This afternoon I spent a few hours on the CAD and laser cutter. I started off making the last diagonal bracing and sticking that in. I cheated a bit this time around and purchased a length of 45 degree timber molding. This meant I could put in the diagonals without the pain of having to sand the ends of the brace to 45 degrees. The resulting baseboard has virtually no 'wiggle' despite only having 50mm deep framing.
I also spent a few minutes removing the cork underlay where the platform
I've been making slow progress on the scenics over the last couple of weeks. I've covered all the polystyrene with a layer of Sculptamold and got what I hope will be a suitable base for static grassing in a future.
I'd not used this stuff until I was recommended it by one of my friends, having always used modrock or other plaster bandage type things in the past. I've been very impressed as it dries quickly, forms a strong layer even when applied quite thinly and is very
Having got the Marks Tey bound platform road laid together with the remainder of the track on the second baseboard I thought I'd celebrate with a bit of stock and some photographs. Having 4 coaches pass the 'Wheeeeeeeee' test along the main line was most satisfying! I've got enough rail to finish the Cambridge platform but will need to get some more from Scaleforum.
A J15 sits with the pickup goods in the yard. This siding was also used as a lay-by. For some reason Clare castle has been repl
Over the last month I've managed to complete the track laying on the final board of the rebuilt Fen End Pit. This board is completely new and will feature a two-road engine shed as well as the unloading point, conveyor and rotating screen. Most of the point work and track has 3D printed track bases simulating the corrugated steel sleepers of Hudson Jubilee track.
In addition to the shed I've added a siding at the front which I'm hoping to use to collect the 'reject' material from the sc
I consider myself to be very lucky to live in a town which still has a shop with a worthwhile model department. Ely is lucky to have City Cycle Centre as it holds a very respectable range of paints, raw materials and tools as well as the usual RTR/RTP models. Also relatively locally a day of shopping with the family usually involves going to Bury St Edmunds (no one in their right mind attempts shopping in Cambridge, no parking, too many tourists and no model shop!). Model Junction in Bury is the
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
When I first build the 10RB dragline back in 2000 the tracks were made by heating plasticard under the grill and using a simple press tool to form each of the track plates. The result didn't look too bad but 17 years of service they had got pretty worn out. The plasticard was only 20 thou so the pressings didn't really capture the nature of the solid castings used for the tracks.
Ruston Bucyrus produced a number of different widths of track which would have been chosen depending on the
I've managed to get a fair bit of modeling in over the last week working on a variety of projects.
The major project was getting the Stour Valley P4 layout back up on its own new legs. It was previously on the legs used for Fen End Pit so I had to dismantle it every time I went out to a show. Getting the 3rd baseboard up then encouraged me into some track laying, this went well but threading Exactoscale chairs onto rail is even harder than normal when your finger tips are tingling from chemo
Now I have got the baseboard around out of the scenic section into the corner built I needed to make some track and think about fiddle-yard design. Off-scene I am happy with using ready to run P4 track rather than laying timber sleepers and plastic chairs. I decided that the corner might as well have a small cassette fiddle-yard so that I can use it to reverse trains when the loop over the door is not in place. I've built a B6 point on paxolin which gives access to the cassette or to the circuit
Over the past month I decided to try and resurrect an ancient locomotive from my collection. It's not that we've discovered a source of high pressure Geo-thermal steam in Clare, it is just that I fancied trying to get the old Impetus Andrew Barclay fireless to work again. I first built this loco about 20 years ago and I can remember my son, who was about 5 at the time, drawing steam locomotives with their cylinders at the wrong end for months afterwards! The loco was built with a split axle desi
I took the opportunity of the Christmas break to undertake some pretty major works on Fen End Pit. An evening of laser cutting produced replacement frames for the two centre baseboards, these frames were assembled and then the original MDF frames from the original layout were removed with various degrees of force! It was clear from the ease with which some of the original framing could be removed that this was a job which was somewhat overdue! The original boards had warped a fair bit too and to
A good few hours in TurboCAD, followed by some time on the laser cutter produced parts for the fourth baseboard for my Stour Valley project. This board was a bit more complex than the previous three because it needed to accommodate the small stream which I think was originally part of the moat of the castle. I only had to recut one piece where I screwed up the drawing which is pretty good going!
