Commercial fittings
Following on from fitting up the injectors, now might be a good time to discuss the use of commercial and home-made pipe fittings. Before continuing however, note that the driver’s water lever on Douglas requires a spacer, about 3/8 inch long, to allow clearance for the bottom of the reversing lever when in its reverse position.
For some applications, particularly feed pipework to injector and pumps, small diameter commercial copper elbows and tees are very useful. They are easy to modify for our purposes by removing the soft solder ring (if fitted) and can be cut down to size. The use of commercial 22mm copper elbows has already been addressed herein as a useful shortcut for making the motion brackets. Remove the solder ring using a scriber (but don’t stab yourself as I did once) or, alternatively, hacksaw below or across the ring to simultaneously remove the ring and shorten the fitting.
I use commercially available copper tube to supply my pumps and injectors but sometimes it’s difficult to get the tight bends required and maintain an acceptable look on the locomotive, especially in the larger sizes. This is where these commercial elbows can come in useful.
Other commercial fittings that are useful on narrow gauge work are screwed imperial unions, elbows and tees. I’m running out of my stock of these, which was acquired at scrap prices many years ago when imperial sizes were replaced with their metric equivalents and huge amounts of useful ‘stuff’ was scrapped. As with most model engineers, however, I have plenty of hexagon brass rod, a screw cutting gearbox on the lathe and suitable sets of BSP, BSB etc. taps and dies so it’s not difficult to make what’s required.
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WORKSHOP TIP - Boring Eccentrics
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Wenford A 7¼ Inch Gauge 2-4-0 Beattie Well Tank
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Vertical Boiler Locomotives
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Union Nuts, and How to Make Them
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CLUB NEWS
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A Boiler Feed Pump
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