Following on from my last post showing an overview of my turnout construction fixtures, I have managed to get some working turnouts produced after many months of no modelling.
Since trying the fixtures out for the first time, I discovered my soldering iron just wasn't up to the job and I wasn't getting the results I had hoped from the fixtures. I have since purchased a new temperature controlled soldering station and it has been fantastic. I also found most of the 2mm Association rail was
In my first post on the modular fiddle yard design I mentioned B8 turnouts had been chosen for the fiddle yard. There is very good reason for this which I can now show.
For several weeks I have been working on a few designs for 2mm finescale flat bottom turnout construction fixtures. I started off with Templot to create the turnout drawing then imported this into Autocad as a DXF. This is where the fun began as I had to change some sleeper spacings in order to incorporate a 'hidden' moving s
Here is the next stage in the modular fiddle yard design: Proof of Concept for the curved boards.
I took my drawings from Autocad, printed them out and stuck them to a scrap piece of 6mm MDF. The plan here was to create a neat template to use a router to cut all the boards from. I used a multitude of power tools to create the first 'rough' template before cleaning it up with a sander. Once I was happy with this I screwed this piece to another bit of 6mm MDF and proceeded to use a router w
Well, it's been another year since my last entry and still no progress due to yet more time spent improving my designs. My job has also meant I don't have much time to do any physical modelling so I spend a lot of time on my computer thinking of more ideas to add to the layout. The main part I wasn't entirely happy with was the fiddle yard. I think I had seriously over complicated it for myself then the realisation came that I couldn't re-use the fiddle yard for any other layouts as it was t
Building turnouts in 2mm fine scale which operate smoothly has been a difficult task for me. The first few turnouts which I actually managed to finish looked a bit rubbish and rolling stock kept sticking in the crossing. This almost made me move back to N gauge track but then the 2mm Association released their comprehensive book on turnout construction and operation. After reading through the book several times I began to think of new ways to build the required turnouts for Rannoch. The turn
A few of you may remember I previously had a few blog entries featuring some CAD plans and baseboards for my attempt to model Rannoch in 2mm Finescale. That was almost two years ago and pretty much no progress has been made on the layout front. I have been slowly collecting and converting/detailing rolling stock in preparation for track laying which never happened. Most rolling stock items which I started to detail and convert haven't been finished yet so there isn't much to report on that fr
