Suydam 2 Stall Engine House

[Bernd]

Lets get to the soldering portion of the kit build.

First the corrugated sidings gets a good cleaning where the angle is to be soldered to. I use a stainless-steel wire bush to remove some of the oxide that has built up over the years.



I used rosin flux for a good bond with the solder.



I used a pair of 1-2-3 blocks to hold the angled piece square to the end of the building. I was able to hold the angle piece in place with the resistance soldering probe and in the other hand hold the solder. A quick step on the on/off pedal switch and it was tack soldered. I did that in a couple of spots and then went back and soldered the full length. Doing that helps to keep the angle piece in place while soldering.



Next came the longer pieces that needed to be soldered on the bottom. These are to be soldered on 3/32" from the bottom up. Again, a couple of spot solder joints and then back over the whole length.





Side walls are done



As are the end walls. You can see the brass angles I had to make to replace the missing ones in the kit. The extra parts on the right are the doors. I didn't use them in the finished model since I didn't like the way they would have been attached.



I was going to assemble the back and front walls to the side walls, but that wasn't going to happen until I figured out what's up with the door's on the front and why the gap if you wanted to do the model with perhaps one door closed. A quick read of the instructions again stated that 3/32" wide strips were to be soldered to the edges of the door. So that makes up the 3/8" that is missing on the left door set. Really didn't like the butt joint it would have entailed





When I started the project, I was thinking of making a set of wooden doors. I've never seen swinging corrugated doors.

Moving right along. The next parts are these angled pieces that get soldered to the roof halves.



Using two 1-2-3 blocks and a heavy steel block to hold down the part that will be soldered to the roof panel. It also needed to be centered. The wire with the brass part on it is the ground wire for the resistance rig. It gets weighted down with that piece of round stock with the orange paint on it for a good ground connection.



I began by spot soldering the left side first. The ground has been placed, and the probe is at the first solder point to be spot soldered. This will hold the angled strip at that end.



Then the right side was spot soldered. Now the that top piece won't move as you spot solder in several places along the roof line.



The solder should get sucked up under the metal.



Now the rest can be spot soldered in between the ends.



The one half is done with the hole for the chimney in it.



All the angles have been soldered on to the appropriate parts and the end walls have been joined together.



Next will be assembling the walls. This is not going to happen next because I want to add interior beams. It's not going to involve any great detailing. I just want it to look like something is holding up those corrugated panels.

Till next time.

Bernd

[elwoodblues]

That is a lot of serious soldering there Bernd.  Not sure how long that took you but it looks very well done.

[Bernd]

That is a lot of serious soldering there Bernd.  Not sure how long that took you but it looks very well done.

Hi Ron,

Not sure either after 3 years. The soldering didn't take long that long but the prep work did. I've got two more of these kits that I plan on someday making a four-stall engine house.

Bernd

[ACL1504]

Bernd,

Very nice SBS on this. As a teenager, I attempted to build, solder the Black Bart Mine kit. What a disaster! I was successful on the power house one.

Looking forward to the rest of this thread.

Tom

More to come Tom. I've got almost 200 pictures on this build. Sometimes I think I get a little to verbose in my builds. I'm much into show details of certain procedures. You may need two or three bowls of popcorn to sit through this one. 

Bernd

Bernd,

Not a problem. I also post close to 2 hundred photos on my builds. I have plenty of popcorn.

Tom 

[Mr. Critter]

I have just acquired the Orville Redenbacher company. Heat up some oil in your kettles, lads.

[Bernd]

Continuing on with the Suydam Two Stall engine House I was looking at what I could do with the windows in this kit.

At this point I was also wondering if corrugated buildings were painted. After doing some surfing, I did find that they were painted. So now I had to decide what color I want the outside of the engine house to be. In setting up my NY,V & N Rwy. I have two colors I was looking at. The first colors simulated the colors of the telephone company perhaps 40 years ago. The Rochester Telephone company trucks used three colors, green, black & yellow. Can't remember which color was on top, yellow or green. The black was easy, it was the belt line.

Here some rolling stock I painted in that color. Both ways. One with the green on top the other with it on the bottom.



And then I have my second-generation color scheme following the "NYC Pacemaker" colors, except I added the white lighting stripe to emulate NYC's lighting stripe scheme. Both sets of equipment was named for the "Black Diamond Lines" because it was going to be strictly coal hauling line.



More on that at some point later when I start a thread on the layout itself.

