The failure of my old soldering iron means a brief hiatus on the B1 until I get a replacement. As a result I headed back to do some more work on the goods shed which I've been doing the artwork for and laser cutting. Having sorted out the issues I was having with consistent cutting on the side walls I had got to the point of having a set of parts I was happy to assemble. The assembly went fairly well and I was pleased with way the buttresses on the corners ended up. Having a test run prior to th
I've made some good progress on the Dave Bradwell B1 chassis. I fitted some pickups, made up the brakes and then refitted the pickups as they conflicted with the brakes! This got me a chassis which could move under its own power from the track. I then spent a good few hours fettling the slide bars to get the crosshead casting running smoothly.
This was quite entertaining and the result was pretty good, the lower part of the slidebar is just pinned together by the 4 lengt
I was contacted last week by Keith Barker of the Ely MRC, he had been occupying himself during lock-down sorting out old media files on his PC. He had located some video of a model narrow gauge cement works railway taken at the Stowmarket in 2001 and thought it might be my layout. He was happy for me to post it up on Youtube, so I added a bit of a commentary and it is now there for all to see.
I built 'The Works' in the 1990's and exhibited it for a few years prior to selling it some
Anyone who has worked with a laser-cutter will probably have story about just how dire the software for them tends to be. HPC Laser cutters are very nice machines but they still come with LaserCut 5.3 which has had no updates to my knowledge in 4-5 years. It is the only piece of dongle protected software I have and it is frankly awful. The interface looks like something produced in the mid-90s and the English language options look like Google translate was used. I have learnt my way around the i
More progress with the Dave Bradwell B1 chassis kit over the weekend. The cosmetic and functional springs were fitted. The cosmetic springs hold the driving wheels from falling out and also hold the functional sprung steel wire spring. These springs are held at one end by a hole in the etch and at the other end in a 10 BA grub screw. These grub screws can then be used to adjust the individual amount of springing on each drive wheel. This picture shows off the P4 wheel profile rather nicely,
I found a lovely photograph of a B1 shunting at Clare on the Transport Treasury website.
https://www.transporttreasury.com/p968962872/h9A4C364E#h9fccc231
This got me thinking that I really needed to have one for my model. I started investigating the options and found that Hattons had a second hand one available with a slightly damaged box and a wobbly drive wheel for an attractive price. I'd spotted that Dave Bradwell produces a chassis kit which, having built his J39 cha
Over the last week I've been doing some work drawing up the cattle dock and the goods shed. The good shed was sparked off by wanting a project for the Scalefour societies 'Socially-distanced Challenge' and by the fact it was the next building I needed to work on.
The process of studying photographs, counting bricks, comparing with drawings from the GERS has been a fascinating one. The goods shed particularly is interesting because it was substantially rebuilt during its lifetime. No
I made a small purchase from Hattons this week which then pushed me forward to finish one quite old project. I'd found a picture which shows a B1 shunting at Clare so started looking online for the options to produce a model. Hattons had a secondhand one which was advertised as 'warped drive wheel and imperfect box' for a very reasonable price. Given that I can't get hung up about the state of the box and would rewheel to P4 anyway I decided I couldn't pass it up. I have also written off for the
As I hinted in one of my previous blog postings I wasn't entirely happy with the windows in the station building. Some were ok (usually the ones I'd shot in photographs) but others were a bit iffy. I'd been slowly developing the process and the cut files for the laser cutter. This picture shows versions 1, 2 and 3 from left to right.
Version 1 was a single 1mm cut with the detail engraved on the top. The single thickness made for a lack of relief that I didn't think gave
I did a bit of 3d modelling in CAD this weekend and produced some rainwater goods. This included some of the castings that hold the pipes onto the walls, some spouts for the bottom of downpipes and some hoppers for where one pipe goes into another. I also drew up some chimney pots and some suitcases, just for the laughs.
They came out pretty well on the Anycubic photon.
The holes in the drain components were drawn at 1.3mm and drilled out easily to fit some plastruc
The road side of the station building at Clare has a glass awning over the entrance door. Looking at the pictures this had a timber frame under the glass and a thin leaded layer on 3 sides of each pane only on the top. The main glazing bars were cut in 1mm MDF and drawn at 1mm wide but probably cut down to about .8mm. The top layer was in thin card and was extremely fragile when it came off the laser cutter.
