Scratch building the Hudswell Diesel Locomotive
In the March issue NZ Model Railway Journal there was
an article on a kit of a NZ Hudswell Diesel Shunter Locomotive.
The kit and plans are in 1:43.54
scale and as I model in OO or 1:76 scale
I needed to reproduce the plans in OO gauge. I used an ordinary household canon
inkjet printer to scale it down but any printer should work. I put the magazine
in to the scanner and scanned off a 100% copy then I used a process of
elimination to get the right scale. I needed to scale mine down to 57%. You can
try scaling yours down to 57% but scale may very between printers.
The materials I used in this
scratch build were plastic card and brass. I started by transferring the plans
to the card using carbon paper and then proceeded to cut out the parts with a scrawker or
plastic scriber.
I started cutting out the
superstructure, then I started gluing it together. I used some small brass tube
to make the chimney and because I had a brass roof I went to solder it together,
forgetting that the sides of the boiler were plastic card. After melting parts
of the superstructure I went to cut more parts out but in brass this time. I
have found out that on small models like this one it is not a good idea to
solder because there is not enough surface area for the heat to dissipate,
especially when using plastic card. The original idea was for the train to run
on N gauge track, but there was not enough room in the bottom of the train to
fit the wheels. The wheel were scavenged from a $15 siku toy diesel train. So
with out massive modification to the chasse so I went with a stationary model.
I sanded the tops of the wheels down to fit and glued them in place. A few
months later I finished it at Trainz14, by laying plastic card track on a model
base board with ballast and static grass.
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