EDM Fletcher Jennings:
I had an EDM Fletcher Jennings body kit for my birthday in 2019. This is designed for a Dapol 16.5mm gauge chassis but I thought I could modify a Branchlines Tal-y-llyn chassis kit to 14mm gauge instead. The body is a 3d print and was originally designed by Andrew Young who bult his first model on the Brachlines chassis and very kindly gave me a copy of his construction notes.
The starting point was to cut the original chassis fret into two separate sides and drill them to take new 9.5mm spacers from Markits. As I was building the chassis as an 0-4-0, I cut off the rear section and adding some rear frame fillers to disguise the frame cut-out where the rear pony truck should have been.
Now Andrew’s model has some nice wheels which Branchlines confirmed were from Alan Gibson. My chassis was so old that it had Markits wheels with some etched overlays to simulate the FJ pattern wheels. I did wonder about getting some Gibson wheels but I would have had to had shorten the axles which is a bit tricky when you don’t have a lathe. I decided to use the Markits wheels but to modify them in a similar fashion to something I did years ago. Back then I used Plasticine and Plastic Padding but I haven’t had these for years so I improvised with Blu tack and epoxy glue.
The bottom left wheel is the original Markits wheel, bottom right has been modified with the removal of 4 spokes, top right is a modified wheel embedded in Blu Tack to about half the depth of the wheel and the top left is a wheel that has been filled with epoxy glue. That last wheel needed the remaining spokes filling with glue to simulate the balance weight and the final wheels look like this:
Not quite as nice as the Gibson wheels, but I had 14mm gauge axles and they are self quartering. They didn’t work out quite as smooth as I had hoped but I thought that I would get away with them – after all I have probably created a greater sin by building this as a 2 ft gauge loco!
Initially I tried an old Branchlines 80:1 multibox and a huge Mashima motor but the gearbox was just too noisy and I replaced it with a High Level gearbox.
This was one of the early chassis etches where the holes on the motion bracket are in the wrong place for the slide bars. The instructions say “file off the tab and solder in the right place” a task I found easier said than done. I realised that the holes in the motion bracket lined up with the cylinders so I just replaced the etched bars with plain strip.
While the body is a very nice 3d print, many of the additional parts are superb brass castings including the valves and injectors which need the pipework carefully soldered in place. This went together far more easily that I was expecting. For once, I took my time, prepared everything carefully and used Blue Tack to hold the various bits together.
I wanted to keep the brass bits as brass and the copper bits as copper so these were left off the body until all the painting had been completed. The steam turret pipework was also soldered and left off the body although I blacken the turret as I didn’t want a brass finish there.
I still have to weather it, add couplings and a crew but with any luck I should be testing it out at the Bristol O Gauge Group show on the 26th January.
Pretty much finished apart from couplings, nameplates and crew.
Sorry for the photo quality, I am afraid that it is the best that I can do at the moment.
Here is a video of the loco being run in on the M5-M50 NGM Group test track in January 2020: