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3/4 " Scale Hudson Locomotive built by Victor Shattock.

Lester Bowman

Hot Rolled
Joined
Apr 9, 2011
Location
Modesto california USA
Here is a 3/4" Scale ( 3 1/2" Gauge ) locomotive and Tender built by Victor Shattock many moons ago. It has remained in this unfinished state until now. Dad traded for this quite awhile ago. I have inherited it and post pics complete with dust and dirt. It needs a bit of TLC :)
 

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Addition photo's. This is a very dirty and forlorn looking piece but its workmanship is exquisite.
 

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The boiler is steel. The barrel is 5" diameter tapering back to 6" joining to the Crown Sheet. Detail shots show a very stout construction. Stays fitted but not nutted and sealed. Beautiful thing.
 

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More detailed boiler pics.
 

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And the last show a gorgeous Tender with most of the small details suffering from dents and bents and shuffles.
 

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A couple more detail shots of the Tender. This was built before the " Little Engines " Hudson became available.A lot of information about Victor Shattock and his basement Railroad can be found on line.

I need to find the right guy who will finish this up and treasure this :) It deserves more and I'd say 95% complete. Exquisite detail and remarkable workmanship. Needs a good cleaning!

Victor lived in Oakland California and worked for Southern Pacific RR. His story is very interesting. It is time well spent reading about this remarkable man.
 

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I am most intrigued by Lesters posting on Victor Shattocks model locomotive, When looking at a model constructed by a craftsman of long ago, I tend to try and "look behind the artifact", and try and put myself into the situation of the engines constructor, and I always think on the possibility of more primitive plant and tooling which one would not find in a model makers equipment of today, Was this little locomotive built during the depression years, and also was the builder struggling to pay his mortgage , or was this machine built just after the last war, When money may well have been hard to come by?
One small detail which caught my eye in the construction was the little castellated nut on the valve gear, I think it was too small to be a commercially available item, Therefore how did Victor achieve its production, Did he have a small milling machine and have recourse to a tiny slitting saw, or did he jury rig his lathe to achieve a delightful outcome , I wonder also if he had one of the ubiquitous Soth Bend Lathes, In its day and still at present the "Must Have" of the model maker in many cases
When time permits, I will have to read the link to his story and put my mind at rest. Nowadays in this trendy stage in world time, button pushing to programme a C.N.C. machine would be the order of the day, But I tend to think that Victors achievement to him would be more sweet than button pushing, Even although he would be toiling like Adam of old earning his reward by the sweat of his brow.
 
Lester:

You have quite a treasure in the form of the nearly-completed Hudson. I am always amazed at what craftsmen, particularly model engineers, with limited shop equipment accomplished.

As Cutting Oil Mac notes, this was an era when model makers or model engineers often worked with a very basic small lathe and drill press. Nowdays, we take for granted having some sort of vertical milling machine in the shop, even in home machine shops. I am sure a number of people in today's world can't function without DRO, let alone the vertical mill. Mr. Shattock accomplished some very precise work without benefit of most of what we take for granted in a machine shop. Think of the accuracy in establishing center distances on the side rods and engine frames. Any deviation from one side of the engine to the other on those center distances, and the engine would literally lock up and the drivers would not roll. The degree of accuracy in machine work for this sort of model building is quite high, and I liken it to "toolroom work". After that, we have the fit and finish of the working parts. It is one thing to work to the high degree of accuracy required to build a running locomotive, but to do so while conforming to scaled down original parts and with a fine finish takes it to another level.

The boiler particularly intrigues me. Having the tapered barrel, Mr. Shattock cut the barrel sheet (on a boiler, the pieces of plate that are formed into the parts are referred to as "sheets") to roll into the tapered course. On something of this relatively small diameter, getting that tapered course designed, laid out and rolled was a trick in itself.

