A lot of brain work and a few hours in TurboCad resulted in a design for a baseboard frame cut from 6mm ply on the laser cutter. I've had to make the longest lengths by jointing two bits together but with a suitable joint and a glued plate I don't see it is going to move. Lots of clever joints should make it nice and strong and lots of holes in the cross braces should mean I can feed wires around.
I have some hardware, alignment dowels and bits coming from Station Road baseboards.
Plan i
Well the time came and I finally took the plunge.
Sometimes you just get to the point where you need a fresh start so last week I carefully removed and dismantled all of the 'jigsaw' boards, stripped off all the under baseboard electrics and got back to a clean slate. I would like to state for the record that this was not purely because the editor of Scalefour news had asked for some words! In fact, as I took things apart I realised just how amazing it was that anything ran on the layout at
I've been playing in TurboCad today, revising my plans to fit the model of Ebridge Mill I've been making. The result has been a slight simplification of the siding to the mill, I decided it looked just too squashed with multiple sidings. Also I've managed to get more space between the two yard sidings so that you can actually get a lorry between the sidings to load/unload. The river has a slight difference in that there is now a cut from the river, under the lane with the level crossing (slightl
Over the last week or so I've made some good progress on my model of Ebridge Mill. The lower building is almost complete now, the roof got covered with Wills sheet and I'm reasonably happy with the colour. It probably needs some Woodland Scenics putting into some of the troughs as lichen. The rain water goods have had quite a large effect on the look too with the guttering made from shaped 40thou plasticard and the down pipes from 1mm plastic rod.
When you zoom in you can really see the
I'd been looking for a suitable industrial building to form a back-drop to my rebuilt scalefour empire and also provide a source of rail traffic. Those with very long memories may remember my attempt to model Mistley maltings (or at least part of it) more years ago than I care to think. I didn't want anything quite that big this time so spent a good few hours on Google searching for 'East Anglia Mill' and similar terms. I end up finding Ebridge Mill near North Walsham. There is an excellent web
First up, here is a picture of what I've done with the top of the water tank. in the absence of pictures or drawings I'm hoping I've got something which is plausible. I stuck some plastruct angle inside the tank and then tried to model some tie-bars to hold it all together. The water is clear acrylic with the bottom painted black.
Next is a little experiment on one of those things which is just so much easier to make when you have something that cuts accurately! I drew up this wagon tur
My model of Thaxted water tower is coming on nicely. As I commented in my last blog I cut a base for the tank from 3mm acrylic (an alarming orange colour) and a pair of formers from transparent acrylic. A piece of brass the right height was then folded around the formers and stuck on with epoxy.
I think the painting was much more successful than previous attempts. I had sealed the MDF with an MDF sealing paint and then sprayed on two coats of red oxide primer, leaving a good bit of drying ti
I finally got around to doing a bit of modelling, inspired by a thoroughly enjoyable day on Saturday exhibiting at the 16mm show in Peterborough.
I've been working on drawing up the water tower from Thaxted based on the drawing available from the GERS. Having had lots of goes with the little goods hut I had worked out most of the gotchas with the cutter and so the parts which were cut were pretty much right first time. OK, I'll admit I drew the windows frames too far apart by .5mm so I neede
Friday night saw the ends of the Wickham trolley assembled and then Saturday saw the roof bent to shape and the parts soldered together. At the moment everything is just resting together but you get the general idea. The wires sticking out the front are to the motor.
The plan is to stick a DCC chip under the roof and run the four wires up the each of the corner posts, the power from the track up the rear posts and the drive back to the motor down the front ones. The seats were mighty fi
Taking up macrame has been deferred for another day. Thanks to everyone for their words of help and encouragement.
I went into Makespace this afternoon and cut three new buildings to try painting. I now have two complete buildings, one in grey primer and the other in red oxide. I've also got the bits for a third and a couple of spare walls.
I tried a couple of paint finishes on a spare wall, The middle section is just Halford's red oxide. The top section has had a wash of water colo
*This is the standing joke in my house when model railways become just too difficult.
I'm in the dumps as no matter what I try I just can't get a brick finish I'm happy with, I can see now why I stuck to using Scalescenes for so long, I just can't paint brickwork.
The desk is covered with dozens of little laser cut test sheds which are going to end up in the bin very soon at this rate.
I've tried painting a brick colour in Enamel and using an Acrylic to run the mortar into the c
I managed to find 4 bearing in Brian's 'box of useful bits' which allowed me to make some progress on the paxolin 'chassis'. In order to be able to remove the wheels I have found some bearings which fit into some U channel. The Polish motor has a 1mm shaft which I sleeved with a 1.5mm brass tube.
The little runner wagon has wheels shorted out on one side so while I've fitted pick-ups on both sides with pickups I may well just try and short out the wheels on the opposite side on the main
Today, being a bit milder, I was able to take a bit more time in the garage with an aerosol before having to get back in the house to warm up. The result was that I could get a much better coat of primer on the building and apply it in several thin coats and let it harden off before going any further.
