JimH

I'll put this here because it is hardly worth a new thread and I didn't see one on tin bashing. One of the longer term projects is a Merryweather steam fire engine which has been in the family for a fair few decades now. This is in need of, among other things, a new boiler. Oddly the one task which was putting a mental block on proceeding with the design and documentation of a new boiler was the cladding. The cladding? Surely such a trivial thing as insulation would be a doddle compared with manufacturing a new boiler.
 
Aye well this has bothered us for many years decades because the cladding is entirely brass and that age hardens and cracks. The chemicals in polishes doesn't help this process (apparently). The upshot is that after 110 years or so the cladding looked like this. Notice all of the cracks? One option was to have it heat treated and start silver soldering up the cracks. Then a more skilled basher than I could sit there with a soft faced slapper gently dressing out the ripples and dents.
 

 
Here's a thing. When researching the availability of panel beating tools don't type "leather faced slapper" into Google and expect anything useful back. Ho hum.
 
Anyway. The problem with this job is that rather simple looking radius at the top. You need to lose metal to fold it in which is tricky. An option is to spin it. This was no good because it was too deep for all of the spinners we spoke to. We could have made it in two sections with a band round the middle but that is hardly pretty. Hell, they managed in 100 years ago so we can't let it beat us. Again, maybe a better basher could have sat down with hammer and dolly and just keep dressing it down until they got there. I suspect this is the approach taken originally. The offending curve and the offensive cracks.
 

 

 
So where to begin? First buy a big sheet of brass, roll it into a cylinder and silver solder the butt joint. So far so easy. Then, taking the largest sledgehammer to crack a nut you acquire some slabs of polypropylene from a plate heat exchanger and bolt them into a large plastic block. Then you put it in your big lathe and turn the curve on it. This was done by calculation. Yes kids, maths in action!
 
This is the plastic guide mounted on a big piece of pipe the right distance from the ground.
 

 

 
Then all you need to do is anneal the brass, slipin onto your guide and off you go with your hammers. The results speak for themselves.
 

 
Shite. This sorry mess is what we keep hidden behind a bench after it was cut off. Luckily we made the cylinder much longer than it needed to be. We reckoned we had another four attempts before another sheet of brass was needed. After some thought and discussion we came up with the idea of crimping the top of the cylinder to make a nice even start to the curve. So taking a body jack we made a funny looking press to form ridges. After that the cylinder looked a lot like we were going to be investigated by the CIA and MI6 for building a nasty weapon.
 

 
A shell casing from a super gun?
 

 
So, with the crinkles to help guide us when we are hitting it maybe this attempt will be more successful. So you break out the body hammers and start hitting hard (but controlled). Things are looking hopeful...
 
 

 
The massive problem with brass is that it work hardens. Steel or aluminium you can just keep hitting and biffing and bashing until it is where you need it to be. Brass on the other hand does not like being moved and you need to anneal it regularly. In a patch you would get half a dozen hammer blows before it went hard. What this meant was that you got a hammer blows once aroud the circumference before you had to lift it off with the floor crane, turn off the workshop lights and heat it to a dull red with the gas/air torch (oxy-propane is a bit too hot). Then you waited for it to cool to slip it back onto the guide. This is a painfully long process but s  l  o  w  l  y you start to make progress.
 

 
Keep going...
 

 
Starting to look hopeful...You can see the bit that keeps getting heated.
 

 
And eventually, after a couple of scares, you get there. It's got a curve and you feel pretty bloody pleased with yourself I can tell you. The black line marks the overlap of the chimney.
 

 
We are only part way there because what you have is a pretty bashed bit of brass. So you go to the cupboard and get the stack of tinsmith's wooden hammers that you bought a few years ago with this job in mind and start to work out how to use them to dress out all of the dents. So you biff and bash and rub chalk on it to see where you need to hit and in the end it looks like this. Ignore the crinkly section - that bit gets cut out to take the exhaust pipes from the engine so we didn't finish that. 
 

 
Now it is time for more filing and using miles of abrasive tape until it looks like this...
 

 
And then it is buffing wheels and soap time and after only a few hours one small patch looks like this
 

 
By now you feel like you can do anything so it's time for a brew. And then, as if by magic after only a couple of weekends' more polishing you end up with this.
 

 
The grubby bit at the bottom is the excess we had to play with. It will be cut off. All the holes in it will have to wait until the shell is made because the cladding has to fit very tightly to the shell couplings and we only have one go at it. Wreck it now and there's trouble.
 
So there you go. How to make a new boiler cladding for a 1908 Merryweather Gem in ony thirty years or so. Sadly about this point it was decided to build another waggon so this just sits in the workshop for another day.

That seems to be the gist of it. If you use it without asking then they will get all Biblical on your bottom and start throwing around cease and desist requests before the pant has dried. If you ask then most seem to be fairly happy. Given that there will be a fair bit of money in the sign writing we don't fancy going over it with Valspar on pain of being sued into oblivion.
 
There are a few models on sale of early Boots vehicles around so they can't be too averse to it being used.
 
I think we'll start with a nice friendly letter. If that doesn't work we'll try an even friendlier one.

That seems to be the gist of it. If you use it without asking then they will get all Biblical on your bottom and start throwing around cease and desist requests before the pant has dried. If you ask then most seem to be fairly happy. Given that there will be a fair bit of money in the sign writing we don't fancy going over it with Valspar on pain of being sued into oblivion.
 
There are a few models on sale of early Boots vehicles around so they can't be too averse to it being used.
 
I think we'll start with a nice friendly letter. If that doesn't work we'll try an even friendlier one.

As far as IP is concerned, commercial names and logos remain the property of the business concerned even if they're historic versions, and companies can and do start getting arsey if they hear that someone's using their name on something without permission. Some are maybe more relaxed than others, especially if it's not on some sort of profit-making venture (I'm guessing that the reconstruction and eventual sale of these leviathans doesn't keep you in Dom Perignon and Rolexes?); but because Boots UK is now owned by giant US conglomerate Walgreens, I'd have a care since giant US conglomerates aren't exactly renowned for a breezy, carefree approach to IP law.
It's probably worth contacting Boots' Head Office and asking to speak to someone in their communications and marketing team. Emphasise the local and family connection; stress that you're not going to be using their name in a pejorative way or to pretend you're in any way a Boots employee, just an enthusiast who wants their project to look historically accurate.
Any business with half a clue would be all over this like Billy Bunter in Asda bakery aisle when the 'final reduction' yellow stickers appear, as a golden opportunity for free positive publicity, the chance of borrowing it for promo purposes once complete, connecting with 'heritage' and 'core values' and all that marketing-guff, etc etc.
If you're really lucky and they've got community engagement cash swilling round unspent for this financial quarter, they might even chuck you a few pennies for the paint.
Unfortunately, not all businesses have half a clue... so success is not 100% assured. But the old phrase "better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission" may well work for some situations, but most assuredly does not cut a great deal of ice in a registered trademark lawsuit.
But hey, if you try approaching them and they don't go for it, then how about a very similar livery for the totally fictitious 'Poots The Chemist'...
 
