Horsetan

Maxons are very strong motors. Expensive, but strong. Alternatives are Escap and Faulhaber. More weight?

Let me know when you start hallucinating.

Dunno if this will show up, but here goes: This is a blown-up crop of the original photo, the copyright of which belongs to SLS. There's also six rivets on the door itself, in a hexagon formation.

Reported on here as well

Wow, the corrosion really has got into that cab door.....

It might actually be 35 rivets because there are a couple that seem to be hidden by the smokebox door hinges. I've taken a close-up photo of the original photo, and will see if I can blow it up even more to verify the count.

I make it 33 visible rivets on 560's smokebox front.....so far.

If you look at the rivets on the smokebox front of 560, and then try to line them up with the adjacent rivets on the smokebox wrapper (a bit like "joining the dots"), what you get is a zig-zag pattern, hence staggered. Most people won't be too fussed about this, and that's fine, but it is something I noticed and since I have a rivet press I might as well give it some proper work to do! GSR/CIE really were great believers in rivets - smokeboxes were absolutely covered in them, and it can be a total pain in the **** when you're trying to get it right. The other thing I have to try to do is calculate how many rivets there are around the smokebox front of 560.

Maybe you were lucky. Others were not.

What people may not know is that DC Kits can be a bit erratic these days when it comes to delivery or even simple customer service, as is evident from this thread. If they have no time to pick up the phone, how can you be sure you'll get your order?

Maybe not so much designed around the motor, but certainly around the motor mounting screw points. What other motors share the same fixing centres?

I had quite a bit of difficulty, when squinting at photos of J26s late in their service lives, trying to make out the smokebox rivet patterns as the photographic qualities weren't the best. Eventually, a photo of 560 on the little turntable at Waterford suggested that not only were there a lot of rivets, but that the ones on the smokebox front did not line up horizontally with the ones on the smokebox wrapper, giving a sort of staggered effect. Not sure how my rivet press is going to cope with this!

Difficult choice, I reckon. Worsley Works has crisper finish because it's etched, but you get no castings, according to the website, or any help with the rounded top of the nose. However, this build article says that castings are supplied. Silver Fox gives you a one-piece shell and details, but may not be quite as crisp.

Not every manufacturer has a Plan B, and if you're only doing short runs.... Supplying your own motor wouldn't necessarily be a good idea because everyone has their own preference and a multiplicity of different designs exist. That said, I went coreless back in the late 1980s and built up a stock of them, so I'm not yet affected by shortages.

Little cubes cut from styrene / plasticard strip, brushed into place with solvent such as Plastic Weld. The solvent will also do a fair job of "rounding off" the cube, making it look like a round rivet.

The motors shown on their website production process page resemble Mashimas. If Mashimas are what OO Works have been using until now, then that may explain the difficulty because Mr. Mashima, the manufacturer, announced a while ago that he was retiring from the business (having already threatened this once or twice in the past), so motor production would end. I'm not sure what motor would be a direct replacement for a Mashima, though it could well be a Chinese-made one.

On the Products page, but it's academic anyway, as they are no longer taking orders for it. Must mean that their projected batch has sold out. If ye've missed it....ye've missed it!

Looks the biz alright

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These are the 21mm gauge spacers that Kirley kindly let me have: They originate from the SSM "SG" loco kit, and being 16mm wide could be usefully adapted for the S-class chassis.

I was pleasantly relieved to find that the eccentric rods from the Finney GW 1854/2721 motion kit are virtually spot-on when it comes to the measurement between centres: the S-class 4'6" equates to 18mm in 4mm scale: ....so I can definitely use all four of these rods and the brass eccentric sheaves, as well as the cast inside cranks from the same motion kit which we already know to be the right shape. I also discovered that the measurement between pivot and crankpin centres for the Finney LSWR T9 connecting rods corresponds exactly to the 6'6" distance of the S-class connecting rod: Half the fun is finding out just what is possible with other people's etched parts; they've done all the hard work, so why not use them?