Porter in 009: Primed and compared...

I've applied a coat of primer to the small Porter this morning, and have posed it with the other 009 1:76 scale American locomotives I have and intend to use together...

This cute little locomotive uses a Bachmann N gauge 'Thomas and Friends' Percy chassis. You just need to remove the couplings fore and aft, and glue the cylinder block in place. The 3D print is now available to purchase from my Shapeways store here, if you fancy recreating a similar engine.

I have filled the holes in the tops of the cylinders (these will get covers next before painting), and I've filled in three spokes on each wheel as a balance weight. The parts are a simple push or glue fit. The chimney pushes into a slot in the boiler, the boiler pushes over the gear tower. The cab sits on the frame at the rear, and rests against the back of the saddle tank, and includes the rear buffer beam, the front pilot glues to the frame.

The metal handrails are easy to form from straight sections of wire and finish the detail level off nicely, although note this is not a truly accurate craftsman kit, more of a caricature put together for my own amusement. In these photos (unlike yesterday) the bell and whistle have been removed for painting.

Here are a few comparison photos - above is the first of my Porters - this is a Koala Creek Shapeways print, and uses a Minitrains Krauss chassis resulting in a lovely smooth running model. It's a larger prototype and the quality of the design of parts is sublime, lovely detail and a pleasure to work on, still available here with a wood cab, or steel cab.

Finally, seen here with my cab conversion (still available here) for the Minitrains 0-6-0 Porter, which gives it a more realistic outline. It is this cab that formed the basis of the new conversion kit, as I had drawn it to scale from the original drawings before adjusting it to match photos of larger 0-6-0 examples found in the Yukon.

The three are compared in the header photo, along with my own Davenport, a unique model I built using a Minitrains Gmeinder chassis fitted with axles from a Minitrains F&C chassis. I suppose a similar model could be achieved using the Minitrains NS2 chassis now, and cutting down the centre axle to remove the flycrank jackshaft drive. Perhaps one to look at in the future, as my prototype was often popular with other modellers but I deemed it too tricky and expensive to market as a kit due to the requirement for two donor models and a wheel swap! Anyhow, I hope to get some paint on the new Porter in the coming days and ideas of how these cute little models can be used on their own layout are again circling my mind - the original Dawson Creek was too large and heavy to be regularly used and went to a new home this last summer, but perhaps there could be a reprieve for a small layout in the near future. We'll see, post Covid post Kinross what might happen. In the meantime, it's fun to be building narrow gauge models again. More soon...