(Source: Datsuncog Minor is a commercial solicitor for a certain high-profile Oxford Street retailer, with a particular focus on Intellectual Property law. He is not, it has to be said, a shiteist.)

OSRAM looks like not a bad call...
 

There is a load of stuff to do today and a rapidly looming deadline so let's have an update. That will put food on the table.
 
So the chassis is bolted together, the holes reamed and the rivets in the bag. Now all we need to do is heat them up, pop them in and job done but first you need a rivet gun. This is a McDonald gun made in Glasgow and these things have built a lot of ships. This was last used when we put a new tube sheet of the Fowler roller back in 1985 when we had two ex-riveters to help us out (YCRTA two ex-riveters to actually do the difficult bit) but now we were on our own.
 

 
There were five of us this time. Someone on the gun, one with the hydraulic holder, one on the pump, one heating rivets and one running with the white hot rivet. I got to play at being a manly proper man and work the gun. I got to do that because of my in depth knowledge and understanding of rivetted joints. Ha ha ha. We only had to put 30 5/8" rivets in. We all had the impression of long departed riveting gangs looking down on us from above pissing themselves laughing at our pitiful efforts. After a bit of arsing around I reckon we got there.
 

 
This is the front one. That keeps some bolts in it because it needs to be removed to get the boiler out.
 

 
It is hot, bloody noisy and not exactly easy work. It is no wonder that people who did this for a living were worked to death by their forties.
 
With the frame bashed together the next bit is the footplate which is made in two halves so you can get the boiler out. If you look back you'll see a picture of a pile of bits of plate. The footplate is made of admiralty pattern chequer plate which has diamonds rolled into it which hasn't been available for a long tie now so you have to take what you can get. We were very lucky to get a load out of an old mill and then we spent an irritating Saturday playing jigsaws with tape measures and french chalk trying to work out the best way of joining the plates in a way that minimised the number of joins and hid them as far as possible. After a full a frank exchange on views on the subject of how to do it we came up with something that made the best of a bad job.
 
Then it needs tacked together, turned over and marked out as per the drawing. There are a few curves that take a while to get right. Also, because you only have one go at this you do get a bit checky. Once you are happy, cebtre dab all the cut lines and break out the NM250 oxy-propane cutting torch and off you go. Then you lay into it with big angle grinders and you end up with something with lines and curves all over the place.
 
In the picture below you can see two short join lines on the front plate  - these will be hidden by the boiler. You should be able to make out the join down the middle of the rear plate. This is annoying but hey ho. The join that runs from side to side across the hole is meant to be there. That gets bolted up.
 
Note how the lines of the front plate match the lines of the rear plate. It took a lot of cutting and grinding to make that happen. This is the somewhere near finished plate lifted up into position on the chassis. The cut on the hole looks scruffy because it hasn't been tidied up yet - we are working close to the S4 and we are waiting for a couple of welding screens to arrive to keep the sparks off the finished one.
 
This is an important bit because that set of curves across the front kind of define a Super Sentinel.
 

 
The big hole is what the boiler sits in. As you have probably worked out by now the boiler does tend to dominate the cab. And makes it very hot in there.
 

 
The axle beam waiting for the jig to be finished.
 

 
Fairly stout weld needed to hold it together.
 

 
A somewhere near finished steering box bell  crank. The big straight arm hangs down and connects to the drag link.
 

 
The start of the track rod ends. These have bronze spherical seats which provide movement. There is a fair bit of machining left to do on these to make them look convincing.
 

 
The bronze seats have small springs behind them to keep enough load on things to keep them together. These are those small springs. This is very cack handed engineering. Nice springs, though.
 

 
 
One for the woodworkers in the audience. I found this photo of the spring hanger and slipper plates. A dovetail joint in half inch steel plate.
 

 
Drive sprockets on the carriers. This is the rear face of them. The bronze rings are a modification. When these were made the used a super crude mechanical seal on the main bearing housing which wouldn't hold small coal so we ditched them and went for a design of modern lip seal like an oil seal on a car hub. Once the carriers are on no one will see any difference. The little sprocket you see fixed to the one on the left is the drive sprocket for the dynamo. The original set up was appalling and because we tend to drive at night a lot we need something that works. This layout allows us to run a much bigger sprocket and get more speed out of the dynamo without it looking awful. Once the carrier is on the drive chain should hide almost everything.
 

 
Steam engines need a lot of oil both in the crankcase and the top end. This is the start of the mechanical lubricator that pumps something that looks like treacle into the steam supply to keep the cyliders oiled. It is driven by the engine.
 

 
A pile of boiler bits. These are the hinges that take the grates and the ash pan. They look like crude bits of tat because they are crude bits of tat.
 

 
And this finally arrived from Aus. This is the body for the valve that controls the boiler feed pump. The water pump runs all the time that the engine is running so when you don't want water in the boiler you have a bypass  - sorry, in old speak - bye-pass valve that sends the flow back to the water tank. This is worked from a lever in the cab. This is a right fiddly thingwith internal ports and it had to be cast. Making a pattern for this was waaaaay beyond what we could do so we had someone quote to make one for us. Let us just say that we were glad that a nice man in Aus had already had a pattern made and got us one cast at the same time. This was very, very much cheaper. There is a lot of machining to make this thing into a finished item.
 

 
It the background you will see a shiny thing with a sphere on the end. This is the start of the other bit of the track rod ends.
 
Next jobs:
Carry on with front axle
Get some stock bar to start building up the front of the cab
Work out what wood is needs to make a start on the cab
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I'll put this here because it is hardly worth a new thread and I didn't see one on tin bashing. One of the longer term projects is a Merryweather steam fire engine which has been in the family for a fair few decades now. This is in need of, among other things, a new boiler. Oddly the one task which was putting a mental block on proceeding with the design and documentation of a new boiler was the cladding. The cladding? Surely such a trivial thing as insulation would be a doddle compared with manufacturing a new boiler.
 
Aye well this has bothered us for many years decades because the cladding is entirely brass and that age hardens and cracks. The chemicals in polishes doesn't help this process (apparently). The upshot is that after 110 years or so the cladding looked like this. Notice all of the cracks? One option was to have it heat treated and start silver soldering up the cracks. Then a more skilled basher than I could sit there with a soft faced slapper gently dressing out the ripples and dents.
 

 
Here's a thing. When researching the availability of panel beating tools don't type "leather faced slapper" into Google and expect anything useful back. Ho hum.
 
Anyway. The problem with this job is that rather simple looking radius at the top. You need to lose metal to fold it in which is tricky. An option is to spin it. This was no good because it was too deep for all of the spinners we spoke to. We could have made it in two sections with a band round the middle but that is hardly pretty. Hell, they managed in 100 years ago so we can't let it beat us. Again, maybe a better basher could have sat down with hammer and dolly and just keep dressing it down until they got there. I suspect this is the approach taken originally. The offending curve and the offensive cracks.
 

 

 
So where to begin? First buy a big sheet of brass, roll it into a cylinder and silver solder the butt joint. So far so easy. Then, taking the largest sledgehammer to crack a nut you acquire some slabs of polypropylene from a plate heat exchanger and bolt them into a large plastic block. Then you put it in your big lathe and turn the curve on it. This was done by calculation. Yes kids, maths in action!
 
