It’s like Christmas come early!

After finalizing the basic design of the two bogies, a set of CAD drawings were constructed to get the laser cutting process underway. There’s been a lot of interesting articles in the ME press about laser cutting and slotting pieces together (kinda like a big jigsaw) and I was impressed at how well this seemed to work. So, I jumped on this bandwagon and made the frames as a big jigsaw.

An order was placed with Alsager Precision Engineering for the laser cutting and the project was now heading from paper, via laser, to steel. A few weeks later, the first batch of many was ready for collection…

 

The two main frames (10mm plate), buffer beam, pivot plate and motion bracket/frame stetcher.

Cylinder end cheeks/frame stretcher, cylinder mounting brackets and fly crank.

As you can see, the majority of components are ready to be slotted together to turn the flat 2D into 3D. I’m not going to reveal the frames slotted together quite yet, but lets say they look impressive already. It looks like the jigsaw theory is working well as this sneak peak at the cylinder set shows…