I spent most of a rainy Saturday fitting a Zimo MX645 sound decoder to the Connoisseur Jinty, a.k.a. Dobbin. Why did it take so long? I think it can be said that it all came down to the far end of the motor shaft rubbing against the top of the firebox. This morning I carefully removed a small part of the shaft (tip, using a Dremel cut off disc with multiple short cuts to prevent overheating of the shaft and therefore the delicate motor windings).
Now the motor runs the way it should. Why thi
I hope my sneak preview was not too titillating - you may be a little disappointed. The truth is, I am quite vocal about kit building over on Wright writes, but every self-imposed rule is, well, made to be broken, or at least ignored. Particularly if there is a good reason for doing so.
So with no more ado, let me introduce Jubilee Class 45688 Polyphemus.
My family history during the past 100 years has not been particularly unusual, but when my stepfather died two years ago, hi
Christmas is coming and it is clear that the turntable will not be finished before I leave France. Several parts are back ordered and I have come to an impasse. But at least I can continue to work on the overall layout and a trial run fitting the three baseboards together, along with the backdrop, has demonstrated that progress has been made. The upper level of the turntable has been fitted (temporarily) and the turntable module has been placed into its space. Some cutting and adjusting had
Good progress has been made but the day ended on a frustrating note - I can't find the 8 countersunk M1 bolts and nuts to mount the deck onto the bridge. As they are metric I hope to buy some replacements tomorrow at the local bricolage. Otherwise the project will stall.
EDIT: I just re-read the instructions which says to use cheesehead bolts and they are included in the kit. For some reason the holes on the top of the deck look as though they are countersunk and that would seem to be logi
As noted, my weekend was somewhat spoiled by feeling under the weather, but today I have been able to get through one of the more repetitive tasks, that of pressing the hundreds of rivets in the bridge's bracing angles. There is no doubt that having a rivet press is a definite advantage and I would recommend this "luxury" tool as verging on a "necessity" if constructing a kit of this type. My tool happens to be a Metalsmith model but any of the available rivet presses out there would suffice.
Looking at the coal hole dimensions in the previous post it would appear the scale may be a tad too small for a shed in the 1950s. The coal chute would appear to be not quite level with the top of the Jinty's bunker and the weather canopy of the wagon ramp would be too low for a Jinty to enter.
The former problem can be solved by simply raising the entire structure above the coaling road. The clearance required for coaling a Stanier 4000 gallon tender, possibly the tallest tender to be anti
A little under the weather today, so not much progress. But I have started on the turntable bridge construction. Then I got sidetracked by the arrival of a copy of Jack Nelson's LNWR Portrayed which I bought off Amazon following an earlier recommendation for Coal Hole drawings.
Several original LNWR designs are shown in a short chapter. The smallest depicts shoveling coal straight from wagon into tender. Next is a simple platform, followed by a very simple combined coal stage and water tank,
With all the parts prepared and the radius arm fixed onto the central axle, I was ready to start pinning the chairs to the well base.
First I used a pencil to draw a circle using the radius arm notch. Then some trigonometry to work out the chair spacing. 80 chairs means an arc of 4.5º which relates to a chord slightly less than 15mm at the 60ft scale radius. But the four chairs at the joins of the two halves of the race rail need to be closer, so a slight adjustment was made to accommodate t
The Turntable kit safely negotiated a stormy English Channel along with myself, my car and a lot of other railway bits and pieces. To be honest, the crossing from Portsmouth to Caen was a piece of cake - Brittany Ferries' latest ship, the Armorique, behaved extremely well and I slept for most of the 5-12 hour crossing. I have always used the Tunnel in wintertime but my loathing of the M25 has finally been replaced by a new trust in surface vessels! OK, on with the show.
I am following both t
Before the race rail can be fitted, the central shaft and its bearings need to be installed. (As I will be using the MU6 motor drive, they will stay in place afterwards, whereas the optional stepping motor set up does not need the lower bearing.)
I then soldered a brass bush onto the upper bearing plate (the one with countersunk screw holes) and attached it to the center of the lower board using countersunk screws, washers and nuts.
Next, the transverse beam was attached below the lower
Yesterday I took possession of most of the Ransomes and Rapier 60ft turntable kit. The motor and a few parts will follow next week. Dave Smith of Metalsmith (soon to be re-named Midland Railway Centre) has been a great help in making sure I understood the measurements and opportunities to fit the installation module in the layout. I will be detailing the ongoing construction of this item once I am in France. It may take quite a while to complete, however, as I have been given some other comm
In 00 gauge there are several options for printing brick paper on one's computer, though the results don't have an embossed quality (which may be over scale anyway!). In 0 gauge I have been searching for alternatives to Scalescenes brick paper which, if large areas are to be covered will take on a tiled look, repeating the patterns.