In looking at the welds, Mr. Shattock appears to have used oxyacetylene welding. No handy TIG in those days, and it may be old enough of a locomotive model to date to a time when stick welding was not a well accepted thing. I got a chuckle out of the hole in the firebox wrapper (roof sheet) for a steam dome or possibly for the valve turret ( the block of valves in an engine cab which is mounted just above the boiler backhead and provide steam supply to the auxiliaries). Seeing how that hole was made by "chain drilling" and chiselling out the center piece is classic and in keeping with what locomotive boiler shops did 'back in the day'. I've been inside quite a few full sized steam locomotive boilers in the course of doing engineering work on them. On the boilers built prior to the 20's, it is common to see the dome hole cut into barrel by "chain drilling" and chiselling. Anytime I see a dome hole cut in this manner, I think of the poor bastards who had to do that job. Remember, this was an era before portable magnetic based electric drill presses, or small hand-held portable drills. If you wanted to drill a hole in a boiler barrel in those days, you chained a drilling post to the barrel and used a "boiler ratchet" or "ratchet drill"- commonly called an "old man. To chain drill a ring of holes about 24" diameter for a dome base was a mankiller of a job, as was chiselling out the webs of steel between the holes. Every time I get inside an old boiler and see a hole made in that way, I think of the men who had to do that job. Mr. Shattock cut the hole for the dome or steam valve turret base in that same manner. He may well have drilled the holes using a hand-cranked "egg beater" drill, or a breast drill given what I'm seeing on the rest of the boiler.

The welding is a whole other topic, and oxyacetylene welding is almost a lost art. In the 'teens and well after, it was THE process for welding in new fabrication as well as repairs. It is how I learned to weld, using coat hanger for filler rod, and how I got a few men started welding. When heavier sections are welded, such as standard wall pipe, the heat thrown off by O/A welding is quite intense. Working inside the firebox to weld the seams must have been a real "hand burner". Weaving and "washing" that wide cover pass on the bottom of the mud ring also was a hot proposition. As someone who learned welding with O/A, it is a process which, while forgiving as far as what you can do to get a good weld (manipulating your puddle), puts an incredible amount of heat into the work. Welding a job like the Hudson's boiler using O/A and controlling distortion from the welding required an incredible amount of skill. As a kid, when I was learned to weld, the oldtimers had me run an open root weld on two pieces of 3/8" steel plate which had been bevelled from one side. By the time I ran a few filler passes, the plate was warped into quite a bad curve. That was the lesson for me. Controlling the stresses set up by the massive amount of heat and the welds themselves when running O/A welds was quite an art in itself.

It is quite significant to note that Mr. Shattock followed full sized boilermaking practices of the 'teens or 'twenties when he built the boiler for the Hudson.


People who do shop work take so much for granted, whether it is hand held powerful drills and angle or die grinders, vertical milling machines, DRO, and so much more. Even bevelling the sheets of the boiler for the welds took some doing in Mr. Shattock's day. No angle grinders, maybe bevelling on a pedestal grinder if he could get to use one (aka "government job" in a shop where he might have worked). The Oxyacetylene welding was time consuming, and it would not surprise me that Mr. Shattock had an acetylene "generator" (using calcium carbide and water to produce acetylene on site), and tanked oxygen. In the 'teens and 'twenties, there was a firm named Oxweld, and they equipped countless railroad backshops and boiler shops for oxyacetylene systems using an on site "generator" and banks of tanked oxygen. The old shops would have a separate building some distance from the shops which housed the acetylene generator, and the shops were piped for acetylene and oxygen. I recall the old enamelled signs in the Soo Line shops in Marquette, MI for "Oxweld Railroad Acetylene". Mr. Shattock, aside from doing incredible machine work with limited resources, built a boiler that followed full sized practice of that era. I've seen boiler repairs and welded fireboxes made in that same era, and the oxyacetylene welding always makes me stop and think of the times and the men who had to weld those boilers.

Mr. Shattock's Hudson tells quite a story, and is quite an epitaph to the man. I am glad you have the locomotive, and really appreciate your taking the time to post the photos of it. I also chuckle in seeing the tender. Remember: I am in New York State, so when I read "Hudson" type locomotive, I thought of the NY Central RR. NYCRR made the Hudson type of locomotive famous, and they ran coal firing on their Hudsons. When I saw your photos of the tender, I realized: Mr. Shattock was modelling a west coast or California variation of the Hudson, hence it has a tender for supply an oil fired boiler. Imagine the work of making that tender in an age when handy propane of Mapp torches did not exist. Mr. Shattock may well have used soldering coppers heated in a separate gas fire or charcoal fire, and he may well have used a gasoline blow torch ('petrol blow lamp', I think, to our UK brethren). Drilling small rivet holes on the cab and tender was likely done using a hand cranked "eggbeater" type of drill, and soldering was done using either a flame thrower of a gasoline blow torch or a soldering copper. It took a lot more skill and a LOT more patience to do the work Mr. Shattock did, aside from incredible skill. It's quite a testament to the man and I am glad you shared his work with us.
 
