Your Projects

After a bit more work, the castle conversion now looks like this:

and what's more, it runs like this:

Towards the end of the run it was suffering from a slight slow down every 4th turn of the wheels. I have others that do this, but haven't figured out a decent fix yet, something to do with the timing shaft I believe.

There's no whistle at the moment as I haven't worked out how to fit one in. I did cut one down until it fitted, but by that time it had stopped whistling (or maybe only so dogs could hear it). Also, there's no coupling at the rear of the tender yet.

I was thinking what other locos did Hornby Dublo make and a Dublo 'Barnstaple' locomotive looked promising - a large 4-6-2 Pacific. Still the wrong region for me, but it's what we have.....

The 4-6-0 Castle looks interesting, but is way above my current skill level, but member David is currently making a superb conversion....

A West Country body from Fleabay was purchased ....

The boiler is narrower than the Duchess, so an A3 looks likely to be the doner drive system..

Some time ago, probably last year, at a club roadshow, we commented that there were no GWR live steam locos on the club layout. After some thought, I decided to try and convert an A3 into a Castle, based around an old Hornby Dublo cast body. I've finally made a bit of progress, so here are some photos etc.

I started the tender first, but the Hornby boiler is too tall/wide to fit into the Dublo casting. I bought some 25mm copper tube (Hornby boiler is 32mm) and added a set of live steam parts to convert it into a smaller/longer boiler that stood a chance of fitting inside the Dublo tender once I had machined it out as much as I dare.

I haven't bothered with a new frame to space the wheels correctly, but just cut down the Hornby plastic and threw away the trailing axle. It wil…

So, this build started several years ago, but got left behind when I got to starting the tender conversion....I didn't have the tools to do it..... so I have recently bought a cheap drill, for tackling the tiny holes that need drilling for some of the threads required...

The drill is very basic, but has speed control and can hold drills from 0.4 - 4mm ( though I doubt it has the power to drill much above 3mm - depending on material )

First up was to drill and tap the threads for the heater electrical connections/

As the Stanier tender has totally different axle spacings to the Gresley tender, the electrical pickups needed modifying.