Hello! Firstly, I feel I ought to apologise for my absence on this forum; I can’t quite believe how long it’s been since I did post anything here and there are plenty of reasons for this, but the most significant of these involve a reduced amount of time spent on railway modelling of late (work, life, other interests etc), and what railway modelling has been accomplished has been written in a thread over on the scalefour forum. The reason for that last item is that in modelling in scalefour, but
I've neglected to maintain much of a presence on here for a while; it's not intentional and a refusal to participate, more of a desire to spend a larger proportion of the modelling time available (which isn't enough) to devote to actual modelling and making some headway rather than sharing progress throughout the interweb. However, I have been maintaining a forum thread on the scalefour forum... primarily due to my scalefour committee involvement and desire to have some form of presence on the d
Dear all,
I realise that I've not posted much here of late, but I have been dabbling in some projects in some of my spare time, although that's become more limited of late, although a spell off work has seen me able to get my eye back in and catch up with the write-up that I'd promised.
As I've taken on the duties of the new member support officer in the scalefour society, ive tried to put more of a presence in on the scalefour forum so my write-up is over there, but I thought a link to the p
Stories of my demise have been greatly exaggerated; I’ve been around, but spending my modelling time, modelling rather than writing... but here’s an attempt to readdress that.
Some months ago I acquired a pair of ViTrains 47s. I’d always admired certain aspects of these models, not least their bogies, and the opportunity to pick these up in these liveries was not passed by. The Virgin loco was acquired after I missed out on a trip to Warley as some small compensation; the DRS one was picked
The final stage of the lengthy 47 project began with the glazing. For this I used two packets of Extreme Etchings laserglaze... one packet for the Bachmann 47 (which I used in the bodyside and cabside windows) and the other for the Heljan 47 which I needed for the windscreens which were to sit in scale frames... and the Bachmann ones were too small.
However, the Heljans ones were still a little large but these were simply sanded back using three grades of Tamiya sanding sticks to achieve a ni
It’s been a while since my last status entry, so I thought that whilst sat trapped in a hotel, seemingly miles from attraction or civilisation, I’d draft an update on the 47 project... and this is the result, uploaded a day or so later.
There was a little distraction since the last update because I decided to postpone the inevitable (painting) and do some more work on another “in work” project, that of a Craven DMU. I blogged this (part 1) and really ought to do the part 2 weathering bit too...
Slight improvements to the Bachmann Craven Part 1: The modelling bit.
I’m applying some delaying tactics to my 47 project, which is currently in primer but with yellow ends. I need some more practice with the BR blue and my Iwata; I’ve got a good finish on one practice GUV body and I want to do another once I’ve done some masking on that too. I’ve been busy with work and been a bit under the weather (influenza and norovirus are two ways to lose weight but I’d not recommend either of them – i
It’s been a little while since my last update and I wish that I’d more to show, but I’ve been busy with work, a writing project and “real” trains and photos... but there has been some progress and with the impending “exhibition” tomorrow, I though a brief update would be in order.
Not much here requires much in the way of explanation, so the text will be kept short; I think that the pictures will be able to do most of the explaining and make up for the absence of the 1000s of words.
First o
Having completed work on the underframe, it was time to work on that middle bit... the chassis, which is framed nicely at each end by that concentration of minutiae of detail, the bufferbeams.
The first thing to look at is those buffers. No matter what I did I could not accept that they were quite right. Size wise they looked ok, but..... I spent some time googling replacements but didn’t find any on-line and the next exhibition was a few weeks off... so what to do!? Actually, I think it was ea
Well, it’s been a while since my last proper update on this project... which is now into its 2nd year, so I’ll try to address this omission. The 47 project has been tackled bit by bit; the bogie frames were a task tackled after some consideration as to how to improve on the offerings provided by Bachmann. I picked up some Heljan bogie sideframes (suggested by Jim SW) and whilst these looked nice, I thought that they still lacked form fidelity and fixing them to the Bachmann bogies might be troub
Well , it’s been far too long since my last blog update; I’d love to show how much I’ve achieved in the last, er... nearly 3 months, and I have found some time to get some modelling done, just not as much as I’d have liked to. I suppose that work and life interspersed with some energy sapping episodes have slowed things down a bit; life tends to be like that. So, this update will lack and definitive progress, but there’s a bit of variety that I found useful to keep the interest going.
A gree
It’s been a while since I posted an update; sorry about that. I added some gallery photos, but I’ve missed out on the dialogue obtained from these great blogs... so hopefully this will be a start to remedy that.
Life has been getting in the way of modelling... but given that “life” has included a couple of trips up to the ELR and some 2 and 4 stroke diesel encounters, and a model show or two, life’s not caused too much of a railway abstention.
Well, I started trying a light improvement to t
It’s been a while since I posted anything on here; work and other life events have taken their toll on the available time and energies so there’s been little available to enable me to crack on with this project. I admit that when I started this, it was intended as a simple “post Deltic” project; it’s turned out to be anything but. The difference here is that with the Deltic there are plenty of “bits” available commercial, thanks to the likes of Brian H et al, for the 47 the bits are limited... b
This won’t be much more than a “this is where I’m at†posting because progress has been zilch since the last entry... the warm weather, building work, decorating, allotment and work hasn’t helped the situation... but still I’m at a bit of a holding point.
