Engines > From Plans
Another Pennsylvania A3 Switcher
Kim:
Very nice looking! You did a great job forming the copper sides AND the horseshoe bend parts. Those cause me no end of grief! I had to do that upper horseshoe member a couple of times to get it right. But I'm glad I did, because that cool shape of the tender is part of the charm of the A3!
Looking great! :popcorn: :ThumbsUp:
Kim
matthew-s:
I missed this build. Great progress.
I’m building one too, I chip away where I can.
I very much enjoy the process. It looks like you are too!
Kim and BlondiHacks have been a great help to me. Although I suspect I’ve been working on mine longer, and I’m way behind them!
:Lol:
JCvdW:
Thanks Kim and Matthew for checking in. Your interest and comments keep me motivated!
The sheet metal parts for the tender tank were cut out with the CNC router. As always sequence of operations are important, and the top plate had to be made twice. Trying to do the top bend after the man hole opening was cut, resulted in a warped top plate.
An embossing tool was made following Kozo's instructions and lots of fake rivets embossed. I followed Blondihacks method to first print the location of the rivets on paper, to ensure that rivets aligned on all edges.
Sourcing small screws locally to join the sheet metal turned out to be a problem. Luckily, a local optometrist turned out to be an excellent source of small screws. He had some small stainless steel M1.6 screws with heads exactly the same size as the embossed rivet heads.
I used my Dremel mounted on the milling machine (https://www.modelenginemaker.com/index.php/topic,12280.0.html) for drilling and tapping M1.6 holes to fasten the top plate to the side plates.
All the tender tank parts ready to be fluxed and screwed together for soft soldering:
And after soldering, pickling and a bit of Scotchbrite (this short sentence belies a marathon session of fluxing, assembly, soldering, pickling and re-soldering!):
Quite a few of the screws did not solder, even after pickling all the parts and screws before soldering. Pickling probably did not clean the screw holes well enough. An ultrasonic cleaner may be the answer. Rather than trying to get the screws soldered in, I decided to fill and seal the holes with JB Weld instead.
I also found (by luck) that reheating a soldered joint and then only applying some flux, will more often than not 'pull' the solder out from the joint to form a fully soldered joint.
And finally, with the dummy side plates attached, it now really is beginning to look like a tender:
There are still some small dents here and there on the curved edges of the copper side plates which happened during forming, which I hope can be filled and levelled with etch primer when painting.
Now I only need to make the coal stopper, to finish the tender tank section before moving on to the man hole.
Kim:
That is beautiful! You're doing a bang-up job on the tender, it's coming along wonderfully! :ThumbsUp: :popcorn: :popcorn:
Kim
Admiral_dk:
Looks good :ThumbsUp: and a LOT of work ....
Per :cheers:
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