I've got myself to the stage where I have so many unused bits stashed below track level that it's time to start rationalising it all and making them do something useful. Fun and games.
1/ The old smoke deflectors have four triangular support brackets each. That's 12 vertices each side, and I don't need them to do their old job. You can do all sorts of things with 12 vertices. Some of these German locos used a slightly odd sort of Belpaire firebox. Instead of being a completely separate box like the English ones, it sort of morphed out of the cylindrical boiler slightly below the highest point, and then sorta morphed back in again, before doing a bit more morphing out slightly lower down and then dropping vertically to the ashpan.
You can see how it works here:
- Das_firebox.jpg (74.71 KiB) Viewed 4226 times
So, the cunning plan here is to take those 12 vertices and re-arrange them to make the protruding top sections of the Belpaire firebox. These will have faces at 22.5 degrees, just like the boiler but on a smaller radius, so should match in quite well. I figure it's worth trying this because it's the sort of modular component that could be re-used on several locos. I can't think of anything else useful to do with those vertices at the moment, so this will do.
2/ The old smoke deflectors themselves will be left stashed below track level for the moment. Later on I'll look at re-shaping them slightly so they can form the style of smoke deflector that was actually used on the early P10/BR39. if I get cheesed off with the fancy shenanigans I might fit that one in as an easy break from the trickier stuff. It's always good to have an easy job on the to-do list.
3/ The lower section of the firebox that drops to the ashpan will be made from the firebox faces that were left over when I deleted the old boiler sides. These will carry into the cab to form the lower sections of the backhead. IOW, they'll be doing much the same job as they used to, just re-shaped a bit.
4/ The main frame side plates are just a nuisance at the moment, because they have more vertices than they need and in the wrong positions. This means I need to move and re-map some of them anyway, so I'm going to whip them out of the main frame side plates and use them for something else. They'll make up the lower sections of the firebox/ashpan. This will give a nice, simple mesh and mapping for the main frame side plates themselves.
5/ BR39's didn't have a front throttle, which means I don't need the one from the BR01 base model. What BR39's did have was a second tank under the left side of the cab, to match the current one on the right, and funnily enough the mesh for this is basically the same mesh as for the old throttle casing. This means I can turn the old throttle casing into the second tank by just copy/pasting the hex for the left tank and then tweaking it a bit to flip it to the left side of the loco (which is just changing + to - in a few places).
6/ With the P10/BR39 having four sets of drivers instead of three, I need an extra set of brake blocks, etc. I can make this out of the funny business that used to be the gfx between the last drivers and the rear truck. It has the same mesh as the others, so is easy to adapt by copy/paste and a bit of y axis tweaking. It's already grouped with the others in the code, so that keeps things tidy. I also need to scale the existing brake blocks gfx and move them so they fit the new, smaller diameter drivers. I should be able to do this by just scaling the mesh a bit, without doing any remapping of gfx.
Ok, so that's a whole pile of stuff, of varying trickiness, which should use up about half of the currently stashed bits.