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Yet another 2mm FS blog

Entries in this blog

Saddle tank (Part 2)

Unfortunately progress has been rather slow, so there's not a lot to show in this update. I blame the recent cold weather - it didn't seem like a good idea to attempt such delicate work with frozen fingers...   The chassis is now soldered together - not a difficult job, with the jig holding everything together.   The insertion of worm and motor shaft into the gearbox looks somewhat unclear - the motor shaft is 1mm diameter, the inside diameter of the worm is 1.5mm diameter, and the motor s

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Saddle tank (Part 1)

A little more progress on providing some motive power. Some time ago I bought the Dean Sidings resin body for a 1701 saddle tank, which is intended to fit on the Farish 57xx pannier chassis. There was already a kit available from the 2mm Association to convert that chassis to 2mm standards, but it had a poor reputation. There was an etched chassis replacement intended for release "sometime soon", so I decided to build the body and procrastinate until the chassis kit arrived.     The 1702 bo

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Building an old Toad (part 4)

I recently stumbled across an interesting article covering old Toads. It was written by John Lewis, apparently published in January 1983 in a publication called "Scale Trains" (which I don't recognise), and formed the first part of a five-part series. A couple of copies of these articles are available in the files section of the Yahoo GWR-elist, in different formats. It provides some useful background information for the one I modelled, so I thought it worthwhile to summarise that here.   The

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Cattle Train - GWR (2mm FS)

Although it's not obvious from the product list, the 2mm Association kits provide a good start for building GWR cattle wagons - known as MEX (or should that be MEXes?) for identification purposes.   The Association body kit 2-561 is intended for a BR cattle wagon (Diag 1/353) which is very similar to the late GWR cattle wagons of diagram W12. By substituting the Association 2-363 underframe (11'6" DC) for the recommended 2-352 underframe, you can easily build the GWR W8 diagram of 1913 (the

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Building an old Toad (part 3)

The smooth progress of the earlier sessions came to an end here - nothing monumental, just a string of things that didn't quite go right. Some have been re-worked to my satisfaction, some still need a bit more effort to fix (or work around). Mostly a problem with my limited soldering skills, abetted by lack of alignment aids in the latter part of the build.   Anyway, back to the main story.   Next I tackled the various ends to the body, and their overlays. The outer part of the verandah is f

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Building an old Toad (part 2)

Returning to the previous instalment, there's something worth mentioning (in case you've not read the comments): Normal practice is for 90 degree bends to be bent towards the half-etch, but 180 degree bends to be bent away from the half-etch. In this kit, the V-hangers are bent 180 degrees towards the half-etch, thus passing inside the solebar, rather than outside it.   After fitting the brake gear, the next step that I tackled was the solebars.   I cut out the four plain solebars, leaving

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Building an old Toad (part 1)

This covers the start of planning and building a Toad (GWR Brake Van) for the layout. Not one of the usual Toads (from Association kits), which come in 20 and 24 feet lengths, with four or six wheels and a capacity of 16 to 25 tons, but the earlier outside-framed variant with a length of 18 feet and capacity of 10 tons.     This is one I did earlier - not finished yet (missing buffers, couplings, handrail, and with the roof still loose), and flawed by a couple of mistakes in the constructio

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More research (or a weekend out)

A couple of months ago I ventured out for a weekend's research, visiting Didcot (for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Great Western Society) and STEAM (20th anniversary of the closure of Swindon Works).   I returned with lots of photos, and I include below a few that are relevant to my layout (and a few that aren't, but seemed worth including anyway).     I haven't yet established when 4 or 6 wheel coaches were replaced by bogie coaches in my area, but this one is from the righ

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Progress - sort of ...

It's now about 9 months since my initial blog entry, describing plans for a 2mm reconstruction of Market Drayton (on the Wellington to Crewe GWR line) around 1905, and nothing has been reported since then.   Broadly work has fallen into two categories - armchair modelling (research and planning), and building some of the rolling stock that I want for the layout.   On the planning side I now have track plans and drawings of the buildings at various dates, so that I can interpolate and produce

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Unfinished GWR red wagons in 2mm FS

This short entry was prompted by recent discussion of the old GWR wagon red, in Mikkel's recent blog entry on the Farthing layouts for a 3-plank open in GWR red, at http://www.rmweb.co....pen-in-gwr-red/   I suspect that any attempt to distinguish between red and grey wagons in old photographs is going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, due to the similarity between the two shades when converted to grey in the photo - specially as we don't know what shade the red originally was, and it prob

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Introduction

Having drifted away from the hobby many years ago, after playing with O gauge (clockwork) and various early forms of N gauge (including OOO push along and Treble-O-Lectric), I recently returned and decided to take up the challenge of 2mm Fine Scale. I used to be quite happy doing simple kit-bashing and scratch-building of rolling stock on proprietary chassis and bogies, but had little experience of soldering (and what little I had was long, long ago).   Choice of prototype wasn't too difficult

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