Does anybody here remember Mel Thornburgh?
In the 40 & 50s he was featured in MR often. Always with a series of articles about scratch building Brass Locos. Mel was an amazing man , his work was impeccable, he made pretty much EVERY part of the loco , except the wheels, gears & motors. He used no commercial details -- bells, compressors etc, instead hand fabricating them all.
On top of that Mel owned NO power tools , not even an electric drill -- he turned any machined part with a hand driven "eggbeater" drill & a file!!! He also had no workshop, using his kitchen table to build on.
The man & his work always amazed me -- a few years back I bought a collection of MR magazines that had the complete set of his build of a K4 Pacific that was featured starting in 1949 & going thru part of 1950.
I decided to build this engine pretty much as he did, except for being willing to call electricity "my friend" & to use a few (very few) commercial detail parts.
The loco is about 75% complete now & has been sidelined for a number of years, now that I am going to have a place to work again after a long dry spell ,I have responded ( sort of) to the recent "finish one up challange" . I know the challange was for over the summer but I'm going to get this loco done anyway.
One thing I regret now is that I took no pics of the process , too late to remedy that, best I could do now would be to show where it is today, if anyone is interested. Guess I'd have to find where the boiler front has dissapeared to before I did even that.
In the 40 & 50s he was featured in MR often. Always with a series of articles about scratch building Brass Locos. Mel was an amazing man , his work was impeccable, he made pretty much EVERY part of the loco , except the wheels, gears & motors. He used no commercial details -- bells, compressors etc, instead hand fabricating them all.
On top of that Mel owned NO power tools , not even an electric drill -- he turned any machined part with a hand driven "eggbeater" drill & a file!!! He also had no workshop, using his kitchen table to build on.
The man & his work always amazed me -- a few years back I bought a collection of MR magazines that had the complete set of his build of a K4 Pacific that was featured starting in 1949 & going thru part of 1950.
I decided to build this engine pretty much as he did, except for being willing to call electricity "my friend" & to use a few (very few) commercial detail parts.
The loco is about 75% complete now & has been sidelined for a number of years, now that I am going to have a place to work again after a long dry spell ,I have responded ( sort of) to the recent "finish one up challange" . I know the challange was for over the summer but I'm going to get this loco done anyway.
One thing I regret now is that I took no pics of the process , too late to remedy that, best I could do now would be to show where it is today, if anyone is interested. Guess I'd have to find where the boiler front has dissapeared to before I did even that.