The ply was stuck together with Gorilla glue, which got me thinking, do they make it from Gorill
Over the weekend I did some work on the washer plant. This machine took the sand from the resolving screen and washed it removing the small particles of clay.The mixed water and sand would be pumped to a cyclone separator where the water would be removed. On the previous version of Fen End Pit the trough was brick built but I wasn't really happy with this. I decided to reuse some of the rusty plasticard from the original fiddle-yard and make the main part of the tank out of this, surrounding it
After over a year away it is time to return to the blog. A lot has happened during the last couple of years which has got in the way but I'm to be back in a position where I can share what I've been building.
Progress on my scalefour model of Clare has continued slowly. The most noticeable progress being on the area around the level crossing. Thanks to some help from members of this forum I was able to get some plans of the '1865 standard' crossing keeper's cottage. Like all standar
As I mentioned in my previous entry, one of the issues with a stepper motor is that you can only tell it to step! You can't get it to go to a certain position unless you have some mechanism to set a 'datum' point first. This often means that you have some kind of limit switch which you can run the motor against so you 'know' you have reached the limit of travel, and therefore, know that if you move a certain number of steps you will also be at a known position.
The practical issue with my fi
Progress since Christmas has been good with the final section of track laying over the bridge completed allowing trains to once more go all around the room. The vertical fiddle yard is still functioning having been dismantled off the wall and then 're-hung' and the old portable sections over the door and the 'crew lounge' (spare bed!) could be re-used with only minor adaption to fit the new position of the rails coming off the main scenic section.
A view from the door gives a reasonable impr
Thanks to various comments on and offline the curvy roofed option won!
I drew up the timber frame in TurboCAD and cut it out in 6mm ply on the laser-cutter this lunchtime. The resulting structure is 'quite large'.
One of the reasons I opted for the curved roof was that I'd solved the problem of how to make curved corrugated iron. With any products available as sheets, either corrugated copper from Ambis or plasticard it is almost impossible to bend in circumstances where you want to
For those who don't know what a J17 is, here is a picture.
They were a James Holden designed locomotive built for the GER between 1900 and 1903, a sort of half-way house between the lighter J15 and heavier J20.
As I hinted the J17 kit from PDK is also quite 'old school' by today's standards. The frames just had simple holes for the bearings, not even a half etched line as a nod that some people might spring or compensate their locomotives.
Progress today
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
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
To make a change from printing corrugated iron I thought I'd have a go at printing some window frames and brick plinth. Fen End Pit's architectural consultant pointed out that glass panes in this kind of window would never have been square. I intended these to look like cast iron frames with a hinged opening section in the centre. I intend to add a window sill to cover the edge of the lower section of 'wiggly tin'.
The base of the building was intended to have a brick plinth, this would
The turnout leading into the yard got laid today, this leads off from the loop back into the double-slip in the yard. Once again I've been able to reclaim the V, switch-blades and tie-bars from the previous layout. The point was built on a copy of the Templot template off the baseboard and then stuck in position on the marks I had previously cut into the cork.
You'll see various tools sprinkled around the layout. The original box of 'Brook-Smith' gauges, the 10BA bolts which I'm using t
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
Modelling in two scales simultaneously (4mm for Stour Valley and 16mm for Fen End Pit) does mean that sometimes it take a bit of mind bending to go from one to the other. Having made good progress with the track in the goods yard I was getting worried that I might have made a mistake with the size of the good shed as it 'looked' too small. I'd taken the sizes off the maps and descriptions I can find and every produced the drawings by counting bricks.
I decided to print out the plans of the b
Any industrial site needs oil drums and up to now I'd just had the one shape, made out of 35mm film pots which are the right size for 16mm.
I decided I fancied doing one of the more corrugated designs which would make an interesting bit of variety. I modeled the shape up in CAD (nice wiggly line rotated) and then printed the drum out on the Wanhao D7.
A coat of red oxide and it looks the part.
At the same time I printed two different models of crows off the Thingyvers
