A couple more pictures.
Firstly this is the switch end of the three-way. The check rails were basically just soldered on to the copper clad using the a set a Scalefour Society jigs to locate them. I was given some old Studiolith rail which is actually a little thinned than the current bullhead available from C&L et al. In reality the guard would probably just have been a piece of angle iron rather than rail, but it was rail I had to hand.
To give you some idea of how the lower l
I realized I hadn't posted a plan of the layout on the blog yet and thought folk might be interested.
This afternoon I painted most of the remaining track on upper level. Unfortunately I had run out of the ballast I used on the first part and have had some fun trying to match up the colours. Note to self, next time make sure I have enough to do the whole layout before I start.
An F5 approaches Empire Basin hauling a short parcel train. The works of National Motors and Switchgea
While on holiday in Cornwall over Easter I visited the bookshop of the Launceston Steam Railway and purchased a copy of the Robert Hudson Light Railway catalogue from 1915 as reprinted by the Narrow Gauge Railway Society. I decided I'd try to draw up and print a U skip more as a scenic feature than as a working piece of rolling stock. I trust one small picture is allowed under 'fair use' rules and I'd strongly recommend the book.
The 3D model took me a few hours to put together, modeli
The original point levers on Fen End Pit were of the simple lever type. I made each one by hand out of plasticard, each one taking 20 individual parts to be cut, shaped and stuck together. The results looked pretty good.
However most of the preserved railways I've visited tend to have the rather more complex type which have a weighted lever that throws parallel with the track. This example is at Launceston on the Launceston Steam Railway.
I spent a few happy hours in CAD modell
The original Wills kit was designed to fit around a Hornby Jinty or such like with a massive X04 motor protruding into the cab. Having built the chassis with something a little less 'old school' it was pretty clear that the absence of a floor, or backhead or crew was going to be a bit noticable. It isn't as if you can see much in the cab through the windows, it is just that you can really seen the absence of anything through the windows, if that even vaguely makes sense.
So I decided to put
Well over a couple of years ago I asked my friends at Brassmasters about the possibility of them producing one of their EasiChas range of kits to fit the Hornby J15. These chassis utilize the original motor and chassis block put provide a method to fit EM or P4 wheels with some springing. The design has now covered a range of prototypes including various LMS, GWR and LNER locomotives. I have produced artwork for some of the Brassmasters range in the past (point rodding components and the origina
I've managed to have a go at fastening an extra micro-switch to be activated by the catch handle on a Shropshire and Herefordshire Area Group (spelled out in full to avoid being replaced by #####, the so-called scunthorpe problem) lever frame.
In order to make it so I could still take the levers apart I built it as follows:-
20mm of rectangle brass tube (K&S)
saw slot in the narrow side of the tube, this allows it to feed over the tag on the lever which holds the bottom of the sprin
I've started work on another vehicle for the parcels train, a MK1 GUV. So far the B4 bogies have been replaced by Mk1 type. These are Bill Bedford etchings with the sides off Bachmann Mk1 bogies (suitable thinned down). The Bachmann bogies came from Kernow Models last week and at £3.50 for a pair are actually cheaper than some less detailed white metal castings.
The original 'Rail Express Systems' livery came off easily with model strip and will be replaced with plain BR maroon (and lots of
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
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
I managed to get my second 'kit of parts' assembled into a baseboard this weekend. I'll be honest and admit that I'd made a few errors in the drawing on this one, some of which resulted in a bit of 'fettling' being required. I'd missed out one set of slots and got a tab 6mm out of place. When you try to cut rectangular holes in 6mm ply the traditional way, with a drill and a piecing saw and file, you realise how much you get spoiled by a laser cutter.
I've still got to fit base-board do
My clever wife bought me a new 3D printer for Christmas (how did she guess what I wanted?)
I was a bit concerned because the box was shipped direct from China by FedEx via what appears to be a puddle at Cologne Airport. Creality customer service were very helpful and we decided it was worth trying to build it and just replace any bits if we found they had been damaged. In the end everything went together very easily ( about 30-45 minutes assembly to first print) and I managed t
I was keen to try and find a way to make a slate roof that would give some texture better than just printed paper. The Scalescenes paper I used before looked very good, but I couldn't face the idea of trying to cut all the lines between the slates.
