Hunslet 0-4-0ST kits back in 1989 when the Branchlines chassis became available. This was for O16.5 and ran on Dyffryn Station, Syreford Station and Ashcross Industrial Museum. I have had another kit waiting to be built to 14mm gauge for quite a long time. However, this time I thought I would make a few changes.
The firebox sides have extensions and a stepped cover to clear the original Hornby chassis. These aren’t required for the Branchlines chassis so I cut them off and fitted the stepped cover upside down to give a flat footplate. There are a couple of lugs that have to be removed to make it flush with the rest of the footplate.
My thoughts then turned to the tank and boiler sections. Whilst the flat boiler sections aren’t very noticeable, I thought I would replace them with a round boiler lower section. The motor is horizontal in the boiler and drives the rear axle through a High Level gearbox and drive extender. It just about fits in the firebox and is pretty much out of sight. I had to mount the round boiler section on the chassis as the motor fitted inside it. This meant that the footplate had to have a section cut out at the front to clear the boiler so that the body can be easily fitted and removed.
I decided that it would be easier to build up the tank before removing the flat boiler sides. I started by fitting the front to the top, taking time to get the fit as good as I could and everything square. This gave me a reference to work back from when adjusting the sides to fit. Trial fitting of the tank confirmed that everything fitted together.
Having the boiler lower half fitted to the chassis presented a challenge as I wasn’t sure how to fit the boiler clack valves. These are attached to the injectors which are part of the body but also, strictly, connected to the boiler which is part of the chassis. I wondered about drilling holes in the boiler to take a spigot off the clack valves but just knew I would forget to disconnect these when removing the body. I decided to reuse the cast clack valves that came with the kit. These are part of the tank/boiler/spring castings, the lower part of which I had already cut off the tank side. After a bit of careful (for me anyway) cutting, I managed to liberate these valves. I realised that they had a bit of an upstand above them and that if I replaced this bit with some wire, I could then locate the clack valve into the bottom of the tank, thus keeping the whole assembly part of the body. It also meant that I could keep all the pipework off the body until it was painted, so I could keep the copper colour on the pipes.
Whilst the loco was nearing completion a test run revealed that the buffer beams, which are deep and wide, fouled some of the dummy point levers, which I had thought I had placed well clear of any rolling stock when I (very) firmly attached them to the base board. Whilst I could adjust them to give more clearance I also found that the buffer beams fouled the fiddle yard alignment bolts. That required a bit of filing to reduce the size of the alignment bolt lever. The main culprit with fouling was the motion bracket which is over wide to allow the outside framed chassis to accommodate 16.5mm gauge. Luckily, I didn’t have to remove any material off the motion bracket itself. I also needed to remove some of the undergrowth too!
A poor video but it does show it is running quite nicely and at the right angle you can see daylight under the boiler.