The welding is a whole other topic, and oxyacetylene welding is almost a lost art. In the 'teens and well after, it was THE process for welding in new fabrication as well as repairs. It is how I learned to weld, using coat hanger for filler rod, and how I got a few men started welding.

That's how I learned. I asked on of the experts here at work, if I should remove the varnish off the coat hanger wire before using it.

"Nah, it sorta burns off and gives a kind of gas flux for the joint" was the reply. So I always left it on. I had to do a number of repairs to the
fenders on my '59 R50 motorbike because lots of the spots where the fender mounts to the body would trap water, and they were rusting out
there. So I hole-sawed the bad parts out, made up sheet steel punched slugs to fit the holes, and applied coat-hanger glue with the OA torch.

Came out better than I thought it would.

Now as for the locomotive - here's the big question in my mind: how the HECK did he make those driver wheels?

Were those cast and then machined, or were the webs on those wheels somehow built up from scratch, again welded in place?
 
Joe..I REALLY appreciate your insight into what Victor Shattock went through to create this locomotive...especially your comments regarding the boiler and how it shows how closely it resembles full size practice. It IS an incredible piece. What makes it even more incredible is :this one" is but one of many he built along with rolling stock and a complete operating steam railroad in the basement of his house in Oakland.

He was intimate with the Southern Pacific Railroad and had an "in" with many of the people who worked there. He had the blessing of the "top heads" who turned a blind eye to his "favors" because the end result was great advertising for SP when he displayed his various Locomotives and rolling stock at Southern Pacific meetings and functions. In fact this man was instrumental in the formation of the Golden Gate Live Steamers in 1936 and was the Grand Father of the Live steam hobby today. There is quite a bit about him on Google.

I discovered he first used a home made lathe and later a 6" Atlas lathe. There are photos showing him at work machining Drive Wheels. I am quite sure he had connections within SP to have these castings done "in house" or foundry's were every where in those days. The bogies themselves look like castings but no..they are cut from flat plate and the "moldings" attached to the edges to simulate castings. Jim is right in his observation of the special little castle nuts and details..beautiful detailed work.

This locomotive was built by Victor Shattock but it is possible the boiler was built by someone else. I'll tell you the story.This locomotive lived for years in ANOTHER basement ( not Victor's ) in Oakland. This was a friend of Vic's and the story goes Victor built the chassis and tender. Victors friend whom I'm sure was a fellow live steamer wanted a larger boiler rather than the copper boiler's Vic was still using. All this came from Ken Shattock whom I spoke with after Dad had first gotten the locomotive. Well..as time went by the locomotive slowly disappeared into the abyss of my parents home and pretty much forgotten until I finally received it as part of my inheritance from Moms Estate. Ken Shattock sadly passed away awhile back. I found this out trying to reach him again. I have notes from that conversation with Ken..can't lay my hands on them at the moment but they'll turn up because I KNEW I would need them someday. Someday is NOW and well..still looking :)

Joe..amazing writing as usual. You have made me see things in this I hadn't seen or considered before. A good cleaning and a few repairs are required. I want to see it and hear it run under air before I let it go. No..too much for me to finish. These things are " A Lifestyle" and need the proper caretaker :)

It really is a beautiful thing and speaks volumes of a man and the times in which it was constructed. Good catch on the tender..Southern Pacific for sure. Thank you guys for your interesting replies. I KNEW you would love to see these pics...cobwebs dust and all :)
 
Now as for the locomotive - here's the big question in my mind: how the HECK did he make those driver wheels?

Ernest A. Steel's Model Mechanical Engineering (1955) suggests such things were readily available as castings

Thumbnail is beginning of pattern for a larger scale - from long ago.:)
 

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Around the time Shattock made this Hudson, both Lester Friend and Langworthy were making driver castings about that size and spoke count. It was also more common then to make your own patterns and get them cast by friendly hometown iron foundries. My hometown has several Fe foundries, bit not friendly until you talk about 10 ton amd over orders....