In this picture I have just positioned the awning, the brackets, which were
So I managed to put the chimneys onto the station building and don't they make a difference! I had made myself more work by cutting the holes in the roof based on the plans I had of Lavenham station from Jas Millham. It turns out that Lavenham had considerably more ornate brick work than Clare and the bases of the chimneys were quite a bit large. I don't know if this was the local builder interpreting the plans he was given differently (trying save money on his contract?) or if they might have b
It never ceases to amaze me that my lasercutter can both crunch through 6mm ply for baseboard construction and do super detail work in 1mm MDF. I'd been asked to help with a 4mm narrow gauge Irish project the station building had rather impressive arches over the windows. This needed not just very fine cutting for the mortar lines but also some engraving to shape the bricks around the arch. These little beasts are 18mm across and cut in 1.5mm ply.
I also made up the chim
I finished off my P4 conversion of the Hornby horsebox. It is a lovely model and I am very pleased with how it looks. The original W-irons were filed down to wafer thin and then I stuck a set of Bill Bedford sprung W-irons behind them.
I purchased some of the new Lanarkshire models Jackson coupling droppers and fitted these. I've always hated trying to make droppers for Jackson's as I never seemed to be able to either bend iron wire to the right shape or solder iron wir
Following on from my 3D printed brakes for sprung coach bogies I slightly modified the model to fit on a Bill Bedford sprung W-iron etch. This was for a 14mm diameter wheel. I printed them in batches of 5 so I can break one per wagon!
They fit quite nicely over the W-Iron.
I've been thinking that the Scalefour society might try the tag line 'Taking nice OO gauge models and cutting large holes in them'. At least that is the case with this Hornby e
Over the last couple of weeks I've been converting some Hornby coaches to P4. I've been using my favourite sprung bogies from Bill Bedford/Eileen. The hardest bit with these though is the brake blocks as I find metal etched brake blocks too likely to short out on the wheel tread when I bend them! (probably my own fault).
So I thought I'd have a go at 3d printing an alternative to see how it might work. It wasn't too hard to model up and I printed the result on my Anycubic Photon. I did two
I decided to give the 3D printer a little job and modeled up some right angle magnetic clamps. These have 4 strong magnets mounted into them and while obviously of no use for anything 'hot' for holding two pieces at right angles while they glue they could come in handy. I'll put the .STL files on the thingiverse if anyone is interested, I made too different sizes, one 50mm and the other 30mm.
They proved to be very useful when assembling walls of my station building toil
So, this one is a bit detailed and has a few ramblings.... Sorry
Some modellers are very clever, they come out with perfectly formed designs, work tirelessly to bring them to fruition and produce superb pieces of work first time. Some practice 'slow modelling', being superbly organized, only getting out the tools and materials needed to for the job in hand and breathing deeply while wielding their scalpels. Much respect it due to these folks, if you feel you fit into these categories
After many hours in TurboCAD I've finally made some physical progress on the main station building for Clare. There has been much counting of bricks and much studying of an April 1986 copy of Practical Model Railways which features some drawings of Lavenham by Jas Millham. Clare was a 1865 'medium' design but I have been able to incorporate what I've learnt in my building of the platform 2 waiting shelter and, even further ago, my station based on the GERS drawing of Takeley, an 1865 'small' des
The S&T team were out again today, taking advantage of the reduced Sunday service to install a ground disk at the exit of the down goods lay-by. This signal was built from some etches which I believe were produced by D&S in the last century. It is f**tingly small!, the disk being about 5mm in diameter and the total height only being about 11mm.
Normal/Danger:-
and when cleared
The wire linkage through the baseboard also drives the ba
I managed to make some more progress on the signals for Clare and now have the down home and up advanced starter in position, if not properly bedded in. Both have 3d printed tapered 'timber' posts and lamps with the rest of the details, arms, ladders etc being from Model Signal Engineering. The taller home signal was printed on the Anycubic photon but I reverted to my new Ender 5 to print the shorted starter. Both have a length of brass rod running up the inside for strength.
The adv
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
Back in 2011 I played about with my Scalefour Society lever frame to use servos to lock the levers.
2011 blog entry
At the time I implemented the locking by connecting a PC and running JMRI, this used the 'logix' operation to monitor the state of each lever and then lock/unlock other levers appropriately. This worked OK but obviously required a PC to be connected to the layout. The locking was also based on my previous layout design rather than my current Stour Valley pro
Thanks to some encouragement from one of my friends this week I got around to trying to layer some additional grass textures on the cutting sides. I used Peco Scene Layering Spray which worked pretty well, it doesn't seem to colour the existing grass but holds the next layer of static grass securely. Getting different lengths and colours of grass fibres makes quite a difference to the overall look.
The pickup goods approaches the overbridge on its way from Clare to Caven
