so after I Had built the brake handle I decided to build the chassis to put the brake handle on. this was done by “Borrowing” The wheels from one of my other wagons temporarily taking the items of rolling stock down to 3 including the loco, but that will be another post on how to make up fresh railway axles coming soon to a pc or whatever you’re reading this on soon…
I had in my garden a large metal chassis from an old kiln wagon used in one of the brickworks in Bishop Auckland, I don’t know which one is a shame. but this was neigh on perfect because it had weight to it being a 4-inch channel section and being built for heat it needed to be thick steel, the wheels, and axle boxes for this wagon were used in other projects years ago so I just had the metal frame, on the underside of this I welded two lengths of 2-inch box section to take the chassis from the axle boxes being on the outside of the wheels to the inside, once this was done I offered up the “Borrowed” axles and drilled the holes for bolting the axle boxes to the frame.
surprisingly this didn’t take that long the whole construction took around 30-45 minutes and the axles were ready to be offered up and greased whilst it was upside down, this done it was time to put it the right way up, this wasn’t as easy as I had hoped it would be, I’d built the thing with heavy parts and now they were all bolted together, weighing roughly 300kgs now I had to use bars, wishes and plenty of foul language to get the chassis wheels down,
This done it was time for a brew and to see how it rolls, It rolls surprisingly freely for its weight, which means it should have no problem being hauled by my locomotive. I’ll do a post on the loco at some point once the excitement of a new item of rolling stock has subsided somewhat.