Crabby Ashpants

Ordinarily, an ashpan is nothing too exciting to be talking about. But in this case this represents closure for a two-year saga of ideas, proposals, prototypes and design failures all for a lowly ash catch basket!

This item is for a small locomotive, called 'The Crab'. I acquired parts and drawings for this back in 2000 and have worked on it in bits and spurts, but for the past two or maybe three years got completely stalled when I got to the part of installing the ash pan for under the boiler. You see, no pan was provided when I bought the parts. And the drawings did not have a design for me to build one. So the challenge was to create an ash pan fitting a round boiler at the top and a square frame at the bottom. Many ideas, carboard and paper designs were tried. Last year, 7-January-2007, I created a square-box design and made it out of carboard (a cheerios box to be exact)(cereal box cardboard is about the same thickness as 22 gage sheet metal). But I got frustrated with the layout process and set it aside.

I had to update the shop inventory for insurance purposes and dug the Crab out for a picture. There was the cardboard design. Looking at it, I thought 'If I laid it out a different way, it would be much easier to make'. You see, the box starts out completely flat, like this:

and gets cut, folded and bent to it's final shape. All that is needed now is to weld it up and install it. Maybe the Crab will get finished someday after all!