L7
 
It is of great interest to read that Victor Shattock was the Grandfather of The Golden Gate Live Steamers, Even over here we have been acquinted with that august body for many years, In Scotland prior to about 1965 , one could go into an iron foundry and ask if they would be interested in "A Chinese Government Contract" and if one was not too greedy , and it did not weigh about one ton, & one let them know it was a "Home Job", they would generally show an interest, Frequently asking if one would bring in the finished item to let them see it, Folks were always interested in small engines, I think they felt it was of a novelty to know that someone could miniaturise a working engine down to something delicate
Thus was the happy go lucky attitude I encounered in the mid to late 1950 era, I used to walk into the iron foundry of Henry & Galt in Paisley , speak to the late foreman Sandy Campbell, and he would oblige, Usually it was something like a lathe backplate or similar The rub of was the request "Can you mould us a little bronze casting "No problem" That in many ways was how the Clydeside works operated, a system of mutual back scratching, If one was not required to reciprocate then a half bottle of whisky or some cigarettes or sweets was fair barter , If one had tried to pay them in cash, It would have been a mortal insult

Fast forward to the late 1960 era and beyond, when foundries became infected by spivs on the management teams, & minimum orders and costing became the order of the day, + that horrible chemically bonded sand which chills tiny cast components, and out comes a casting with half the spokes missing Added to that the general grade of Iron in use now is grade 17 which does not lend itself to anything under 1/4" thickness,

Harking back to these balmy days of yore, at Milngavie (A leafy suburb of Glasgow), lived an old moulder called William Waugh, I knew old William personally he was a one man band , and made a splendid living from casting parts for model locomotives, He exported all over the world, particularly Australia Old Wull, served his apprenticeship as an iron moulder in the Falkirk area, and at one stage had (Before the last war) taken ill, Fortunately his parents were reasonably comfortably off , and they paid for him, to serve an apprenticeship all over again , This time as a patternmaker, his wheel patterns were a dream to behold, One of his best friends, was another moulder who was in the model Engineering trade, Namely George Kennion , down in the South of England,

Some two or three years back, I had recourse to order a couple of model engine castings from two trade suppliers I recieved back to little totally mis-shapen lumps of iron again when I looked at them, the curse of "Chemically bonded Sand"

Sadly I do not have facilities, energy, or space to manufacture my own small iron cast work,only the occasional Aluminium casting in small size How I wish I could magic myself back for a day to those carefree times
 
Someone to finish it and treasure it? I hear Lester Bowman is good that way. Interestingly, the oil stains and dust/rust on the running gear are quite like what would show in actual service. The upper more visible areas might get washed and painted much more frequently than less visible running gear. I would take advantage of those years of "patina" as they like to call such today.
Seriously, Lester, you da man. Most of the hard work is done and your attention to detail is needed. Those parts not there are not a problem. I'm pretty sure that anything beyond your capacity would have people of PM standing in line to help.
 
From the first film, the shop sequences show also the use of a milling attachment on the little lathe. It looks like he did not have a mill, and did things the traditional "British modelmaker" way. Maybe no drill press, but there was no information about that.

Very good work, and must have taken a long time.
 
From what other information I found online about the late Victor Shattock, he had an Atlas 6" lathe and an Atlas bench drill press for his machine tools. There was a lengthy writeup (Golden Gate Live Steamers, I think it was) that I found about Mr. Shattock and his basement live steam railroad and his locomotives. No mention is made of his having started building the Hudson that Lester Bowman now owns.

The writeup I read went into a good deal of detail about Mr. Shattock and his role in GGLS. Mr. Shattock was born in England and married his wife, Maude while living in England. He was formally trained to be a plumber and worked at that trade in England. He and his wife emigrated initially to Canada, where Mr. Shattock opened a plumbing business. He felt there were more opportunities in California, so he and his wife emigrated to California. There, Mr. Shattock found employment with the Southern Pacific RR, doing plumbing and heating maintenance work on SP buildings and properties. Reading this, I found it remarkable that Mr. Shattock was never formally trained as a machinist, nor did he work in the motive power department of the SP. He did succeed in mastering machine shop practice and got a good working knowledge of steam locomotives. My guess is Mr. Shattock kept his eyes and ears open while working on SP's buildings doing plumbing and heating. He likely was able to ask questions of mechanical engineers as well as such crafts as machinists and boilermakers and pipefitters. He likely also got some informal training from SP machinists along the way as he did the plumbing and heating work in SP's buildings. I would think that Mr. Shattock also had access to the SP's engineering drawings on their locomotives and probably was able to get some prints made ( real blue prints back in those days and not so simple as photocopying).

Mr. Shattock, from what I read, was able to talk to SP brass to get materials and use of equipment for the Golden Gate Live Steamers first club grounds and running tracks. He wangled good used bridge timbers for the first raised track at GGLS. The fact he was a SP employee, and the fact he modelled SP's steam locomotives all worked into good publicity for the Southern Pacific RR. SP returned the favors to Mr. Shattock in the form of "surplus" materials and use of equipment for building the GGLS live steam track and club facilities.