This is the plastic guide mounted on a big piece of pipe the right distance from the ground.
 

 

 
Then all you need to do is anneal the brass, slipin onto your guide and off you go with your hammers. The results speak for themselves.
 

 
Shite. This sorry mess is what we keep hidden behind a bench after it was cut off. Luckily we made the cylinder much longer than it needed to be. We reckoned we had another four attempts before another sheet of brass was needed. After some thought and discussion we came up with the idea of crimping the top of the cylinder to make a nice even start to the curve. So taking a body jack we made a funny looking press to form ridges. After that the cylinder looked a lot like we were going to be investigated by the CIA and MI6 for building a nasty weapon.
 

 
A shell casing from a super gun?
 

 
So, with the crinkles to help guide us when we are hitting it maybe this attempt will be more successful. So you break out the body hammers and start hitting hard (but controlled). Things are looking hopeful...
 
 

 
The massive problem with brass is that it work hardens. Steel or aluminium you can just keep hitting and biffing and bashing until it is where you need it to be. Brass on the other hand does not like being moved and you need to anneal it regularly. In a patch you would get half a dozen hammer blows before it went hard. What this meant was that you got a hammer blows once aroud the circumference before you had to lift it off with the floor crane, turn off the workshop lights and heat it to a dull red with the gas/air torch (oxy-propane is a bit too hot). Then you waited for it to cool to slip it back onto the guide. This is a painfully long process but s  l  o  w  l  y you start to make progress.
 

 
Keep going...
 

 
Starting to look hopeful...You can see the bit that keeps getting heated.
 

 
And eventually, after a couple of scares, you get there. It's got a curve and you feel pretty bloody pleased with yourself I can tell you. The black line marks the overlap of the chimney.
 

 
We are only part way there because what you have is a pretty bashed bit of brass. So you go to the cupboard and get the stack of tinsmith's wooden hammers that you bought a few years ago with this job in mind and start to work out how to use them to dress out all of the dents. So you biff and bash and rub chalk on it to see where you need to hit and in the end it looks like this. Ignore the crinkly section - that bit gets cut out to take the exhaust pipes from the engine so we didn't finish that. 
 

 
Now it is time for more filing and using miles of abrasive tape until it looks like this...
 

 
And then it is buffing wheels and soap time and after only a few hours one small patch looks like this
 

 
By now you feel like you can do anything so it's time for a brew. And then, as if by magic after only a couple of weekends' more polishing you end up with this.
 

 
The grubby bit at the bottom is the excess we had to play with. It will be cut off. All the holes in it will have to wait until the shell is made because the cladding has to fit very tightly to the shell couplings and we only have one go at it. Wreck it now and there's trouble.
 
So there you go. How to make a new boiler cladding for a 1908 Merryweather Gem in ony thirty years or so. Sadly about this point it was decided to build another waggon so this just sits in the workshop for another day.

Boots,for three reasons,A.The bodies look good,B., olive green is a lovely colour ,and C.,Boots used to be a great company,for owners, workers and customers.

Beyond awesome - I've not seen that picture before.
 
Boots had Sentinels. Their Sentinels had van bodies. My mother worked for Boots many years ago and we're all Nottingham folks.
 
Perfect. Just perfect.
 
ETA: There seems to be general agreement on that. The question was asked, however, what is the legal position with using an existing company's IP for your own use? Any ideas?

Nearly up to date now. The finished engine - except for the paint - all bolted up, timed and full of oil.
 

 

 
If you look at the stuffing box you will see that it looks rusty. This is because it's been running on steam. We ran a pipe over from the S4 to give this a run on steam. The good news was that everything worked just fine. Now we can move on.
 
You'll be a chassis one day, my son. A pair of chassis rails clamped back to back so everything can be marked out as a matched pair. This makes fitting things like engine mounting plates much easier.
 

 
The floor of the cab is made from 3/16" plate. Yeah, really. It is meant to be admiralty pattern (diamonds) which hasn't been available for quite some time. We were lucky enough to find some sheets of it in an old plant that was being demolished. Being greedy we got as much as we could in the hope we could stitch it together in a clever enough way that you wouldn't see the joins.
 

 
Springs are easy. Spec them, phone up some spring benders, pay them some money and they appear. These waggons had a six ton payload. To look at the springs the payload was ten times that.
 

 
We found a near full set of tin basher's stakes for a pretty reasonable price. Might need to learn a bit more about tin bashing yet.
 

 
Full set of spring hangers somewhere near finished. The floating ones slide on dovetailed plates which are bolted to the chassis. This is the sort of extravagance that people mistake for quality. Boiler bits lying on the floor beong to the S.
 

 
Chassis rails in place and this is what passed for an engine mount. Therese were pressed but that is a bit tricky now so the pressed ribs are faked up with D section beading. You will notice that we built the chassis around the engine so we can lift it up into place. The engine is ridiculously heavy.
 

 
 
They don't build them like this any more. *rolls eyes*. Big lumps of channel with big bits of angle rivetted in place. Put bolts in to begin with then you have to pretend to be the most manly thing ever invented. You have to pretend to be a riveter.
 

 
The start of the front hubs. Big bit of metal makes the hubs and a big disc makes the bit you bolt the wheel to. There is a lot of work to go into these yet. The big bits of steel next to them are the stub axles.
 

 

 
Chain drives. Just like what you have on your bike but bigger. Supers used 1.75" pitch chain which is quite big. The sprockets can be bought off the shelf from Renolds but they are not cheap at all. Like buy a decent car not cheap. What we had been doing a fair bit of up to this point is using Jet Cut in Hillington who are terribly helpful water jet cutting people. Their kit is good enough to cut the sprockets from plate. This means we get all four sprockets for less than the cost of one off the shelf one. However, specing sprockets is tricky because there is a bit of variation in the standard. Since the work isn't exactly cheap we got them to make a template in plywood to test them before we got the proper ones made. Here is the wooden template being checked. Got it right in only three attempts. Note that the chain isn't light duty.
 

 
Front axle C bracket in the boring machine.
 

 
And some fairly finished swivels and steering arms. The short pins act as king pins and the hole down the middle takes the stub axle.
 

 
All our rivet snaps are too big for the chassis rivets and despite searching everywhere we could not find the right ones. We had to buy some fancy pants steel to make our own then sent them off for heat treatment. Note rivet gun.
 

 
Two halves of the front axle beam and C brackets machined and bolted up. Now we need to make a jig so we can hold it in the right place while we weld it together. Without boring the tits off you on the subject of geometry the change from solids to pneumatics cocked a lot of things up so we need to discretely introduce some angles to try to get things in about the right place.
 

 
Yet another pile of bronze to make the front axle bushes from.
 

 
Sprockets returned from Jet Cut.
 

 
The big ones will form part of the brake drum fabrication. Powerful stuff, a jet of water.
 

 
Progress slowed by other stuff. The S has been around for ten years which meant it was due a major boiler inspection. This involves removing the boiler from the chassis, removing the cladding and splitting the shell from the firebox. A right old faff and no mistake especially for a boiler that is eleven years old. This is it back together waiting for the insurance inspector to witness the hydraulic test. The big strap round it is just for lifting.
 

