After an excellent weekend with 'Fen End Pit' at the Southwold exhibition I came back and spent a few more hours on the PC producing the drawings for the roofs and chimneys of the test station building. No matter how hard I try to sort out the angles of hipped roofs by being mathematical I'm always surprised when they fit, more often than not after a bit of 'adjustment'.
The chimneys are cut from 1mm MDF and fitted together quite well. I'm less convinced about making 'interlocking' brickwork
Saturday saw the first point get some 'workings' on the switchblades. The Turnout Operating Unit (TOU) was one of the perspex ones I'd made for the previous layout and the only modification needed was to shorted the length of the brass tubes that go up to just below rail level because the baseboard is now 6mm ply rather than 12mm MDF. The tie-bars are scrap brass etch with the two halves separated by a sliver of paxolin. This cruel enlargement makes it look much worse than it is!
The co
Last Wednesday I was lucky enough to get off work early and join some friends in an evening visit to the North Norfolk railway for a trip on the line and a tour of the engine shed and works. This was an excellent event and a good time was had by all. We can now all count up to 34 with ease! (you had to be there!). Although the light was fading towards the end I was still able to get a picture of the J15 Y14. What a superb locomotive and HOW COULD Hornby GET THOSE HANDRAIL KNOBS SO WRONG? (sorry
This Christmas sees the completion of the new railway room, the lighting and electrics were finished and flooring laid just before Christmas Eve. This meant that on returning from work on Thursday I was able to assemble Fen End Pit along one wall. Those who follow my blog will know that there is a grand scheme to model part of the Stour valley in P4 as a big 'roundy-roundy' that goes around the room. However common sense dictates that rather than launch immediately into that project I should get
I'm looking forward to a day out on Saturday with Fen End Pit at Steam in Beds. http://www.bag16mm.org.uk/Steam%20in%20Beds.html
A chance to play trains, dig sand and chat to people sounds like an excellent plan.
Progress on the extension continues, the railway room now has plastered walls and a door. I'm even promised lights tomorrow!
Only trouble is that between now and when a carpet fitter comes in two weeks I have to get every wall and ceiling of about half the house painted! I shou
I've got to the point in this little project where I need to make some gates. We are talking great big LNER gates here, with enormous concrete posts and guy rods.
Some drawings were published on here a few years back so I drew these up in TurboCAD and chopped then out on the laser-cutter. Two thicknesses of .7mm plastic seemed to give the right thickness. I nipped in to John Lewis at lunchtime and purchased some material to try and make the mesh. I've sandwiched this between the two pieces o
A good few months back I was working on a Rumney models chassis and tried to fit a Parkside Shocvan onto it before realizing that it was planked and it should have been plywood to match the chassis type.
http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/186/entry-15555-a-little-bit-of-suffolk-or-learning-to-love-templot/
it was helpfully pointed out that Red Panda actually did a kit of the plywood version and so I purchased one of these from a trader at the Ely show. An offer over the weeken
The Ruston LBT moved into the paint shop this weekend. Unlike all of the Simplex locomotives on 'Fen End Pit' I thought this one should be a non-manufacturers standard colour. A bit of contrast seemed like a nice idea and looking through my photographs of LBTs I could find them in standard Ruston green, blue, orange and yellow. You pays your money and takes your choice. Roy Link had commented what a nice colour yellow was to weather so I decided on a standard 'plant' yellow as the basis colour.
On Friday night I started to look at the Ruston bits. The bits for the horn-guides were pretty good.
The bearing is held in a carrier which then springs in the elongated hole in the carrier. These were made up and then epoxied onto the chassis and the wheels test fitted.
We now have a chassis that rolls.
A close-up of the horn block shows the bearing end in the guide, this will get covered with a bit of plastic in the end but I wanted to make sure that the springing wa
I received my etchings back from PPD yesterday. Apart from an error with the J17 coupling rods which were on the same etch the Ruston bits look super. The intention is that these bits provide the strength I need for the axle boxes and motor mount together with lots of nice bits to detail the laser cut plastic body, This is the first time I've used PPD and actually produced etching for myself rather than just doing art work from others and I'm very pleased with the results.
The idea is t
I spent most of this afternoon with soldering iron, files and a 'hold and fold'. My 'Traction Ears' now slide smoothly in my 'Traction Horns' and even the job of dismantling the Bachmann chassis and modifying the gear drive was only made difficult by not being able to find a sharp drill that could cleaning cut the rather soapy plastic of the bogie easily. So far I am vary impressed with how this is going together and I'm looking forward to the 'rolling test' to see how the springing works.
So the E4 got some transfers and looks a lot better for it. I have then picked out the various brass fitments in Humbrol metallic paint and finally given the loco a light covering of Humbrol matt varnish before adding a light dusting of Railmatch Frame Dirt.
I'm quite pleased with the results, it has blended the areas where I'd had to retouch the black nicely.
Left to do are the crew, the buffers and enough coal to get from Cambridge to Marks Tey and back.
As a half painted loco
Yesterday was that great annual treat of a trip to Scaleforum, the journey to Aylesbury almost made me miss the delights of queuing around the M25! The list of bits was rapidly procured (with the exception of those from High Level kits where the focus was on talking to customers rather than rapidly serving (this is not intended as a complaint, that is a large part of the point of Scaleforum) - note to self: next time buy online!)
I purchased a 12x24 motor to replace the 14x24 which I had pu
Back from the summer holidays and a small gathering on Friday evening allowed for what are pretty much the final bits of brass to be put on the D16/3. First to go on were the front guard irons and then the brakes on the tender. I had some fun because of the earlier issues with the folding of the internal tender chassis which was slightly on the dink owing to the 1/4 etching rather than 1/2 etching of the components which made folding it up damn near impossible. in the end I had to enlarge some
No blog entries since February, too much going on and now so much to catch up on. Get a cup of tea, this could be a long one.
First up I've been working on rebuilding the lever frame from Empire Basin to fit Empire Mills. The revised track plan calls from more levers and so an extra Shropshire and Herefordshire Area Group frame was ordered from the Scalefour stores. This takes the frame up to 25 levers. The frame was built as per the instructions except for the addition of a locking 'tab' wh
I made some more progress on the bridge this weekend. I need to get at least a base to the structure (and some transparent acrylic cut for the water service) before I can lay track over it and with a desire to be able to run trains around the room again it has worked its way onto the 'critical path'. I've drawn out the base in TurboCAD and worked out a representation of the underside to give some transverse girders between the main side girders. I've also put some girders following where the rai
An excellent day out to day at 'Steam in Beds' organised by the Bedfordshire area group of the 16mm association. Our surroundings in the church at Eaton Bray were rather impressive and it seemed only right given the Church of England clergies long history of interest in railways! Many thanks to Rad and 2BIL for their help.
Despite the obvious temptations to things 16mm I managed to resist buying any new toys, probably a good idea given the orders received from the MERG and Rapid electro
As requested by Phil, a few notes on how I make tie-bars. I'll try and cover the current TOUs later, my previous version made from plastruct was described here http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/186/entry-8263-making-tous-turnout-operating-units/
The visible tie-bars are made from a couple of pieces of scrap etc roughly .75mm tall and a tiny piece of thin paxolin. Mine originally came from Eileen and judging by the price label which says 70p I suspect it is quite old! I have
Time to finally start laying track and I decided that I needed to start with probably the most critical bit of the formation, the single slip and turnout into the loop. The template from Templot showed these a 1:8 crossings, which is actually the shallowest diamond that you can have apparently. Anyone who has ever made a diamond crossing will tell you the most difficult bit is making the obtuse crossings - they are a pig to get right. That said after spending the whole of Friday evening turning
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
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
With the hiatus caused by test building of a new MERG DCC Booster and the preparation for Ally Pally out of the way, (thanks everyone for the nice comments on the London Festival of Model Railways thread) I got back to the main matter in hand, finishing the engineers' possession on Empire Basin and getting back to being able to run trains around again.
Having made the fiddleyard move up and down the next step is making it stay in one place. Until I have a way of accurately holding it at a pa
That's Alexandra Palace and the London Festival of Model Railways next weekend.
So, time to take Fen End Pit out of the cupboard under the stairs where it resides and do a few 'pre-fight checks'. Fortunately the whole layout goes up in our back room with the kind permission of the domestic authorities.
A quick bit of scenic work with a hoover, removing the spiders, was followed up with a new coat of paint on the backscene and on the facia panel. The work then turned to the stock, fi
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I built a Wills N7 kit. The chassis was built using the etches for the kit, now sold by South East Finecast. The original chassis had the 'posh' hornblocks from Gibson (I think) which were the lost wax casting with a tiny springs pushing down on the bearing with a bolt through the top of the hornblock to locate the spring and set the ride height.
All of this worked fine until you took into account the sheer weight of the white metal body. The body c
I've managed to build the platform starter for the Up line following the description of making a tubular post signal in Mick Nicholson's Constructing and Operating Semaphore Signals (Booklaw publications 1999) I'm pretty pleased with it, particularly the coloured 'Crystal Klear' for the lenses. It still needs the lamp fitting which is why you can see the colours from the rear. Operation is via a servo controlled using a MERG servo4 card (which also gives me bounce).
Having positioned t