One article I read online about Mr. Shattock was written by his grandson, Ken Shattock, from whom Lester Bowman's father bought the Hudson locomotive. Ken Shattock starts his article by saying he came from a broken home, and was taken in by his grandparents as a small boy. His grandparents raised him, and there are some photos of a young Ken Shattock with Victor Shattock and the smaller live steam locomotives on the basement layout. Remarkably, Mr. Shattock had time to be a good father and husband while cranking out quite a number of scale model live steam locomotives and building an incredible indoor layout in his home basement. During WWII, Mr. Shattock was investigated for possible subversive or espionage activity. It seemed by that point in time, people would flock to Mr. Shattock's home on certain weekday evenings to see his live steam layout running. He ran multiple trains and had working switches and a working turntable and water tower. During WWII, gatherings of fairly sizeable groups of people who were meeting in a private home with no advertised or apparent purpose on a regular basis attracted the attention of government agents. Two agents arrived one evening when Mr. Shattock had his locomotives in steam and blended in with the crowd. They afterwards interviewed Mr. Shattock privately, said they saw nothing suspicious or worse in what they'd seen. The agents then said they enjoyed seeing the live steam locomotives running and had developed enough of an interest to come back just to watch the live steam locomotives running.

From what I've read, Mr. Shattock was a low-key sort of man and quite the proper gentleman. Photos of him in his shop show him in a white shirt and necktie. I find Mr. Shattock to have been a remarkable man in so many ways. He learned what he needed to know to build live steam locomotives and it went beyond book learning and paper drawings- he learned the machine shop work and many other skills. He managed to build a number of very fine live steam locomotive models with limited tools and equipment. He did this in an era when Live Steam castings were not so common, and if a person wanted to build a model live steam locomotive, they had to often make their own patterns and get castings poured, and do a lot of the engineering and design to produce the working drawings before starting to build anything. This sort of hobby is bound to take considerable amounts of spare time, yet Mr. Shattock seems to have found some way to balance being a father and husband with his live steam hobby. Seeing not only the locomotives but the live steam indoor layout he had built has me wondering where and how he managed to balance his familial and husbandly duties with his hobby time and hold down a full time job. In one story, Mr. Shattock was working away from his home on some SP site, and had a RR car setup as a plumbing shop and with living accomodations. He succeeded in building a live steam locomotive and short test track in that SP shop car. The man must have had a continuously working mind with photographic detail and the ability to design and hold engineering details in his mind. In his shop, building those locomotives on nothing more than a 6" Atlas lathe and drill press, he must have worked with no wasted moves and made every second of time count. Using a lathe milling attachment is a limited and slow alternative to a milling machine, and that is all Mr. Shattock had to work with. At so many levels, Mr. Shattock had to have been a very remarkable man. As Lester Bowman notes, and from my reading about Mr. Shattock (prompted by Lester Bowman's original post), seeing the steel boiler of the Hudson does raise the possibility some SP boilermaker(s) may have built it for Mr. Shattock. Having equipment to cut and roll up the barrel, firebox, firebox wrapper and flange the required sheets and all the rest of the boiler parts took a boiler shop. Seeing the welding as it was done on that boiler tells me an experienced O/A welder did the work.
While Mr. Shattock had no shortage of skills and determination, I would think it was a stretch for him to have made that steel boiler. As they say, dead men tell no tales, so we can only guess at who and how the steel boiler was made.

Regarding the staybolts on the boiler: the boiler is put together with screwed stays. These are rigid stays. How they had a small staybolt tap to put in those rigid screwed stays is a nice question in itself. The way a screwed rigid stay would be finished up is to have "hammered it up", meaning peened the exposed ends sticking out of the boiler sheets. Once the ends were "hammered up", in the old days, the boiler makers would run a calking chisel around the riveted over ends of each stay. By the '30's, seal welding of rigid stays was being done instead of the calking. The stays that tie the crownsheet (the top of the firebox) to the roof sheet on the outer wrapper would have been flexible stays on the full sized boilers. These would have had a ball-and-socket joint where the staybolt seated on the firebox roof sheet. The ball-and-socket joints would have had screwed caps on them to make them steam tight. On the model boiler, since no flexible stays are used on the firebox roof sheet, chances are Mr. Shattock, et al, was going to make some "dummy" caps to create the look of flexible stays. These would be nothing more than a cap nut with maybe a copper gasket to seal it against the boiler's roof sheet. Inside the firebox, on the crownsheet, the stays would likely have been seal welded when they finished the Hudson's boiler, but it would have been a bit of a feat to get in there to O/A seal weld those stays. They may have planned to simply rivet over the ends of the stays sticking thru the crownsheet with some kind of rivet snap.