 
There is a fair amount of kit in the workshops which has been gathered over the past 30 years or so as things become available and there was space. Sometimes things turn up that you are not very likely to use but you are sure you will use them one day. This forge came out a training centre in 1993. We were convinced that one day it would come in handy and as if by magic a mere twenty five years later it's needed to heat the rivets for the chassis. Note Sprint not being polished.
 

 
Steering box trial fitted to chassis. Are you starting to get a feel for how crude these things are? Elegance was for other people.
 

 
The S minus its boiler. I was moaning the other day about dismantling cars just to get to the clutch. It is worth remembering that to get the boiler out of an S Type you first need to remove the roof. Plus ca change and all that.
 

 
And finally a last look at the chassis with some bits on it. You should start to get a feel for what goes where.
 

 
And that brings us up to dateish. The next jobs are rivet the chassis, make the front engine mount, get on with the front axle and make a start on the cab which is where I came in. More updates soon.

No update yet because there isn't anything terribly exciting to photograph other than bolts fitted and bits of angle shaped. The front axle is in one piece now which is good. I'll get some photos later. 
 
There needs to be a descision made soonish about what this thing is going to look like. The cab is pretty much set in stone other than length which will be tweaked slightly but the body is still up for discussion. One thing is that while there is a lot more work/cost involved in them big bodies always look the part and certainly make them a lot more appealling to people when we get bored with it and sell it on.
 
Up to this point our thinking was a large, fixed coke body like this one here.
 

 
The benefits of this are that the body is relatively simple to build and would allow us to, with a reasonably straight face, to paint it in Gas Light and Coke Company colours to match the other one (GLCC ran Supers).
 
However, waggon 6982 from which the engine we have comes was built originally as a three way tipper and while it offends me not rebuilding it as that we are utterly sick of tippers as they are ugly pains in the the arse, never get used as tippers and we've already got one. The point is that if it isn't going to be a tipper then all bets are off and to hell with originality. On top of that many of these waggons had several bodies/uses in their lives and many were returned to he factory on more than one occassion to be returned as something else. Getting flexible with history is nothing new.
 
One photo that took my eye was this one here. This was owned by the Sheffield grocers (they must have been more than that to justify the massive investment in one of these things) Arthur Davy and Sons...
 
 

 
I really like the big box body and butch looking tail gate and doors. Unless some Sheffield local historian knows different it appears that the waggon is painted mostly red. This is a problem because not only do we not want a tipper, we reeeeeeeally do not want a red waggon. Red is a foul colour and always ends up looking like crap. So, some artistic licence is required. It would help if I had an artistic bone in my body but I'll just have to work with the hand I've been dealt.
 
What I'm looking for is some ideas of suitable liveries for a waggon like the box van above. The rules are:
 
- Preferrably black, dark blue or green. However, other colours/ shades will be considered.
- Absolutely not red, yellow or white as the main colour.
- Household names are good but not mandatory
- The livery needs to fit in with the box van body - a quarrier would be unlikely to have a box van
- It would be nice if the nature of the buiness was nice. I'm not sure I fancy having a box van owned by Scruttocks Maggot Farmers and Rotten Carcass Disposers Ltd. That said, I really fancy a fag company livery but I haven't found one yet.
- One oddity about the livries for most steam waggons is that they have a big, featureless front apron where most lorries had their radiators. This brings both benefits and drawbacks when designing a livery.
 
Already under consideration:
 
- Lipton's Tea (Lyons has already been done)  - Dark green, gold leaf lettering, black chassis
- Tate and Lyle Sugar Refiners - Dark blue, gold leaf lettering, black chassis
- Boots Manufacturing Chemists - Dark olive green, gold leaf lettering, black chassis
- Shore Porters' Society, Aberdeen - Dark blue, white lettering, red wheels, black chassis
- Pickfords Removals and Storage - Dark blue, white lettering, red wheels, black chassis
- Just making up some shit that looks nice.
 
Thoughts, suggestions and pointers gratefully recieved.

I don't think we've had this one yet. It's another from the dealer in all things thoroughbred Emergency Accountants. This time the unique appreciating asset is perhaps the most desperate use of the GTi badge ever. Not for this lad the backdrop of water features in the grounds or the stone built stable blocks. No, the cars speak for themselves and can shout through the palisade fence and weeds.
 

 
 
To be fair to the lad he only wants a grand for this cast iron investment opportunity. I do wonder what is going to happen to the global economy over the next decade that is going to make a thirty year old estate worth 25K. Perhaps he thinks we are in for a bout of hyper inflation.

Let's start this catch up with a bit of history. Right back at the start I mentioned the Standard. The Standard was a simple device and a tough wee bugger. A typically overloaded Standard, yesterday.
 

 
Brown Bailey ran their Standards, massively (and I mean massively) overloaded into the 1960s. If you know the Glasgow Transport Museum you'll know one of Brown Bailey's Standards.
 
It may look crude to our eyes but in comparison with what went before it was pretty bloody awesome. One day people will look at our Scanias and laugh in the same way. Anyway, the Standard was so brilliant that they sold thousands of them and Sentinel made a lot of money. By the 1920s sales were tailing off and money was getting tight which is why the new improved Super was developed. However, it was clear by then that despite their best efforts steam was not going to be viable as road haulage for very much longer so they needed to diversify. One of the things they went into was railway engines. In order to minimise risks they didn't leap headlong into building proper locos but instead chose to use as many bits from the waggons as possible. This restricted what they could build to shunters and, slightly later, rail cars. This is the quite late Sentinel Shunter that lives in the NRM
 

 
The Super engine sits vertically at the front and drive through a chain. The boiler (much bigger than the waggons in this case) is in the cab. There is a bigger version of this one in preservation that uses two Super engines. Sentinel shunters were actually quite successful and were built into the late 1950s. If you rake round most railway preservation places you'll almost certainly find one rotting into the weeds.
 
What is the point of all this wittering about railway engines? Well, the engines were the same as the waggons with one or two key differences namely they had a solid forged crankshaft and a differently shaped crankcase. They also ran pressure fed lubrication to mains and big ends. Why this development didn't make it onto the waggons is lost on me. They also had a slightly different (but significantly better) manifold arrangements but it is just too boring to go into that here. The upshot is that if you need a few bits for an engine then one of the first places to start is your friendly neighbourhood railway preservation yard. And we had one of those just down the road and it had not only a few shunters but also a very large pile of brand new spares. This would be just what we needed. In the end we came away with what we needed in exchange for a not exactly trivial sum of money. What will become clear over the next couple of photos is that we didn't have a great deal of choice.
 
Probably the most important missing pieces were the camshafts. Not satisfied with talk of railway things let's have a bit of talk about the mechanics of steam engines - apologies to anyone who is being taught to suck eggs. The reciprocating steam engine has many benefits but it also has some limitations.  One of those limitations is addressed by giving it variable valve timing. On a piston valve or slide valve engine this is a pretty simple task which involves some sort of linkage - and there are lots of different types of linkage - controlled by the operator. What you are doing is controlling for how much of the piston's stroke you admit steam. To produce lots of torque you need a lot of steam so to start, for example, you will run at 90% cut off. That is admit steam for almost all of the stroke. As speed builds you need to admit steam for less and less of the stroke. The shortest cut off may be as little as 20%. The other thing is that you often need to run a steam engine in reverse so altering the valve timing allows you to do that to. All very easy to understand and handy.
 