Now to the next project on the engine house. I was going to assemble the walls, but I wanted to add interior beams to show the metal was being held up by a frame of some sort. While I was contemplating that I took a closer look at the windows that would be use on the engine house. The kit supplies an acetate sheet lined with ink to simulate the partitions of the windows.



Above is what they would look like glued to the inside. Yuk!!!!!!!!!!!

I came up with the idea of using individual pieces of wire to make the window panels. A jig would be needed to hold the little pieces of wire. I made three jigs in total. The first two were scrapped as they didn't work. I'll show you what didn't work first.

I made the first jig using a piece of bass wood with a piece of the engine house I had left over from the kit I had many years ago. It got thrown out due to the fact the metal actually rusted. I had drilled holes in it and added four pins so I could cut out wood parts to make a wooden round house. The project never left the ground.





Holes were drilled into the bass wood for a fret saw blade to fit through.





Tools needed to cut out the windows, fret saw and a small table with a slot in it.



Cutting out the window portion. You can barely see part of the saw. I just follow the inside of the metal window.





I used a second piece of 1/16" bass wood to draw the window outline on. The acetate window material was used to locate the lines for the wire on the wood. Notice the extended pins on the cutout portion and the holes in the solid portion of the bass wood. This was used for aligning the two pieces. This will facilitate getting the completed window out of the jig.





I had to order a new bottle of flux. I kept knocking over the bottle which makes a sticky mess and didn't leave me with much flux left. Along with that order is some solder paste that will be used to solder the window wires together.

To keep from knocking over the new bottle I decided I needed a non-tipping flux station. A piece of 1/4" Luan and some hot glue did the trick. I also added a brush holder on the side, so I didn't have to go looking for the brush every time I needed it and a small plastic shot cup to put some denatured alcohol in to clean the brush. The rosin flux fluid evaporates fast just leaving the rosin behind. This way I can wash and soften the brush up before using it again.



While I was waiting for the solder paste to arrive I started on the first window. It turned out to be a disaster. Below are the tools I used to solder the wires.



The wire I'm using is Tichy phosphor-bronze .033" thick. This equates to around 3" in HO scale. There will be a total of 20 pieces to solder together to make a complete window as shown to the right (the acetate window). I started out with the .033" and am thinking of going smaller for the smaller ones inside each larger panel of windows.

The first attempt was frustrating. There are several reasons it didn't work. The wood used is way too soft and scorches very easy if too much heat is applied. The smoke that is produced puts a carbon soot on the wire making it impossible to solder. A complete circuit needs to be made when soldering the wires together, an almost impossible job. The wires move as you place the probes on the wires. I applied a small dab of flux. Then used some solder pieces that I squished flat and placed over the joint and applied the resistance soldering probes only to have the wires move as I soldered them. Everything got miss-aligned. Plus, the soft wood was getting pretty burned. The next picture shows what's involved in trying to solder. Would the soldering tweezers have helped? Perhaps, but they were too large for this job. BTW I'm using a homemade resistance solder unit.



Here are the parts for the larger sections of the window. Note how bad the wood is scorched. Less heat? Perhaps.



At this point I was pretty frustrated at the outcome. So I will stop here for now. I'll show the solution I came up with the worked great in the next post on this project.

Bernd

[deemery]

Well, I'm learning a lot from this thread, starting with "probably not a kind of kit I want to build"    But the lessons on approaching metal work/soldering are still useful.

dave

[Bernd]

Well, I'm learning a lot from this thread, starting with "probably not a kind of kit I want to build"    But the lessons on approaching metal work/soldering are still useful.

dave

That's one reason why these kits are so cheap at railroad shows. Many seem scared of soldering.

Bernd

[Pennman]

Well, I'm learning a lot from this thread, starting with "probably not a kind of kit I want to build"    But the lessons on approaching metal work/soldering are still useful.

dave

That's one reason why these kits are so cheap at railroad shows. Many seem scared of soldering.

Bernd

Very interesting! And I must admit I'm with both of you gents. First, with Dave on not wanting to construct this type of metal kit. And Bernd for not wanting to solder large projects of this caliber. I'm ok +/- with small solder joints but not this. BTW, I will continue following this but I spilled my popcorn and the dang dog got it!

Rich

[Bernd]

Ok let's get to the real fun part of this soldering project.

There's two ways to do this. I'm going to show both methods. One showing building a fixture and the second using a CNC machine to make a jig. Since 99.9% of modelers don't have CNC machines in their workshop, I'll start by building a jig. The second jig will be machined.