Looking at the backhead, there are raised pads for the tappings for the water level glass and try cocks. What this tells me is that someone possibly built up those pads with oxyacetylene welding and then slicked them off flat. This is really good practice as it provides what is known as "compensation" for the tapped holes in the backhead. Someone was thinking in terms of full size boiler practice. There are hinge pieces already welded to the backhead for the firedoor, so whomever was doing the welding was skillful enough to do some very small and fine work with it. Typically, when I think of railroad shops and boiler work, it is heavy work. To do the kind of welding needed on the Hudson boiler, it took a torch with finer tips, and possibly an "aircraft" torch. An "aircraft" oxyacetylene torch is an extremely small torch with very fine tips. The valves for controlling oxygen and acetylene are set forward on the torch barrel so the welder can manipulate them to adjust the flame while welding.

I would not be surprised if Mr. Shattock and the boiler shop foreman were buddies, and the result was things needed to build the Hudson's boiler were purchased by the SP boiler shop. A special order small staybolt tap, and a small diameter tube roller and an aircraft torch all would be the kinds of tools that would be purchased for the job. Back in the days when that Hudson boiler was being built, manufacturers of things like staybolt taps existed and would take a special order, as would makers of tube rollers. Aircraft torches were in common use by the 'twenties and 'thirties for what the name says: welding tubular aircraft frames together. Other crafts also make use of aircraft torches and they are still in production.

The other job to consider with building any rod-connected steam locomotive is the "quartering" of the axles and wheels. The keyways on the axles are indexed at some angle to each other so that the cranks are at something like 90 degrees from left-to-right side of the engine. This prevents a locomotive getting stuck on dead center.
When a locomotive is built, the keyways in the axles are indexed to whatever angle is required from left-to-right side (or as railroads tended to say: engineer's side and fireman's side on steam locomotives). The drive wheel hubs also have to have their keyways indexed, and the crankpins have to maintain this same indexing. It is done on full sized locomotives with a purpose built machine tool called a "quartering machine" which can either bore the crankpin holes in the drive wheel hubs, or can take a cut on the crankpins to bring them into correct quartering (done when an engine is shopped for heavy repairs). How Mr. Shattock pulled off the quartering with very simple and limited machine tools and tooling says a lot about the man. One old motion picture (now a youtube) shows him using his bench vise as his "wheel press". Cutting keyways in the axles on the lathe milling attachment is do-able, slow but possible. The indexing of the axles to establish the quartering would require a special fixture. Cutting keyways in the drive wheel hubs would likely have taken a "government job" with a broach and press, or else meant endless hours "shaping" the
keyways in the driver hubs with a boring bar and toolbit in the lathe. Doing this for one model live steam locomotive would have taken most people quite some time, and one locomotive model would have been their total output with the shop facilities Mr. Shattock had. Pondering the work needed to build a model live steam locomotive (based on experience with full size steam locomotive work), I find more and more areas of the work to marvel at.
 
A couple of minutes into the first of the films the statement is made that the boilers are "made of copper throughout". That is/was pretty common, as copper is easy to form compared to steel.

I agree that the up-close of the foundation ring sure looks like welding, and steel construction, though. I don't know what to think of that along with the common use of copper and the statement. Copper can be welded, but most use silver solder.

Actually, it does not look much like the boilers shown in the film. Those look more classy, and seem better built, looking much more like copper boilers, although the films are black and white, so one cannot be sure. I wonder if the boiler shown with the running gear is original to it. Someone may have added it, possibly the running gear was built by Mr Shattock, and a boiler was never completed for it.

Something about the boiler seems out of scale for the running gear. Maybe that has to do with the photographic angles, and it is just an optical illusion.

K N Harris in his book on boilermaking for models mentions using copper, riveted for strength, and using soft solder basically instead of calking, not relying on it for any structural strength.. But he also mentions and more-or-less recommends using silver solder for boiler construction, suggesting the rivets and solder for those with limited facilities.

Steam Railroading in the Basement - YouTube
 








 
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