However, the Super engine, like most undertype steam waggons from most manufacturers (Yorkshire being a notable exception), uses poppet valves (the same kind of thing as what your car uses) operated by a camshaft. If you have a camshaft how do you engineer variable valve timing? These days there are many ways of doing it and through the years various engineers have come up with all sorts of elegant solutions.
 
What we are talking about here is not elegant at all. The solution is that you have multiple lobes on each camshaft then as you want to change the cut off or go backwards you drag the camshafts from one lobe to another. Hmmmm. To illustrate here is the first prize from the trolley dash. It is a brand new, still in its waxed paper exhaust camshaft. My little beady eyes lit up when I saw this.
 

 
You have an inlet and an exhaust camshaft. Twin cam, four valves per cylinder and VTEC. There is nothing new under the sun. Each valve has four lobes. Two forward cut offs, a drain position (all valves held open) and a reverse. Because shunters tend to go forward as much as they go backwards the shunter camshafts have two forward, a drain and two reverse. Later DG and S Types waggons got three forward cut offs. Each one of the bumps you see is a lobe of a different grind. The long slot at the end take the drive dogs from the cam gears. It is long because the camshaft needs to slide within its drive gear.
 
This is a close up of some lobes. You may be able to make out the two forward - drain - two reverse lobes for each valve. Making these would have been tricky so it was a huge step forward to get them.
 

 
This is someone else's photo of the inside of their Sentinel shunter crankcase. It gives a pretty good idea of how things work. The engine sat upright in the shunters so they added a little tray underneath the camshafts so they always ran in oil. The things poking down are the tappets.
 

 
Enough about valves what else did we get? These are the inlet manifolds linked by the steam inlet pipe. These were overhauled spares which were nice because everything was there. Even though the valves were new they won't be used because the steel used by Sentinel was absolutely hopeless and valve seat life was close to non-existent. New ones in the right steel will be used (you'll like them when we get to them).
 

 
A pair of exhaust manifolds. You might see that one has been dropped at some point and bent the valve stem. Hardly a disaster but it broke the valve guide too. A little bit of remedial work required.
 

 
Valve adjusters. These screw onto the end of the valves and allow the clearances to be adjusted.
 

 
A pair of new pistons. Very nice. The log shaped thing is the exhaust manifold link pipe.
 

 
And lastly for the store shed was a pile of new piston rings.
 

 
There are still a few key components missing so we had to venture into the undergrowth to find the sorry remains of the two used, incomplete and mostly buggered spare engines to get the rest.
Our luck was in and one of the engines had one of its cylinders still on. This is well and truly knackered but it can be used as the basis for a pattern so that is good enough. That is the old piston next to it. We had to cut through the piston rod to get the cylinder off.
 

 
A pile of tappets. Hopefully from this pile there will be eight that can be pressed into service.
 

 
Camshaft gear train. The big one is the idler that is driven by the crankshaft and the smaller pair are the camshaft drive gears. They sit on bronze carriers which allow the camshaft to slide relative to the gear. The big bronze eccentric on the large idler gear is what drive the water pump.
 

 
This is what Honda copied to make their VTEC engines. There are forks inside this cast iron housing which engage with the camshafts. This allows the driver to move the camshafts to the desired position. You don't need to know too much about steam engines to know that using poppet valves is a really, really stupid thing to do. Suffice to say when Abner Doble designed his cutting edge steam cars and lorries he did not use poppet valves.
 

 
And the last piece of the jigsaw. A cylinder head. Only one sadly so we'll need to make another. The big bronze valve is a relief valve. If you get it wrong and overfill the boiler water can get carried over into the engine. This is called priming and it can also happen under other conditions. Priming is very bad news for a steam engine and usually results in people looking very sad and/or gulty and wondering just how all this broken thing can be made better. However, a decent relief valve at either end can save the situation. Waggons didn't have RVs but locos did. We'll keep the RVs on this one.
 

 
That will do for this time. In the next installment we go back to making patterns, a new lathe appears and some things start to look finished.

So where are we? By this point the list looked a bit like:
 
Boiler
Superheater
Chimney base
Injector
Most of the steering box
A steering wheel
Windscreen hinges
Ash pan
Tank filter boxes
Feed heater box and lid
A vague idea what we are up to
 
When we built the last one we started with an engine and then fretted about making axles and boilers and the rest of it. Now we were pretty happy that the rest of it could be built but the engine was going to be a problem. What Sentinel built was a fairly standard twin cylnder, double acting engine with poppet valves operated from camshafts (we'll come to them later). Where things got odd is that the Super has a twin chain drive. There is a sprocket on both ends of the crankshaft driving a chain to a sprocket on each rear wheel.
 
Errr, where are we going to put the differential?
 
After much head scratching they come up with one of the more mental ideas in vehicle design. We'll put it in the crankshaft. And in a stroke they made what would have been a difficult job of making an engine very much harder. So there was humming and hawing and then as is usually the case if you think about a problem for long enough someone solves it for you. The widow of John Keeley died and there was a big auction of all the stuff he had amassed over his life. One of the lots was the remains of a sorry looking Super engine minus lots of bits. Fortunately there was a crankcase and - most importantly - a crankshaft. The old man trooped down there with the intention of buying it come what may. A coupe of weeks later we had to do an 850 mile round trip in the LDV to pick it up. Here it is, upside down, on a pallet. The big bits that are missing are the cylinders, the camshafts, all of the valve gear and the water pump. Still, we stand a chance of getting a waggon number if we can identify it.
 

 
Peering through the crankcase door you can glimpse the crankshaft. Pretty much everything you can see is buggered.
 

 
Hosed down and on the workshop floor things look a bit better.
 

 
So you take it to bits and have a look. This is the crankshaft stripped of all its shafts and gears.
 

 
To give some idea of scale those are 3.5 tonne axlestands it is sitting on. Two people can just lift the bare crank. One of the avenues we explored was having a crankshaft made by LCR (who are an amazing company who can do some well impressive stuff) because it is way beyond our workshop capability. The estimate from LCR was that to manufacture what you are looking at there less the balance weights would be £14,000 plus yer dreaded, mate. When you saw what they were doing for the money we had no argument with the price. The problem was that it was £14K FFS. 
 
Just to jump forward a little so you can see what it is meant to look like this is the same crankshaft once we'd finished it. I'll fill in how it got to be like this but it should give an idea of how it works. The large lumps of metal on each end of the crank are the partially machined sprocket carriers. These spin freely on the crankshaft and are driven by shafts that pass the the hollow journals. It is unbelieveably heavy by this point. You see the massive main bearings? It needs them.
 