Having gone about as far as I’m going to go with the Bachmann 47 body (maybe some roof handrails beckon)... it was time to turn the attention to the underframe. Whilst I need to do some research on the fuel/water tanks, my init
This will be just a short entry to record that my small P4 depot diorama got its outing on saturday to our local show... and quite a nice little show it was too. Well done to Chris R for organising what felt to be quite a busy day. Nothing on the scale of derby... but a nice show.
My pitch all set up before the show... and before the creation of my impromptu paper light shade
I was pitched next to Matthew as before... which was useful to enable each other's displays/layouts to be left in cap
Some progress has been made on the “Brush 4â€, to the extent that I think the “body†is now done.
The main area of focus has been around the front ends, in a bid to try and make the model look a bit more like the prototype. As I’m sure I mentioned before I’d acquired some Extreme Etchings Class 47 windscreen surround etches... and very nice these are too. So I wanted to use these and soon realised that these would be quite a bit bigger than the Bachmann openings so an improved look cou
I recently posted an entry on the class 47 P4 conversion and detailing project that I’ve started; this will cover some other tasks tackled in the last month or so.
First of all there was a problem with my Nimbus. I only discovered this when my DCC Concepts rolling road arrived, just before Christmas. Despite attempts at lubricating the gears and bearings that were accessible, I finally came to the conclusion that the problem was with the motor... quite what the problem was, I’m still not
Workbench update January 2012. I’m going to create a few work bench updates here to reflect what I have managed to achieve since “finishing†Nimbus at the tail end of 2011.
As some might have read, I’ve had a bit of an issue acquiring the necessary to “P4†a Bachmann 08... so I’ll not touch on that here. I also had to strip Nimbus down to basics and replace the motor due to a unsettling growl which disappeared if he loco was turned on its side (bearings?) Lubrication didn’t hel
P4 Deltic Conversion, Part 20… final stages and completion
Well, I didn’t really think that I’d get here, but thanks to the support I’ve received from a number of RMWebbers (listed) among others, I’ve finally finished my Nimbus. OK, so he’s going to have to come apart again once I get my rolling road so that the gears can get a good seeing to with plenty of lubrication... I think the gears are all a bit gungy and dried out... so running is a little rough inside, but the pickups are ok... and
My Nimbus, detailed by Nimbus20, on Flickr
Well, it’s been a while since I last updated this blog and my last entry had my Deltic at a BR “blue” stage with a half-decent finish which I decided to stick with. Since then, I’ve made some headway... well, almost finished in fact, and sampled some proper Twin Napier haulage at the deltic 50 event at the East Lancs Railway... which was a weekend to remember and gave me some more inspiration to crack on and get this project finished... I’ve some photo
Dear all,
This will be a quick entry, with nothing stupendous to show, but the last couple of evenings have allowed me some practice and deployment of some railmatch BR Blue to my Nimbus.
Having bounced back due to the huge support received in response to my previous posts, I'm back where I was... but this time with a better result. This is good. The Railmatch paint is a lott more "matt" that the Precision paint I was using, and this has clearly helped me in my novice "insufficently experience
Since my last entry, there has been some work completed. The loco body was eventually stripped with Modelstrip, which was far easier and kinder that the results achieved on one GUV using Superstrip... which I won’t be using again.
The photo shows the results on the two GUVs, one (upper) stripped in super strip, the other in Modelstrip.
The other photo shows the 55 “modelstrip’d”. One etch (an exhaust) was found in the bowl... and some others needed a little sticking back down, but generally
Well, here goes nothing.., or rather what I’d hoped to be “something”. This is a posting that I didn’t really want to post... but it’ll close things out for a while.
The photo below shows my model of Nimbus in as a complete state as she’s likely to get... for the time being... or maybe longer.
This weekend, we had no "family going out" plans, so we stayed in... and I had some time to devote to railway modelling. I decided that the time had come to practice and attack the BR blue finish that
Dear all, given that I’ve not reported much of late, nor achieved all that much to be honest... there’s quite a bit to be done outside of modelling at the moment, so life is, as usual, taking priority. However, despite this some progress has been made.
The bogies were separated again, and the wheel rims masked... and sides treated to an airbrushed coat of weathered black... and then some brakedust mixed with track dirt was dusted over this. The bogie towers have had their copper pick
Ok... here we are, time for a brief update. This time, fewer words and more pictures! I’ve been working on the fuel tanks (still)... but I feel that these are now done. Detail was added using the Archer fine transfers – cast resin... 0.008†rivets (AR88014) to the underside of the fuel tank seem, at the ends of the tanks and to the sides below the tank mounting brackets (2 under each)... as seen in prototype photos. I’m going to admit, that this was quiet tricky given the confines I was w