What I've tried here is to laser cut strips of slates onto large A4 size postage labels. The slates are about 3.5mm across and the strips are 10mm deep.
Laying these strips is a little fiddly and I found with the hipped roof that you
Now this locomotive has been very long in the making. Originally constructed from an Alan Gibson kit while I was at university 25 years ago this has always been a bit of a 'problem child'. The 2-4-2 wheel arrangement makes it virtually impossible to get around any kind of curve without resorting to some way of getting the leading and trailing axles to turn into the curve. Obviously the prototypical way of dealing with this would have been radial axle boxes but these are fiendishly difficult to m
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
With the rebuild of Fen End Pit underway I need to build a couple more Hudson 'Jubilee' style points. In the past I've made the sleepers by heating plasticard and squashing it in a hand made press tool but in this day and age I thought I'd have a go at 3D printing. The original drawings I'd made in 2D were imported into Onshape and then bits extruded and cut out to make a 3D model of the turnout. This then got exported as an STL file and downloaded onto the Ultimaker 2 printer we have in Makespa
So I thought I'd better explain briefly why I'm having various changes of plan and different projects going on. Bottom line is that I had a rather unpleasant diagnosis in February and 'the future' is now more uncertain than I might have hoped. I'm not intending to turn this blog into some kind of medical record, but I'm currently into my second cycle of Chemo.
My approach to dealing with this is to take each day as it comes and try to keep positive, if I can continue enjoying building model
With the Ely show rapidly approaching a couple of afternoon's help from my friends managed to complete the lighting rig. This is formed of a box girder made from 3mm ply, three rows of 'warm white' LEDs and two rows of colour changing LEDs. I also had to make a 'gallows bracket' for the centre of the layout. The whole lot got a coat of blue to match the facia and the result looks pretty professional, even though I say it myself.
The LEDs seem to work well, and being able to adjust the c
I had assembled the tender chassis originally using the Alan Gibson hornblocks supplied in the kit. This were the units with a tiny spring which provides some downward force but where the hornblock itself is designed to sit on the end of a bolt which passes through the top of the horn guide. The theory is that you can adjust the bolts to get the ride height for each axle correct. From my experience I find this very difficult and the resulting ride is very 'hard' and it is too easy to have one ax
The weekend gave me the opportunity to remake the ends of the bridge corner boards which I had to shorten to make space for the extra 10cm of fiddle yard. A short length at the end of the baseboard is built up with MDF and ply to a height which allows for a solid length of copper-clad PCB to go underneath the rails. This gives something solid to solder the rail onto and hopefully keeps everything from moving. I had to put an additional bit of bracing onto one of the main baseboards to stop it fr
As the scalefour layout takes a rest while waiting for major house redevelopment I've been working on stock. Given that the E4 and various other coaches are complete I thought it was time for 'something different'.
Until this point Fen End Pit has been an all Simplex affair (ok, apart from the Lister) but given the Ruston and Bucyrus dragline it seemed only a matter of time before the Ruston locomotive salesman came calling for business.
I've always liked the LAT and LBT ever since I bui
I had a go at cutting the building again, this time in the more conventional 3mm MDF, using .7mm ply for the quions. The result fitted together quite nicely, though I probably shouldn't have turned the 'corner power' down so far on the ply as I had to resort to a scalpel to get some of the parts free.
Before discussing painting here is a picture of Clare station to give you some idea of the colouring. I'm not convinced that four decades of no trains and possible cleaning haven't chang
Yesterday was spent with Fen End Pit in the loco shed at Page's Park. The conditions were far from ideal as the temperatures were in the 30s and the shed environment was pretty filthy, not a combination designed to allow model railway layouts to function flawlessly. The 009 and O16.5 guys were in the cleanliness of the station building but the larger scales were in the shed. Temperatures and dirty made several things fail, I had to jury rig the power to the conveyor and revolving screen at one p
A few weeks work and progress can definitely be seen on the E4. I'd been concentrating on the body but today was the day to try and get some wheels in place. The loan of a GW wheel quartering jig from Middlepeak Tool Hire made this so much smoother. Being original Alan Gibson wheels these had the hole already drilled for the crank pins, another help when putting things together. You'll see from the photograph of the underside that the chassis is built using 'continuous springy beams' with High L
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