Now I have discovered paperbrick.co.uk which enables random generated sheets of brick paper to be generated using a wide variety of brick types, brick bonds, mo
The original SketchUp 3D model was drawn using 0 gauge scale dimensions, basically the actual scale of the model and the cabinetry it will sit on.
I have made a new 3D model using the space but scaling it in real dimensions. Thus the 2.4m x 0.6m layout actually measures 343ft x 86ft in full scale. This doesn't seem very much space. Here is a view of what I have "built" so far:
I have discovered a couple of errors which will need a major revision, unfortunate after all the effort of
While away from the modelling work bench for a couple of weeks I have been reading research material, in particular two books:
On the Footplate at Bushbury 1947-1962 by Keith Terry
Monument Lane Loco Shed by Tony Higgs
These make for interesting and useful research reading. Keith Terry was a Bushbury fireman for most of his railway career. Tony Higgs was a local resident in Ladywood, Birmingham who researched the history of Monument Lane for ten years.
The two sheds were 3B and 3
I am taking some time off from model railways. An important birthday is coming up and my good lady and I are going to celebrate with a week in Snowdonia. I thought I would leave you with this evocative photo from warwickshirerailways.com, of unrebuilt Royal Scot 6131, Royal Warwickshire Regiment. The photo was taken at New Street Station and the young boy somehow looks the way I felt when I was his age!
My 50 year old Wills Finecast King has been receiving some attention in the past few days. My last entry was bewailing the fact that Halfords black primer had failed to do its job on the tender. Since then I have spent a lot of time removing the primer and starting again with Halfords etch primer.
That having worked I then decided that, since this was a renovation project I should hand paint the final coats, using sable brushes and Humbrol acrylic paints. I am reasonably sure I used Humbr
I have made up loads in 4mm many times (I think my first one was a Peco Wonderful Wagons Tarmac wagon with tarpaulin'd load back in the 1960s) but this is the first attempt in 0 gauge.
The wagon is a Dapol BR 5 plank with opening side doors, perfect for a coal hole! The load is real coal on top of a styrene filler. Glues included scenic liquid glue and full strength liquid white glue. The latter was found to be necessary in the larger scale format in order to bed down the coal.
The pr
After a couple of tries I had a really good phone conversation this morning with Dave Smith at Midland Railway Centre (soon to be formerly Metalsmiths) and have ordered all the parts for the turntable as well as one locomotive cassette. These will be delivered next month so that I can drive back with them at the end of November.
Dave has been really helpful. He had noted my SketchUp design and we talked about how the various modules can fit into the cabinetry. The "fiddle yard" will actually
First of all, a photo of my "stash"
Next, take a small piece with a lot of shiny surfaces (this is from the coal maceral vitrinite, based on the Stopes-Heerlen coal classification):
Place the piece in a plastic bag and take out a small hammer:
Gently break up the lump into smaller pieces, aiming to have the largest piece no more than 1 scale foot across (7mm in 0 gauge, 4mm in 00 gauge). A foot wide lump of coal is not unusual though the fireman may want to break it u
I spent today out in the fresh air collecting some coal for Legge lane II. 0 Gauge requires 5.36 times as much coal as 00 gauge to fill the same tender and, the coal has to be in bigger scale lumps. My nearest source of real, natural coal is 85 kilometers to the north at Camplong in the Mountains of the Orb, north of Béziers. Here the coal was mined underground but later by open cast methods which ultimately meant removing mountains. Eventually the mines became uneconomic and were closed. All th
I am going to refer to my Jinty as Dobbin from now on, in deference to the enginemen who actually fired and drove the ubiquitous LMS tanks engines and gave this class its true nickname. The locomotive is almost finished but I cannot get the transfers at the moment and there are always a few minor details to be put right with paint brush, etc. The DCC sound chip has also not been installed yet - the drive train needs more running in - and my Digitrax controller is in England anyway.
Coal needs t
An interesting weekend, much interrupted by excellent Rugby - Argentina were magnificent - but I did get some modelling done. The Jinty is getting its black paint coats applied (more on that later) but I was also able to start on the actual layout baseboards. The right end of the layout is a simple 600mm x 800mm module covering one cabinet base. To its left will go the 600mm x 600mm turntable module. I am using two 10mm thick MDF panels glued together so that the turntable and cassette modul
As I had hoped yesterday evening, today's weather is perfect for spray painting. The reason becomes clear in the photo below. I don't like to spray indoors and so use the loggia instead. This means that I am very dependent upon the weather, both the wind and the humidity. The high winds of yesterday have gone and the air is now clear. But what makes my spray booth special is the view!
So the Jinty/Dobbin now has underclothing and I can go for a walk while it dries. It doesn't look