I know what I want to do can be done. I've done it before. Back when I was into TT scale (1/10"= 1') (1 to 120) I was on the TTnut forum, a member wanted to know if it was possible to make an antenna for an Erie caboose. I'll show how that was done. It'll show how I would suggest it can be done.

Here's the setup I did on the TT scale radio antenna. This is what they look like.



I used my Sherline CNC mill and a rotary table to do this. I used a very pointed carbide scriber in the chuck and did about 10 to 15 scribe cycles.



A hole was drilled through the center for the antenna shaft. In order to keep the wire held down I added some spring wire.



I added small pieces of flattened solder after fluxing the joints of the wires. Plus, I added a piece on the surface as a timer to indicate when the solder reached melting temp.



Next I placed the jig on a larger piece of aluminum and placed that on the gas stove. The secrete here is to melt all the solder at one time. Make sure you do this while the wife isn't home. You know the reason. 😉



The result was not impressive. Anybody tell me why before they look at the next picture?



What do they say about soldering parts together? Make sure the surface is clean. Write that on the chalk board 100 times.

Second time around after I made sure the wires were shiny and clean.





The pencil and penny in previous pictures next to the antenna give you an idea of size. Yes, it's small. .300" in diameter. I think I used .010" phosphors-bronze wire.



So having done this work but with a much better jig to hold the wires I was ready for doing the windows. I already had the G-code for scribing the window outlines. This will be the second attempt to do the windows. First, I'm going to build a jig to show that if you want to try this method you won't need a CNC machine.

Until next time.

Bernd

[Bernd]

Continuing the project.

Solder Jig for Suydam Two Stall Engine House

The soldering paste is from Amazon as are the Tamiaya paint and Krystal Clear. The paint and Kystal clear will be used to glass in the window frames or so I thought. I'll explain later when I get to the making the windows. I'm going to show some failures along the way.



I got the first method of making a soldering jig for the window completed and soldered up the first window.

I started off by installing a couple of line up pins to keep the metal templet from moving around while scribing the lines. I used a couple of pins and drilled .027" holes in the aluminum for a snug fit of the pins. The base piece is a piece of 1/4" thick aluminum.





I used a dental pick to scribe the lines for the window opening. These are just for reference when taking the templet off.





Next, I scribed the same lines on a piece of .032" thick aluminum. The piece will be used to line up the outside perimeter of the window.



Once scribed I added a little color to help see the lines.



I then drilled a couple of holes for the fret saw, sawed out the openings and filed to the scribed line. This procedure is the same as outlined when I did the wooded part.



I then determined the midpoint of the window vertically and horizontally to scribe lines for the large sections splitting the window frames.



Then scribed the reference lines.





Using the alignment pins I added two 10-32 brass screws to hold down the top templet. Also added the "ground" for the resistance soldering rig. This is the same principle as a MIG welding table. You just place the piece on the metal table and weld. Here's it's an aluminum table and solder. Both methods present a short circuit to heat up the metal and fasten the metal two pieces together. Only here the solder won't stick to the aluminum table or templet.



The first set of .033" phosphor bronze wire pieces precut for a snug fit. The arched wire was first annealed to make it soft so when curved to the arch it would keep its curve. All pieces of wire have been cleaned to make sure they are free of any oxide that may have accumulated over time so the solder will adhere to the wire.



The arched part, the two outside pieces, the bottom piece and the top straight piece were placed in the jig first and a small amount of solder paste was applied to each intersection and connection point of the wires. The tip of the rig was touched to the separate sections and a quick step on the foot pedal and the connection was made.



The end result came out of the jig with no problem.



A bit of clean up with a small file and some sandpaper will make the joints look better. Next, I will be adding the four windows in each of the larger sections. I haven't decided if I should go with a smaller wire size to denote smaller window sections or stay with the same size. I was thinking of smaller for the purpose of actually having an open window. Maybe it's too early yet to attempt that fate of making a smaller window in the open state. I think that would mean more jigs.

This is a method for the modeler who doesn't have a machine shop in their basement or a CNC tabletop mill. The other way would be to use a piece of aluminum like I did and use the method I showed earlier in making the TT scale antenna by just using scribed lines, and they don't have to be made on a mill, and smaller spring wires to hold the pieces in place so they don't move during soldering. I would use one of these first methods if I had to make just a few windows, but for twelve windows I'm going to show the use of a CNC mill in making a jig to hold the wires. Plus, it's way more accurate than hand scribing.

Next, I need to decide which way to go to fill in those large squares.

Until then, enjoy your modeling.

Bernd