 
However, jump back to a close up on a couple of the diff gears. You can probably see that they are buggered.So the crank needed all new bushes (8 off), new drive shafts (2 off), new master gears (2 off) new diff pinions (2 off) and new diff gears (2 off). On top of that it needed to have the big end journals reground which we can't do so it had to go to the engine remanufacturers to be reground and that took a while for it to come back.
 

 
So from this exercise we have a very long list of things that need to be made/found to turn this into a working engine. However, work carries on other things. The steering box, cover, top bearing housing  and crank are were all done so now it needed the shaft and nut made. This is a left handed, two start ACME thread at 1" pitch which is a bit of a tall order to machine. Its a good thing the old man has had a bit of practce making these now so that wasn't too bad (for me - it took him several days). You need to cut a square thread first then go in with an ACME form tool so you need to kep your wits about you. These days threads like this would be rolled (and beautiful they would be too) but this is an oddball one so you would need to spring for the cost of the dies which is a no no.
 

 
Meh, not bad I suppose...
 

 
And this is the start of the front axle. The bend in the middle is so it goes around the boiler. Originally these were forged but we don't have a massive hammer so the approach we have taken was to make a pattern and have them cast in steel. Then we simply* weld them together in the middle. This also solves the problem of machining the axle since the whiole axle won't fit in our boring machine.
 

 
This is an extract from the parts book. Gives you a bit of an idea what the front axle beam is meant to look like.
 

 
And some long lengths of channel were delivered. You will be a chassis one day soon.
 

 
That will do for now. In the next thrilling installment some things are cast and other things are machined.

So where do you start? The same place as last time. Get the spare parts book and start scoring things off.
 

This is the page for the rear axle. All you need is one (or two) of everything and you are home and dry. The well of spare parts is pretty much dry so you are on your own. Almost everything will need to be made. Fortunately one bit which would be very difficult to make is the injector. Through dumb luck we managed to get one.
 

 
The injector uses steam at boiler pressure to force water into the boiler (I have no idea how). Normally the engine driven water pump does that but if you are stationary then you need an injector. How injectors work is pretty much a black art as far as I can see. The other bits in the picture are the raw castings for the windscreen hinges.
 

 
Exciting, huh? These are two raw castings for the water tank filter boxes. Each one will soak up many hours' of machine time. Another part we got early was a chimney base. The exhaust from the engine exits up the chimney to provide induced draft on the fire. Don't worry, there will be some recognisable bits along soonish.
 

 
Also quite early we managed to get a casting for a steering box. Here is the box in the boring machine.
 

 
The throttle valve partially machined and bolted to the boiler shell.
 

 
A boiler non return valve in its raw state.
 

 
And this is another part of the throttle valve. It's called the dump valve and it makes a "Phsssssttttt" noise when you use it. The idea is that because the throttle opens and closes by hand you have a foot pedal which dumps the steam straight up the chimney away from the engine. This is handy for moving around slowly but also it is your OMG emergency brake. According to the operator's manual when things are grim you step on the dump valve, drag the engine into reverse and let go of the dump valve. The handbok describes this as "To stop almost instantaneously at risk of snashing the engine".
 

 
This is the feed heater. The exhaust steam passes through this box as the boiler feedwater is fed through a coil inside. This improves efficiency.
 

 
Things start to look a little more finished than others. Here is the crank arm for the steering box.
 

 
And here is a more finished steering box and cover.
 

 
Front and rear towing eyes. Some nice chap had a pattern made for one and we cadged the pattern to make our own.
 

 
A new boiler top with chimney base fitted. Hole in the middle is the coal hole. It looks trivial but the boiler top was a weekend's work.
 

 
The feedheater box machined and ready for its cladding.
 

 
New lathes are shite. This is our middle lathe. I love Swifts. They are no Dean Smith and Grace but they're not bad at all.
 

 
So, what you have seen is a tiny snippet of six months' of effort. What you may have noticed is no mention of an engine. This was something that had been exercising us since the start. Building everything else was not that big a deal but making an engine from scratch was going to be a big ask for reasons that will become obvious. We also needed an engine to give us a waggon number an a proper registration.
 
Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode which can wait until tomorrow.
 
 
 
 

One of the things that made the decision to build another Super easy was that we had a boiler lying around. We designed and built the boiler for the first one, then built a new one for the S Type and then built another three of them. However, for reasons that don't need to be gone into we didn't sell the last one and kept it back. Here is the the last one we built sitting in a support frame. A pressure vessel designed, constructed and documented to the Pressure Equipment Directive. This is not your usual try to claim that it is a repair effort and the design dossier is what might be called extensive.
 
The grates are at the bottom and you drop coal down the top. It is a water tube design which is a copy of Sentinel's own design. It is what is referred to as a spiral pattern firebox. See below.
 

 
Here is a firebox that we made for the S Type prior to the tubes being welded into the firebox. The are sixty 1" OD tubes. This is double the number that Sentinel used. The problem of this design is that machining the tube holes is a little tricky because they pierce the firebox at a crazy angle.
 

 
The pattern the tubes make is rather hypnotic. The reason for this layout is that it gives a high heating area but it lets you have a hole in the middle. This is very important because that is what the coal falls through.
 

 
 
What we also had lying around was a new superheater which was meant to go with the boiler. The superheater sits inside the combustion space and heats the steam to above saturation temperature. Higher temperature = higher efficiency. Note 944 being ignored.
 

 
So that is what we started with. A new boiler and a new superheater that were lying round doing nothing.

At close to the turn of the last century the Glasgow firm of Alley and Maclennan moved to Shrewsbury and changed their name to Sentinel. They developed a steam cart that became known as the Standard and because it was so much better than most of what had gone before they sold a shed load of them and made a lot of money. However, by the early 1920s the Standard was old hat and had a number of design issues (trival matters like no brakes to speak of were becoming more important as roads got busier and loads got heavier). Sentinel put their thinking caps on to design something new and then went bust. The company was kicked back into life with a name that was only slightly different put their thinking caps back on and came up with the next model. It had features that were super. Its engine was super, the cab was super and it even had a foot brake which were super. There could only be one name for a waggon (two Gs because Sentinel couldn't spell either) that was this super and that is what we are discussing here. 
 
The Super deserved its name because despite a number of odd design features it was pretty much the sweet spot. A decent cab and brakes but without the problems of the later models.  I've posted this one a couple of times already but I can't be bothered uploading another example of a Super - they all look about the same. This is a Super Sentinel with a coke body on it.
 

 
For the uninitiated the general idea is the boiler sits right at the front in the cab and is fired from the top. The bunker is in the cab too. You then have the twin cylinder engine slung under the chassis with a chain driving each rear wheel. Steam waggons are bad for all sorts of reasons which is why lorries have pretty much always run on diesel. They do have a few advantages. They are quiet, they produce more torque than you have heard of and they don't have gears. Open the throttle and go. They are a joy to drive on the road. Particularly in traffic.
 
And here's the one we built back in the early 1990s. What I mean by "built" should become apparent as we go on.
 

 
You will note a few key differences. This one has windscreens. This was a period option and are essential. It also has pnematics rather than solids. Many waggons were returned to the factory to be converted from solids to pneumatics which allowed them to run at a legal maximum of 20mph instead of 12mph. We drive our waggons on the road so solids are a non-starter. You will also see that this one is very short. Some were cut down to drawbar tractors in period, however, in our case the shortness of the wheelbase was forced on us because where it lived at the time we couldn't get anything longer into the shed.
 
