Welcome

Live steam model on 7¼" gauge of the Württembergische T3 no 924

Welcome to this blog. It will inform you about the progress of designing and building live steam model locomotives. The blog contains the description of a model Würrtembergische T3 on 7¼" gauge (built between 2006 and 2017), the wagons for this loco (built between 2018 and 2022)  and a 5" gauge model of a Great Eastern Railway Y14 class loco (started in 2020)

On the left you'll find the index where you can browse through the different articles and on the right you'll find all the extra's. On the top tabs you'll find a brief description of my other locos.

 

 

Click for the direct link to start of construction series below 
T3 7¼" steam locomotive 
 
Enjoy this site. Erik-Jan Stroetinga. The Netherlands. Europe.

 

 

 

Sunday 17 February 2013

CNC needed for numberplates


Loco number plates for the T3 are not available in the model engineering trade.  I had a sample of a real shed sign, which was the base for my loco plates.

The design was done in Solidworks. 


To make these, I had to buy and convert a milling machine to CNC. A model engineer gave a tip to look at http://www.impulsecnc.nl. This supplier gave me good advice in how to build a home-made CNC milling machine and which components were needed. I started out with the basics: power supply, drives, USB-CNC controller and stepper motors. A cabinet was bought second-hand.



I
 The wiring-up was done according plans. Simply follow the given instructions and connect all the pins of the controller board to the drives and power supplies.




A setup had to be made to connect the motors to the spindles. These are stepper motors of 4.5Nm connected to ball screw spindles with an pitch of 5mm.




Setting up the USB-CNC controller required some jumper settings. On the drives the dip switches had to be set to a given motor Amp and micro step.



First test in milling with the new machine in PVC. 



The complete set-up of the Wabeco F1210 as a CNC milling machine.





The steam turret on top of the boiler, also done with the aid of the new milling machine



The number plates on the cab,