The Home Machinist!

Finally finished the patterns for thesee, it's been a work in progress for a while now. Back around 2012, Paul Brunet gave a friend of mine the remainder of the castings he made a while ago and sold. These were one piece castings, as you can see from the picture. He gave me written permission to copy his design, directly if I wanted to. I decided that shrinkage would become a serious issue at that point, so I made new patterns. At some point I may make a one piece pattern, but after 5 years of headscratching I decided on a multi part truck to simplify and perhaps capture a few details that couldn't be easily done on a one piece frame.
I will be assembling this truck over the next few days, and when it is done and I have some rough assembly instructions written up, I will be casting sets for sale.

Winton/Bollis and then RRSC/Bollis Hi-level and Blomberg trucks were all cast aluminum in pieces then welded together to for the whole. The detail was really great with some cored side frames. A shame that all of that line is not available.
Cary

No welding here, these will be bolt together kits, unless the end user can weld aluminum. I don't possess a welder, and from what I understand, welding cast alloys doesn't work all that well anyways. Been busy the last few days, so no progress to show. Hopefully tomorrow I will have some shop time. Durn holidays.

Got some time in the shop today, decided to work on the bolster first. There's a good amount of draft on the walls, so it needed to be squared up. So, first thing was to clean up one edge to allow me to establish a centerline. I then layed out the edges. These cold have been filed down using a piece of angle iron as a guide, but I decided to use my poor old Atlas mill.
Those of you who are real machinists and/or those of you with halfway decent mills with actual vises and setup gear, please don't laugh too hard. It worked, took a while and could only take light cuts, but I got it done. And after a little cleanup of the brake sills and drilling a few holes in the sides, I did a test assembly. Looking okay so far...

More pics...

Got a little more done today, concentrated on the side frames. Cleaned up the casting flash, and milled out (with a barely adequate setup...) the spring pockets. Not bad for just going by eye. I also drilled the bolt holes and put it together for a test fit. I even attached one of the "fauxlliptical" springs to see how it would sit. I'm pretty happy with how it's coming out, everything so faar seems to be matching up. I roughly cleaned up a couple of journal boxes and set it up for a photo op.
Not sure how much more I'm going to get done on it this weekend, between work and holiday-ing.

These look really nice, Pete, and they're applicable to a long list of potential Diesel locomotives from ALCO and GE, and perhaps a few FM and Baldwins.

I'll be anxious to see brass liners on the journals and wheels under them.

Thanks Dick, I think a few of the detail parts like a set of the fauxllipticals will make it onto the trucks we made for your Alco. Can't find the conversation, but one of the comments that I had on them from Facebook was someone was thinking of building a U50B with them. Not practical with expensive trucks, but at the price point I'm going to be selling these at might be a bit more do-able.
The journal boxes are cored out to nominally 7/8", so solid bushings would be a good match for them. There is plenty of meat on these boxes, so they could be easily bored out for larger roller bearings.

I don't see the scale/gauge listed anywhere.

Paul was making 1 1/2 trucks and was building a Century Series Alco road locomotive.

Sorry, I should have specified. 1/8th scale, either 7 1/4" or 7 1/2" gauge. I made them just a bit wider than the one piece truck I based them off, to allow for more room for 7 1/2" gauge. Haven't made any more progress between the holidays and Mother Nature deciding to go into the single digits temp wise. A bit difficult to do sandcasting when your sand is a frozen lump and you are in danger of freezing your giblets off.

Forgot to mention, I figured out the dimensions for 1" scale, and depending on how well these do I may do them in 1" scale also at some point in the future.