The resulting luminous building showed the joints weren't going to be too bad. I made a bit of a mess when gluing it together last night, I tried to stick the inner walls to the outer walls bef
The 1.5mm MDF I ordered arrived today, the 1mm was out of stock. 1.5mm is the same thickness as the width of a header in 4mm so this allows me to interlock the walls on the header joint. I deliberately drew the 'tab' of the header .2mm over length to get around the problem I had previously that the 'tab' was not quite long enough to lie flush with the 'slot' when the wall was put together.
I also cut a piece of the MDF to be a sanding jig. By putting the wall through the jig I could lig
As suggested by Tim Horn I tried painting the building with Halfords primer once I had stuck it together. This shows my interlocking brickwork nearly worked but the end of the stretcher finishes about .2mm too shallow behind the adjacent wall. To make it work I'd need thin the wall sections down to something like 2.8mm before gluing up the joint. I'll try this next time.
Also on Tim's advice I then tried painting with an acrylic mortar colour Citadel Karak Stone from Games workshop and
Inspired by people using the brickwork to interlock the corners of a laser cut building I had a go at drawing out my 'test shed' with the sides designed to interlock. As the material to hand was 3mm MDF (I have some 1.5mm and 1mm on order) I cut out the stretchers on the joint. This screenshot of TurboCAD shows what I mean.
The resultant kit of parts was amazingly fine and just demonstrates what the cutter can do.
The detail on the 'fingers' of each side shows the closure half
First up the results of my attempts to cut a mitre joint with a laser cutter. My jig worked pretty well but it was very time consuming to get the part on the jig correctly and to align the laser to where I wanted the cut to be. The biggest problem is that the 'red dot' is only really a rough guide for where the laser will cut and it isn't actually in the same place. It is good enough to spot whether the job fits the material when you press 'test' but not really up for fine alignment.
Th
Having started a discussion on laser cutting on a thread in the 3D Printing, Laser Cutting and CAD group (Thanks to AndyY for adding the laser cutting bit!) I'll continue to post some of what I'm doing here just too.
One of the things that is concerning me is how to make the corners of building. Some people are trying interlaced brickwork and I'll probably try butt joining some ABS as well but one thing I wanted to try was to mitre the corners. I had trying to sand anything accurately so I'm
I've joined an organisation in Cambridge called 'Makespace' who are setting up a public access 'hackspace' in Cambridge. These organisation seem to be springing up in quite a few large cities (see http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/United_Kingdom ) and are intended for people who want to build things to share the cost of owning and running tools. So for the price of a gym membership (and anyone who tells me that would do me more good is probably on the wrong forum) I can have access to tools which I w
On the advice of the honourable member of Litlington I took a look at the website of KK Produkcja Mikroantriebe in Poland. http://www.shop.kkpmo.com/ and purchased a frankly tiny motor and gearbox. The motor is obviously one from a phone and is 6mm in diameter the 80:1 gearbox takes the overall length of the unit to a massive 22mm! The unit was tested at takes about 4v to reach maximium speed, this shouldn't be a problem as I can limit the voltage using the DCC decoder which I'm going to have to
Santa, assisted by the elves at Kernow Models, brought me a Derby Lightweight for Christmas. (My family are good an knowing just what I want). Also delivered came a set of conversation wheels from Branchlines.
So last Friday night the two presents were put together and by the end of the evening the unit was making jaunts up and down a Midland branch in South Cambridgeshire (thanks Brian!). More suited perhaps to East Anglian branchlines that Empire Basin's north London but that is the way my
The little grey cells (and Turbocad) have been working since my last posting. The limitations of the space result in a basic track layout which is quite similar to Empire Basin. Using Templot has resulted in a much smoother flow of track work and it is interesting to see that the single slip ends up about 2 inches longer than my original version.
The biggest change is the design of the baseboards. You'll see I now have 4 conventional baseboards for the scenic area, with all of the diffi
So, having declared that the layout was 'back on track' in my last posting I then didn't put anything on the blog for another six months, what has been going on? To be honest, not much; modelling has been pretty much confined to my usual Friday nights out with practically nothing going on between one week and the next. Some of the reason for this has been practical but most has just been down to not being 'in the mood'. I'm sure most people get those times when they look at a modelling project,
It has, as they say, been a while since the last blog entries. What with the unexpected appearance at the Ely show with 'Fen End Pit' and biggest son doing AS levels and wanting help revising Empire Basin has taken a bit of a back seat. To be honest I was a bit dissatisfied with the operation and reliablity of the vertical fiddleyard and it was a bit of a downer.
The problem was that no matter how many times I adjusted the vertical alignment on the rails it just seemed to be 'out' on the nex
Having fitted track on two levels I thought I'd better get some power back on and make sure I could still drive trains round and round. This hasn't been possible since the original fiddleyard was removed in February. I wasn't happy with the idea of just feeding power to all the levels all the time as this seemed like a recipe for disaster. I could just imagine selecting the wrong loco on the DCC and then driving it off the top level when it wasn't aligned with the exit track! The solution I've a
