Castings

[waggy]

Hello Peeps,

There's been a lot written recently re price of castings and materials, thought I'd stick my pennyworth in!

I'm currently building a 5" Duchess to Michael Breezes' drawings. When I started three years ago I got in touch to ask him about availability of castings, he had some but didn't intend to keep a full stock as he was "streamlining" his operation. This presented me with a problem, buy what was available in one go or fabricate? I chose the latter option and am glad I did. Motion brackets, stretchers, support angles,etc are dead easy to make from mild steel silver soldered together. On some items where a web or large fillet show on the real thing, I've soft soldered webs into place and run soft solder onto the required angle to create the effect of a web. Silver solder doesn't form good size webs, it runs too thinly when molten.

I cut the main stretchers from 6mm black mild steel, flanges silver soldered on and machined square. Make them slightly wider than required, leaving a bit to machine off. I machined the three cylinder blocks from solid cast iron. The steel and cast iron came from the off cut pile at a local steel merchants, "one mans scrap is another mans gold" and all that! The steel cost a fiver, the lumps of iron for the cylinders cost fifteen quid!

I then had some spare cash to get the wheels from Reeves.

My thread is this, think, do you need all the castings? Have a go at fabrication, it's not hard and if you make a mistake the thing can always be unsoldered or scrapped at a fraction of the price of a casting.

Your thoughts?

Waggy.

[GWRdriver]

In the beginning, I sought castings because, well, one was supposed to use the castings. As I matured as a modeler I realized many (but certainly not all) of the castings were of poor quality and badly proportioned, but over here (USA) that seemed to bother very few people. I then turned to making my own patterns but soon foundaries, especially one-off loose-pattern iron founders, got more and more difficult to find and were costly. So now, as my pocketbook can no longer stand any of the aforementioned options I resort more and more to fabrications.

On my current loco, the 2X TICH, the only castings (so far) are the drivers (obtained cheaply) and the axle pump body and things are going very well and I haven't had to go into debt to do it.

[baggo]

I am curently working on a version of LBSC's Helen Long and I am using fabrications for most of the parts as cylinder castings etc. are no longer available anyway. It's certainly considerably cheaper to fabricate than use castings and often the result is far superior. I made up two axle driven pumps from bronze and brass bar and I am sure this was much easier than trying to machine a solid casting. The cylinders (piston valve) will be made using cored gunmetal bar for the cylinder with the valve chest turned from solid bar and then silver soldered to the cylinder along with various bits of brass flat for mounting lugs etc. I am going to experiment with a ptfe type material for the valves themselves.

There's a couple of photos of the axle pumps on my website at:

www.baggo.copperstream.co.uk/me/locos/25inch/helen%20longish/axlepumps1.jpg
www.baggo.copperstream.co.uk/me/locos/25inch/helen%20longish/axlepumps3.jpg

I was talking recently to a chap at one of the 2-1/2" gauge rallies and he even suggested fabricating wheels! I don't think I would go quite so far as that though.

The price of castings and materials is getting very high and will soon put our hobby out of reach of a lot of people who are on limited incomes.

John