It was finished in 1995 and we did about 3500 miles in it - the above photo was taken about 130 miles from home. We got bored of it in 2000 and sold it to a chap who did about 12,000 miles in it. The old girl is living down south somewhere now. We moved onto the restoration of the later S Type Sentinel (photo elsewhere) and a couple of years ago we decided that we would build another Super because they are bestest.
 
This time round we will build it longer because the ultra short wheelbase of the last one wasn't brilliant on the road. Think SWB Series III Land Rover with tired springs and you'll know where I am coming from. So what we are aiming for this time round is something with the wheelbase and body of the Charringtons one up there with the windscreens and pneumatics of the one below it. Oh, and steam brakes and electric lights which are all period options/factory modifications.
 
There is a bit to catch up on so it will take a few posts. If it gets too dull let me know and I will stop.
 
Oh, and I am crap at taking pictures.

There is a load of stuff to do today and a rapidly looming deadline so let's have an update. That will put food on the table.
 
So the chassis is bolted together, the holes reamed and the rivets in the bag. Now all we need to do is heat them up, pop them in and job done but first you need a rivet gun. This is a McDonald gun made in Glasgow and these things have built a lot of ships. This was last used when we put a new tube sheet of the Fowler roller back in 1985 when we had two ex-riveters to help us out (YCRTA two ex-riveters to actually do the difficult bit) but now we were on our own.
 

 
There were five of us this time. Someone on the gun, one with the hydraulic holder, one on the pump, one heating rivets and one running with the white hot rivet. I got to play at being a manly proper man and work the gun. I got to do that because of my in depth knowledge and understanding of rivetted joints. Ha ha ha. We only had to put 30 5/8" rivets in. We all had the impression of long departed riveting gangs looking down on us from above pissing themselves laughing at our pitiful efforts. After a bit of arsing around I reckon we got there.
 

 
This is the front one. That keeps some bolts in it because it needs to be removed to get the boiler out.
 

 
It is hot, bloody noisy and not exactly easy work. It is no wonder that people who did this for a living were worked to death by their forties.
 
With the frame bashed together the next bit is the footplate which is made in two halves so you can get the boiler out. If you look back you'll see a picture of a pile of bits of plate. The footplate is made of admiralty pattern chequer plate which has diamonds rolled into it which hasn't been available for a long tie now so you have to take what you can get. We were very lucky to get a load out of an old mill and then we spent an irritating Saturday playing jigsaws with tape measures and french chalk trying to work out the best way of joining the plates in a way that minimised the number of joins and hid them as far as possible. After a full a frank exchange on views on the subject of how to do it we came up with something that made the best of a bad job.
 
Then it needs tacked together, turned over and marked out as per the drawing. There are a few curves that take a while to get right. Also, because you only have one go at this you do get a bit checky. Once you are happy, cebtre dab all the cut lines and break out the NM250 oxy-propane cutting torch and off you go. Then you lay into it with big angle grinders and you end up with something with lines and curves all over the place.
 
In the picture below you can see two short join lines on the front plate  - these will be hidden by the boiler. You should be able to make out the join down the middle of the rear plate. This is annoying but hey ho. The join that runs from side to side across the hole is meant to be there. That gets bolted up.
 
Note how the lines of the front plate match the lines of the rear plate. It took a lot of cutting and grinding to make that happen. This is the somewhere near finished plate lifted up into position on the chassis. The cut on the hole looks scruffy because it hasn't been tidied up yet - we are working close to the S4 and we are waiting for a couple of welding screens to arrive to keep the sparks off the finished one.
 
This is an important bit because that set of curves across the front kind of define a Super Sentinel.
 

 
The big hole is what the boiler sits in. As you have probably worked out by now the boiler does tend to dominate the cab. And makes it very hot in there.
 

 
The axle beam waiting for the jig to be finished.
 

 
Fairly stout weld needed to hold it together.
 

 
A somewhere near finished steering box bell  crank. The big straight arm hangs down and connects to the drag link.
 

 
The start of the track rod ends. These have bronze spherical seats which provide movement. There is a fair bit of machining left to do on these to make them look convincing.
 

 
The bronze seats have small springs behind them to keep enough load on things to keep them together. These are those small springs. This is very cack handed engineering. Nice springs, though.
 

 
 
One for the woodworkers in the audience. I found this photo of the spring hanger and slipper plates. A dovetail joint in half inch steel plate.
 

 
Drive sprockets on the carriers. This is the rear face of them. The bronze rings are a modification. When these were made the used a super crude mechanical seal on the main bearing housing which wouldn't hold small coal so we ditched them and went for a design of modern lip seal like an oil seal on a car hub. Once the carriers are on no one will see any difference. The little sprocket you see fixed to the one on the left is the drive sprocket for the dynamo. The original set up was appalling and because we tend to drive at night a lot we need something that works. This layout allows us to run a much bigger sprocket and get more speed out of the dynamo without it looking awful. Once the carrier is on the drive chain should hide almost everything.
 

 
Steam engines need a lot of oil both in the crankcase and the top end. This is the start of the mechanical lubricator that pumps something that looks like treacle into the steam supply to keep the cyliders oiled. It is driven by the engine.
 

 
A pile of boiler bits. These are the hinges that take the grates and the ash pan. They look like crude bits of tat because they are crude bits of tat.
 

 
And this finally arrived from Aus. This is the body for the valve that controls the boiler feed pump. The water pump runs all the time that the engine is running so when you don't want water in the boiler you have a bypass  - sorry, in old speak - bye-pass valve that sends the flow back to the water tank. This is worked from a lever in the cab. This is a right fiddly thingwith internal ports and it had to be cast. Making a pattern for this was waaaaay beyond what we could do so we had someone quote to make one for us. Let us just say that we were glad that a nice man in Aus had already had a pattern made and got us one cast at the same time. This was very, very much cheaper. There is a lot of machining to make this thing into a finished item.
 

 
It the background you will see a shiny thing with a sphere on the end. This is the start of the other bit of the track rod ends.
 
Next jobs:
Carry on with front axle
Get some stock bar to start building up the front of the cab
Work out what wood is needs to make a start on the cab
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I'll put this here because it is hardly worth a new thread and I didn't see one on tin bashing. One of the longer term projects is a Merryweather steam fire engine which has been in the family for a fair few decades now. This is in need of, among other things, a new boiler. Oddly the one task which was putting a mental block on proceeding with the design and documentation of a new boiler was the cladding. The cladding? Surely such a trivial thing as insulation would be a doddle compared with manufacturing a new boiler.
 
Aye well this has bothered us for many years decades because the cladding is entirely brass and that age hardens and cracks. The chemicals in polishes doesn't help this process (apparently). The upshot is that after 110 years or so the cladding looked like this. Notice all of the cracks? One option was to have it heat treated and start silver soldering up the cracks. Then a more skilled basher than I could sit there with a soft faced slapper gently dressing out the ripples and dents.
 

