Garden Railway Forum

I have an elderly Mamod loco, it arrived with rather nice replacement wheels an aftermarket in-cab steam valve and a ludicrously dangerous home made gas burner. Say £150.

£80 new Bix burner, sight glass blew.

£5 new sight glass and seals.

£5 and again. Rince and repeat.

Boiler sprang leak, bottom hole soldered up.

Made a new sight glass.

Bottom hole soldered up with better solder.

Boiler still leaking underneath and sightglass, so...

£180 new silver soldered boiler and miniature pressure gauge from RWM

They really were not very good were they?

I am currently re-gauging it to 45mm.

They'll be not a lot left of the original.

I'll have it if you don't want it...

Are the 32mm wheels available?

dougrail wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2017 1:14 am I'll have it if you don't want it...

Are the 32mm wheels available?

Nope! I have driven the axles out and will fit longer ones.

When you've finished it, you should name it 'Arkwright's Broom'

(30 years old this broom, and only 'ad 6 new 'andles and 3 new 'eads)

Depends if you are a tinkerer or not.

At a recent running day a fellow member was relating a story from another tinkering member. He bought a new Roundhouse loco. Got it out of the box & gave it a run, which of course was faultless. Back into the box, and a repeat on the next run. After it did this 3 times he sold the locomotive as it provided no opportunity for him to tinker.

Personally I will not run a gas fired Mamod SL/MSS with a standard boiler due to that weak tube joint on the bottom of the boiler. I repair/strengthen that joint using plumbers silver bearing soft solder, which works OK with meths firing. We have a Forum member, ace, who repairs these standard boilers using silver solder.

In my experience the earlier made Mamod SLs were/are more consistent runners (I have one that still runs great on solid fuel), before standards/materials/etc. dropped with the various Mamod ownership takeovers.

Chris Cairns

Well it's finished. I had to make my own conversion blocks to space the cylinders out as the commercially available ones seem to be some sort of light alloy and I don't want alloy in contact with hot wet brass.
It is very crowded on the footplate, I am tinkering with the idea of making a new horizontal gas tank to fit along the back of the footplate.
So finished up to a point, it still needs hand rails.

As you can see it doesn't like running backwards but then it never did on the original Mamod parts.

As for a name some variation on "Trigger's broom" as there is hardly anything left of the original. The paradox is usually referred to as "The ship of Theseus." Theseus, like Jason, called his ship "Argo" so Argo it is.

That looks fantastic - nice job. Happy New Year!