ETAT 030 by Aster

[ol_hogger]

Hello everybody,

ever since I received Regner's tram loco PAUL I have been looking for another geared loco.



When this beauty came up affordably I did not hesitate.



From all I can tell she is all new: wicks all white, no traces of flames nor deposits inside the water gauge. Looking more closely, note that the center wheels are flanged - Any illustration or specification I have seen describe blind wheels in true toy train tradition.
This made me wonder how she would cope with my Märklin 1167 mm radius (just short of 3 ft.) I undid the grub screws of the big gear wheel and pushed her along only to discover that the siderods were binding at one point in the first place. Removal of crankpins individually exculpated the front axle, yet I could not eyeball whether the center or rather the rear axle were the cause.



I decided to create a bit of leeway at the center wheels. Opening the rod bushing as well as reducing the crankpin shoulder seemed equally difficult to do in a precise manner. I settled on replacing the shouldered pins by simple threaded bolts I had on hand. I marred the thread were the shoulder would have been so they would tighten about half way in leaving the rod free to rotate. You can spot the washers for final adjustment. Tried again: curves were not the issue on hand. (That's why I bought a small engine after all.)



The boiler offers three flanges of which only one is actually used for the safety valve. Convenient to install Regner's top-up valve. (Borrowed from PAUL)



One number plate was missing. I added a name plate LISON after the heroine of (wrong: Balzac's) Zola's railway novel "La bête humaine" - pardon my french.

There were absent a few more bits from which I conclude that this model was not always passed on by dedicated railroaders.

Can't wait for the coming season to start ...

 

[Paul M]

Lovely looking engine, and you could be right, it looks clean enough not to have been fired. Is that a Slo-Mo attached to the front wheels?

 

[dunnyrail]

Lovely looking engine, and you could be right, it looks clean enough not to have been fired. Is that a Slo-Mo attached to the front wheels?

Hello everybody,

ever since I received Regner's tram loco PAUL I have been looking for another geared loco.

View attachment 335229

When this beauty came up affordably I did not hesitate.

View attachment 335230

From all I can tell she is all new: wicks all white, no traces of flames nor deposits inside the water gauge. Looking more closely, note that the center wheels are flanged - Any illustration or specification I have seen describe blind wheels in true toy train tradition.
This made me wonder how she would cope with my Märklin 1167 mm radius (just short of 3 ft.) I undid the grub screws of the big gear wheel and pushed her along only to discover that the siderods were binding at one point in the first place. Removal of crankpins individually exculpated the front axle, yet I could not eyeball whether the center or rather the rear axle were the cause.

View attachment 335231

I decided to create a bit of leeway at the center wheels. Opening the rod bushing as well as reducing the crankpin shoulder seemed equally difficult to do in a precise manner. I settled on replacing the shouldered pins by simple threaded bolts I had on hand. I marred the thread were the shoulder would have been so they would tighten about half way in leaving the rod free to rotate. You can spot the washers for final adjustment. Tried again: curves were not the issue on hand. (That's why I bought a small engine after all.)

View attachment 335232

The boiler offers three flanges of which only one is actually used for the safety valve. Convenient to install Regner's top-up valve. (Borrowed from PAUL)

View attachment 335234

One number plate was missing. I added a name plate LISON after the heroine of Balzac's railway novel "La bête humaine" - pardon my french.

There were absent a few more bits from which I conclude that this model was not always passed on by dedicated railroaders.

Can't wait for the coming season to start ...

Does not look like a SloMo but an equivalent geared drive? There was a company in the Hull area that used to do live steam including some Irish ones that ran on 0 gauge track. This looks very like one of their products to me.

Be interesting to see how it runs. I would though caution if never run there could be some things to properly check before letting it loose on track, I did not notice a pressure gauge which would make it tricky to ensure the safety valve blows off as expected. So first I would steam up on blocks and see if the safety valve can blow off also see if the wheels rotate smoothly. With wheels moving does the safety valve stop blowing off? This could indicate things good with that.

Not sure in Germany there would be the equivalent of 16mm society that could boiler test for the loco for you but be well worth hunting to see.

 

[tac foley]

Lovely looking engine, and you could be right, it looks clean enough not to have been fired. Is that a Slo-Mo attached to the front wheels?

Nope, its the single-cylinder steam engine, geared 4-1, that drives the front axle directly. This is cribbed from Marc Horowitz' fascinating series - 'Sidestreet Bannerworks' - and still worth a read -

Aster Hobbies of Yokohama, Japam, produced models of all three versions of the engine (one British and two French). They were mechanically identical and differed only in paint and external details. The blue GER version is the one that seems to show up most often.

These are interesting locomotives. They were intended to be low-cost engines and, when new in 1980, sold for around $600 in kit form. The design is based on John van Reimsdijk’s work with single-cylindered pot boilers. There is one, single-acting cylinder between the frames geared 4:1 to the front axle. The boiler is fitted with a water glass and safety valve, but no pressure gauge, throttle, or anything else. Reversing is accomplished by a lever in the cab that actuates, through a linkage, a rotary reversing valve built into the steam motor at the front of the engine. A small displacement lubricator (sans drain) resides just to the left of the smokebox.

This locomotive is full of quirks, which, I suppose, is part of the reason I like it. The shielding around the pot boiler extends into the cab and there are some spaces that actually let heat into the cab, which gets blistering hot—hot enough to melt the soft solder that at one time held the little handle onto the reversing lever. The alcohol burner, which can be quickly dropped by removing a pin, employs a box-section feed tube. This increases the fuel capacity, but also tends to diffuse heat into the storage tank. The result is that the stored alcohol heats up and vaporizes at the filler and overflow tubes, which often catch fire. This problem was mitigated somewhat by extending the filler tube up and away from the fire.

A steam line exits the bottom of the boiler, passes through the fire (which supplies a little superheat to the line), and then to the steam motor. As supplied, the connection between the steam motor and the steam line was a silicone tube. On one of the first runs, this tube burst with a resounding POP and the engine came to an abrupt halt. Once the offending silicone was replaced with a proper copper line (after unsuccessful experiments with other plastics) this particular problem was solved.

Then there were the zinc-alloy wheels. Nothing wrong there except that they seemed to expand at a more rapid rate than the axles when hot. Thus, they would loosen and slip on the axles, causing the rods to get crossed (another abrupt halt). So, all the wheels had to be pinned to the axles to prevent this unfortunate occurrence.
Once this litany of faults had been remedied, the locomotive turned into a good, reliable runner, even though control remained difficult at best. It would pull half a dozen four-wheel cars at prototypical speed for the better part of half an hour, with the occasional top up of fuel.

 

[ol_hogger]

Thanks for all comments.

Yes, I am in the process of checking her carefully before I put a match to the burner.

There will be an adapter (everything is metric hereabouts and potentially compatible to Aster products, yet there are two common diameters) so that I can connect a pressure gauge and do a cold water boiler test as well as temporarily install a safety of known properties.

I stand corrected as to French Literature: It was pointed out that the novel was by Emile Zola.

Happy steaming
Klaus