I decided to treat myself to a little project, working on the grounds that you can never have too many Simplexes!
I particularly appreciated Slater's choice of packaging, though I suspect some other members of the family might have enjoyed the original contents more.
Inside, surrounded by copious quantities of bubble wrap was a fine looking box.
Inspection of the parts make this look like an interesting project. The 16 page instruction book looks very well produced and the
Something a little different today!
I took some drawings from Middlepeak of this parish and modeled up a Danish platelayer's hut in 1:87. The complete hut is only 40mm x 32mm x 32mm. This was basically a trial just to see how the Wanhao D7 would cope with it. The result isn't bad, probably up with your typical Bachman/Hornby 'ready-to-plonk' building. The hut came out pretty square and the detail is quite nice. The 3.5mm brick work just about comes out but is stretching the resolution of the
A couple more details over the last few days. The washer plant needed some steps to reach up to the cat walk. I decided to try and 3d print some treads and thread them onto some rod.
Also, a few years back while visiting Orford Ness in Suffolk I found some ex-military steel duck-boarding which I thought would be nice to model. With lots of holes and ribs this one really did lend itself to 3d modelling and printing. With a coat of 'Scenic Rust' I think they rather look the part. The spa
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
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
Progress on the works end of Fen End Pit continues and one of the last features to reinstate was the tipping dock and mechanism. Where we previously had a much larger concrete pad which the conveyor magically sprung from (how anyone ever did maintenance on the bottom end of it was a mystery) we now have a much smaller concrete area and some rust plate doors for access. The oil tank has moved closer to the engine shed leaving the original side clear for the storage of more industrial junk.
I thought folks might like to see my 3D printed model of a GER yard crane based on drawings in the GERS journal a few years back. The crane was built by the Chatteris Engineer Co and there were examples in several GER goods sheds and in the goods yards of some of the Stour vally line stations including Clare.
I modeled the parts up in CAD a few months back but knew that it would need something better than my original 3D printer to be able to actually make it. The resulting parts, particularl
Over the last few days I've been making progress with my new resin printer. It is quite a learning curve from the FDM (extruded filament of plastic) printers, getting to grips with 'Curing times' and other completely new variables. After several initial failures I'm beginning to get some useful parts printed. The quality over the filament based printers is remarkable. Certainly, if you are actually wanting to print small models they are worth considering. It is interesting to note that the Wanha
A few days off over Christmas gave a chance to do some fairly serious sorting out of the railway room and make one of the changes needed before Fen End Pit could get exhibited again. The original baseboards were about 3'4" long and the legs were supported by Ikea IVAR wire cross-braces. These gave a leg spacing over just over 3'. So, the original layout had 5 baseboards, 7 pairs of legs and none of them in the right place! As the layout was built in two stages I'd ended up with the situation whe
Note, that is plant (singular) rather than plants (plural), this isn't about sticking on more stringy grass even though there has been a bit of that too.
The whole of the 'works' end of Fen End Pit has been rebuilt so this means I need to reinstall all the working sand processing plant, the tipping area, conveyor and revolving screen all needed reworking. The redesign makes the baseboard slightly wider so I decided to turn the revolving screen around by 90 degrees. Previously both the screen
One of the things I wanted to replace as I rebuilt Fen End Pit was the original lighting rig. It was constructed out of 6mm MDF, used florescent tubes and had some rather questionable main power. The layout is a slightly different shape than before so reusing the rig would have involved a lot of reconstruction work. I believe a lighting rig can make or break an exhibition layout and sometimes layouts which look good in photographs on the web or in magazines can really be let down by their lighti
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
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
Progress continues on the new engine shed for Fen End Pit. Lots of sheets of corrugated iron have been coming off the 3-D printer. I have printed a number of different sizes and shapes to save wastage from printing large sheets and cutting them down. The roof has a single large sheet printed which curves over the top of the roof and then there are two shorted lengths of curved sheet on each side.
I decided to use dress makers pins to form the fastenings and this mean drilling a hole thr
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
On the original Fen End Pit the rotating screen was placed against the backscene by the fiddleyard. The motor was hidden in the fiddleyard and drove the screen via a couple of intermediate gears. In the revised layout this arrangement wasn't going to be possible and I'd puzzled over how to make the drive work. 16mm scale is big and it dawned on me that an industrial electric motor would actually be larger than the motor which I used to drive the screen so what I needed to do was build the functi
Progress continues on the works end of Fen End Pit and I've started thinking about the design of the two road shed. The size is fixed by the site, 330mm x 220mm and the height which needs about 9 scale feet. I want something suitably agricultural and given the Fens the construction material of choice would seem to be corrugated iron. (homage to Dennis from Grunty Fen)
I have a few pictures of the rather nice barn behind the Prickwillow Drainage Engine Museum. This barn actually has two diffe
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
When Hornby announced that they were producing a J15 I was very happy. A favourite locomotive read-to-run and an excuse to get a second to go along side my kit build model Alan Gibson.
Edit 16/8/19 - Work on the J15 EasiChas has now made progress see later blog entry here https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blogs/entry/22523-j15-chassis-kit-design/
Initial inspection gave the impression of a nicely made model but the more I looked at it the more I fe
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
Now all of you were far too polite to point out that just sticking a brake wheel on the back of a skip wouldn't exactly do much to slow it down and that my skip was actually lacking something very important i.e. brakes! I had fitted a second copy of my brake platform parts to another Binnie kit and spent Friday evening measuring and drawing (on paper) the parts that I'd need. Saturday morning and a hour in Onshape followed by a couple of hours on the 3D printer and I had a first version of the p
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 applied Deluxe Materials Scenic Rust to the skip, this pack contains a bottle of very fine 'Rust powder' and a binder which feels like a very dilute PVA. These are mixed together and applied to the model. Once dried a 'Rust developer' is applied which makes the layer of material actually produce real rust.
After about 8 hours the rust is fully developed and you end up with a very rusty skip.
It works rather well on corrugated cardboard to make rusty corrugated iron.
David
A little bit of cleaning up last night and I assembled the extended skip chassis. I need to add a tiny bit of filler at the joint between the original Binnie chassis and the extra parts but hardly any. I put a coat of Humbrol matt 113 on with a brush and this had the effect of really showing up the detail and just how good the printed parts had come out.
I hardly did any work on top surface of the extension and I'm really chuffed with the smoothness which the printer achieved.
Yes, I did get my spelling right and mean braking not breaking.
The Binnie Engineering Hudson Tipper wagon is a staple of 16mm narrow gauge model railways. Understandably Fen End Pit has quite a few and one of them was converted many years ago to have brake standard to give a little variation. I'd often thought about converting a couple more to give one braked wagon per train of skips but never got around to it.
I decided that this might be a good challenge for my new 3D printer so