 
Here's a thing. When researching the availability of panel beating tools don't type "leather faced slapper" into Google and expect anything useful back. Ho hum.
 
Anyway. The problem with this job is that rather simple looking radius at the top. You need to lose metal to fold it in which is tricky. An option is to spin it. This was no good because it was too deep for all of the spinners we spoke to. We could have made it in two sections with a band round the middle but that is hardly pretty. Hell, they managed in 100 years ago so we can't let it beat us. Again, maybe a better basher could have sat down with hammer and dolly and just keep dressing it down until they got there. I suspect this is the approach taken originally. The offending curve and the offensive cracks.
 

 

 
So where to begin? First buy a big sheet of brass, roll it into a cylinder and silver solder the butt joint. So far so easy. Then, taking the largest sledgehammer to crack a nut you acquire some slabs of polypropylene from a plate heat exchanger and bolt them into a large plastic block. Then you put it in your big lathe and turn the curve on it. This was done by calculation. Yes kids, maths in action!
 
This is the plastic guide mounted on a big piece of pipe the right distance from the ground.
 

 

 
Then all you need to do is anneal the brass, slipin onto your guide and off you go with your hammers. The results speak for themselves.
 

 
Shite. This sorry mess is what we keep hidden behind a bench after it was cut off. Luckily we made the cylinder much longer than it needed to be. We reckoned we had another four attempts before another sheet of brass was needed. After some thought and discussion we came up with the idea of crimping the top of the cylinder to make a nice even start to the curve. So taking a body jack we made a funny looking press to form ridges. After that the cylinder looked a lot like we were going to be investigated by the CIA and MI6 for building a nasty weapon.
 

 
A shell casing from a super gun?
 

 
So, with the crinkles to help guide us when we are hitting it maybe this attempt will be more successful. So you break out the body hammers and start hitting hard (but controlled). Things are looking hopeful...
 
 

 
The massive problem with brass is that it work hardens. Steel or aluminium you can just keep hitting and biffing and bashing until it is where you need it to be. Brass on the other hand does not like being moved and you need to anneal it regularly. In a patch you would get half a dozen hammer blows before it went hard. What this meant was that you got a hammer blows once aroud the circumference before you had to lift it off with the floor crane, turn off the workshop lights and heat it to a dull red with the gas/air torch (oxy-propane is a bit too hot). Then you waited for it to cool to slip it back onto the guide. This is a painfully long process but s  l  o  w  l  y you start to make progress.
 

 
Keep going...
 

 
Starting to look hopeful...You can see the bit that keeps getting heated.
 

 
And eventually, after a couple of scares, you get there. It's got a curve and you feel pretty bloody pleased with yourself I can tell you. The black line marks the overlap of the chimney.
 

 
We are only part way there because what you have is a pretty bashed bit of brass. So you go to the cupboard and get the stack of tinsmith's wooden hammers that you bought a few years ago with this job in mind and start to work out how to use them to dress out all of the dents. So you biff and bash and rub chalk on it to see where you need to hit and in the end it looks like this. Ignore the crinkly section - that bit gets cut out to take the exhaust pipes from the engine so we didn't finish that. 
 

 
Now it is time for more filing and using miles of abrasive tape until it looks like this...
 

 
And then it is buffing wheels and soap time and after only a few hours one small patch looks like this
 

 
By now you feel like you can do anything so it's time for a brew. And then, as if by magic after only a couple of weekends' more polishing you end up with this.
 

 
The grubby bit at the bottom is the excess we had to play with. It will be cut off. All the holes in it will have to wait until the shell is made because the cladding has to fit very tightly to the shell couplings and we only have one go at it. Wreck it now and there's trouble.
 
So there you go. How to make a new boiler cladding for a 1908 Merryweather Gem in ony thirty years or so. Sadly about this point it was decided to build another waggon so this just sits in the workshop for another day.

OSRAM looks like not a bad call...
 

No update yet because there isn't anything terribly exciting to photograph other than bolts fitted and bits of angle shaped. The front axle is in one piece now which is good. I'll get some photos later. 
 
There needs to be a descision made soonish about what this thing is going to look like. The cab is pretty much set in stone other than length which will be tweaked slightly but the body is still up for discussion. One thing is that while there is a lot more work/cost involved in them big bodies always look the part and certainly make them a lot more appealling to people when we get bored with it and sell it on.
 
Up to this point our thinking was a large, fixed coke body like this one here.
 

 
The benefits of this are that the body is relatively simple to build and would allow us to, with a reasonably straight face, to paint it in Gas Light and Coke Company colours to match the other one (GLCC ran Supers).
 
However, waggon 6982 from which the engine we have comes was built originally as a three way tipper and while it offends me not rebuilding it as that we are utterly sick of tippers as they are ugly pains in the the arse, never get used as tippers and we've already got one. The point is that if it isn't going to be a tipper then all bets are off and to hell with originality. On top of that many of these waggons had several bodies/uses in their lives and many were returned to he factory on more than one occassion to be returned as something else. Getting flexible with history is nothing new.
 
One photo that took my eye was this one here. This was owned by the Sheffield grocers (they must have been more than that to justify the massive investment in one of these things) Arthur Davy and Sons...
 
 

 
I really like the big box body and butch looking tail gate and doors. Unless some Sheffield local historian knows different it appears that the waggon is painted mostly red. This is a problem because not only do we not want a tipper, we reeeeeeeally do not want a red waggon. Red is a foul colour and always ends up looking like crap. So, some artistic licence is required. It would help if I had an artistic bone in my body but I'll just have to work with the hand I've been dealt.
 
What I'm looking for is some ideas of suitable liveries for a waggon like the box van above. The rules are:
 
- Preferrably black, dark blue or green. However, other colours/ shades will be considered.
- Absolutely not red, yellow or white as the main colour.
- Household names are good but not mandatory
- The livery needs to fit in with the box van body - a quarrier would be unlikely to have a box van
- It would be nice if the nature of the buiness was nice. I'm not sure I fancy having a box van owned by Scruttocks Maggot Farmers and Rotten Carcass Disposers Ltd. That said, I really fancy a fag company livery but I haven't found one yet.
- One oddity about the livries for most steam waggons is that they have a big, featureless front apron where most lorries had their radiators. This brings both benefits and drawbacks when designing a livery.
 
Already under consideration:
 
- Lipton's Tea (Lyons has already been done)  - Dark green, gold leaf lettering, black chassis
- Tate and Lyle Sugar Refiners - Dark blue, gold leaf lettering, black chassis
- Boots Manufacturing Chemists - Dark olive green, gold leaf lettering, black chassis
- Shore Porters' Society, Aberdeen - Dark blue, white lettering, red wheels, black chassis
- Pickfords Removals and Storage - Dark blue, white lettering, red wheels, black chassis
- Just making up some shit that looks nice.
 
Thoughts, suggestions and pointers gratefully recieved.

I predict I am going to do absolutely fuck all work this afternoon.

I predict I am going to do absolutely fuck all work this afternoon.

I predict I am going to do absolutely fuck all work this afternoon.

I'm not sure if I posted this here before but:
 
http://vauxpedianet.uk2sitebuilder.com