The STW traction engine doesn’t come with lamps, although it does have the front lamp brackets on the smokebox. I bought the lamps kits from MJ Engineering.

Whilst the traction engine parts only required a bit of tidying up, such as de-burring of holes and smoothing off sharp edges, the lamp parts were really rough. Adam helped me by machining off the moulding sprues on the mill at work, and I finished them off with the Dremel grinding stone.

The brackets and lens blocks had small rivets (I had to drill the holes for these) but I glued them all with Araldite as splaying the ends was impractical. The bases will need to be drilled and tapped for some tiny screws to be fitted, whilst the vented tops/handles are a tight enough fit that they stay in place, yet being easy enough to remove.

As you see, I have yet to fit the domed glass lenses and the spring-loaded brackets. You can see the red lens with the single rear lamp, and the white lenses for the front ones.

I’ll be painting them satin black on the outside and white inside.

I also bought oil burner kits and one is shown on the left of the picture. The two little stainless steel mirrors had to be made to be concave. I puzzled over how to do this for a while; I placed the disc on a ring spanner and whacked it in the centre with a ball-pein hammer. A few bashes and they were just right!

There's some silver-soldering to do to attach the mirrors and their supports and assemble the burners.

Whilst I love the authenticity of oil burners, I’m going to consider battery-powered LED lighting for when I’m on the road. The burners can simply be lifted out, so I can come up with something to drop in in their place.

I really only work on the lamps when there’s nothing much I can do on the engine itself (eg, when I’ve done 1/2 hour painting and can’t proceed until it’s dry).

Lamps

1/3-scale burrell traction engine

Exit