Friday, February 12, 2010

The land of Lud

I've been doing a bit of work in the last couple of nights on my Ja/Ka project.I've lumped them in together and here's my reasoning.

First up they share quite a few similar bits. The most obvious ones are the wheels and some of the castings. Ditto with the leading and tender bogies. However last night I discovered (with reference to plans and pictures) that the waggly bits on the outside are largely identical ( to all intents and purposes), with only minor differences. This can be extended to the guide bars and cylinder ends. Yeah I thought, makes things a bit easier. Cabs look very similar, but not quite the same. Bugger.
However there are a few major differences. Take the frame shape; plate frames on the Ka vs bar frames on the Ja.

Enthused by the rods finding I plunged into the murky depths of CAD again. after taking 30 minutes trying to work out just how to import a scanned plan into the package (the answer is to look in a menu on something completely different. who the hell writes these things?), the fun really started.

First up, where did the plan vanish to. Oh its rescaled itself and is over there somewhere and..my god its huge! Right then, pan back and follow Cabbages instructions from the journal and just trace the parts out. Nope, I don't want the point there, nor do I want a line to there...or there...and definitely not there. Undo undo undo undo. Try something simple. Circles on the coupling rod bosses. Hang on, why aren't you expanding. Left click right click left click left click left click. Pan in. Ahhhh, so there's where all those wee circles have gone. Undo undo undo undo undo. Left click hold and drag and there we go. Repeat for the rest. Now to draw a line across the lot and clean it up later. left click drag wheres the end gone bugger undo right there. Back the other way left click drag left click. Hang on they aren't sodding parallel! Cedric, didn't you draw these things out full size and then reduce them? Didn't you know madmen were going to come along and blow them up to unfeasible sizes on a computer?

Where the hell is my pencil and paper...

5 comments:

RKBL said...

Ah the joys of cad, I still prefer to draw everything by pen and paper, for me it's far quicker, and they said computers would make everything easier

MaverickNZ said...

I'm not usually a massize fan of steam and esspecially model ones as they get really fiddly. However I definately plan to have a Kb loco racing around my layout if i ever get around to building one.

manaia said...

Hold the horses, Are you factering in flanges? 3/16 Ks and Js are longer, ive been told thats to alow room for flanges on the drive wheels as thay are to close together.

Motorised Dandruff said...

yes, I'm well aware of the flange problem. its why I've gone from 11.25mm to 11mm on the tyre tread and gone out to 12.5mm on the wheel spacing.

Kiwibonds said...

Ha. Sounds exactly like my occasional frustrations in front of the telly with Autocad...