Great to have RMweb back after the Christmas downtime - thanks to Andy for seeing it through.
I decided that I needed to redo the control for the lower section of Empire Basin to use servos. This is partly because I was unhappy with my attempts at wire-in-tube and the rather lashed up linkages I'd made which didn't work very well and partly because I wanted to have a test bed to demonstrate the use of servos for point control.
I needed to make a proper drive mechanism for the point blade
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
This one really has been a long time coming! The Crownline kit has a 'checked' date on the box of 1997. I've had it 'in progress' for almost five years and most of the last two it has been in the naughty box threatening to be drop kicked out of the window. I'd left it socially isolating in south Cambridgeshire with one of my friends so long he was probably going to start charging rent. It looks like it I last mentioned it on this blog almost two years ago. The kit came back home in a socially di
This will probably appaul the continuous springy beam folks but when you have individual springs on a chassis it is important to be able to adjust them so that the effective weight on each wheel is similar. I had some problems with my J39 which would hold the track then 'turning right' but not 'turning left'. It was suggested that perhaps the springing on the front axle was uneven so I decided to build a rig to try and check this out.
An £7 set of electronic scales was purchased off ebay (I'
I had a first go at weathering the Ferguson tractor. I don't really have much experience with weathering vehicles and even less experience with Vallejo acrylics. I think I'm fairly happy with the outcome but would welcome your opinions. I do note looking a the prices of tractors on Ebay that I have added a couple of thousand to the price by weathering it as it would appear that you pay less for a 'restored' tractor than you do for a 'barn find' by about £2000.
Techy bit ----
So this weekend I took delivery of my shiny new Anycubic Photon M5S Pro and a Wash-and-cure station. This was ordered direct from Anycubic and arrived 5 days sooner that the original delivery date. The printer has a 10" build plate so it considerably larger than my old Phrozen Sonic mini 4K. It also has the advantage of wifi connectivity so I can monitor progress in the garage from my warm workbench in the house. The printer also comes with a heater which means I don't
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
It's taken a few months to make much progress on the level crossing. I made some gates but hit a problem as I tried to mount them on the stepper motors but needed to make them removable. This meant that there was a bit of slop introduced and that allowed the dreaded backlash to rear its ugly head. It took sometime to adapt the code to deal with this as I had to make the stepper motors 'take up the slack' every time the gates change direction.
Here is a little video.
David
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
Over the last week or so I've been inspired by an article in the MERG magazine to have a go with an Arduino. These little micro-controllers are ridiculously cheap and can be programmed to do all kinds of things. I've chosen to control a couple of stepper motors to make a pair of level crossing gates.
David
I've been working on and off on making a level crossing for some years now. I've bounced between the electronic and purely mechanical option but finally come back to the electronics using an Ardiuno to drive a pair of stepper motors with simple micro-switches to detect the limit of travel. There is a 3D printed unit under each gate which can actually drive the gate nearly 100 degrees, this allows some over-travel in each direction to take account of the back-lash on the gates caused by there bei
My first blog entry, I never was any good at keeping a diary so no doubt this will be a sporadic exercise, let's see if anyone reads it!
I've spend the last couple of days with various work colleagues making polite, if bemused, comments on the copy of BRM sitting on my desk. Some people seem genuinely impressed to see the layout in print. I'm fairly happy with the way it appeared in the photographs. I'd be interested to know what others thought.
Tonight has been spent with probably my be
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
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
The 1.5mm MDF I ordered arrived today, the 1mm was out of stock. 1.5mm is the same thickness as the width of a header in 4mm so this allows me to interlock the walls on the header joint. I deliberately drew the 'tab' of the header .2mm over length to get around the problem I had previously that the 'tab' was not quite long enough to lie flush with the 'slot' when the wall was put together.
I also cut a piece of the MDF to be a sanding jig. By putting the wall through the jig I could lig
I finally got around to doing a bit of modelling, inspired by a thoroughly enjoyable day on Saturday exhibiting at the 16mm show in Peterborough.
I've been working on drawing up the water tower from Thaxted based on the drawing available from the GERS. Having had lots of goes with the little goods hut I had worked out most of the gotchas with the cutter and so the parts which were cut were pretty much right first time. OK, I'll admit I drew the windows frames too far apart by .5mm so I neede
My model of Thaxted water tower is coming on nicely. As I commented in my last blog I cut a base for the tank from 3mm acrylic (an alarming orange colour) and a pair of formers from transparent acrylic. A piece of brass the right height was then folded around the formers and stuck on with epoxy.
I think the painting was much more successful than previous attempts. I had sealed the MDF with an MDF sealing paint and then sprayed on two coats of red oxide primer, leaving a good bit of drying ti
*This is the standing joke in my house when model railways become just too difficult.
I'm in the dumps as no matter what I try I just can't get a brick finish I'm happy with, I can see now why I stuck to using Scalescenes for so long, I just can't paint brickwork.
The desk is covered with dozens of little laser cut test sheds which are going to end up in the bin very soon at this rate.
I've tried painting a brick colour in Enamel and using an Acrylic to run the mortar into the c
Taking up macrame has been deferred for another day. Thanks to everyone for their words of help and encouragement.
I went into Makespace this afternoon and cut three new buildings to try painting. I now have two complete buildings, one in grey primer and the other in red oxide. I've also got the bits for a third and a couple of spare walls.
I tried a couple of paint finishes on a spare wall, The middle section is just Halford's red oxide. The top section has had a wash of water colo
After thinking about this for sometime i had a rummage through the bits box and found an old Exactoscale 2:1 reduction box. I'd already thought that the 36:1 gearbox might be a bit low geared given the size of the wheels and DonW's comment on putting a spur gear drive to take the shaft to a more convenient height seemed sensible too.
The Exactoscale box took a bit of work to get back up a reasonable state, but fits nicely between the frames of the tender chassis. I've also modified the chass
One of the things about writing a blog, as opposed to an article for a magazine, is that you tend to write as you model and put up pictures of 'work in progress'. As such it is probably common to publish something, possibly making it sound like 'the solution' only to then change it a few days later!
It has been like this with the drive for this loco. The gearbox ran very smoothly, but my attempts to get a decent drive from the tender located motor caused no end of problems. I tried putting i
As I had to take the chassis apart to solder the brake hangers on (they were too close to the wheels for comfort) I opted to paint the chassis while everything was accessible. The frames were brush painted with some enamel primer and the a coat of Humbrol matt black, which amazingly dried matt. I then picked out the valve gear with some Humbrol gun metal to give a slightly shiny look of steel. A quick blast of acrylic railmatch 'frame dirt' has toned it down a bit.
Another task completed wa
After another entertaining Friday evening the valve gear is complete. I realized I had jumped ahead of myself in the instruction and missed the brake-hangers which need to be added and then have the central bit cut away, before the final part of the valve gear can be soldered in place. The result looks pretty fiendish, but it really is just an exercise in soldering lots of laminations of nickel silver together.
When you put the body on you obviously can't see most of it, but I think it
Having put the J20 together and painted it I spotted that I'd missed a couple of important bits off. The first were the front guard irons which were easily soldered onto the front of the chassis. The others were, it appears, completely missing from the kit, these were the two large lockers in the cab, one of which has the reverser mounted on it. The kit appears to not have parts for these at all and they are not mentioned in the instructions. Photographs of cab interiors are notoriously hard to
Over the last couple of days I managed to get a coat of primer followed by a coat a Stratford's finest black. This was a heavy freight locomotive and getting towards the end of its life so I've got a fair bit of weathering to apply. On most of the prototype photographs it is almost impossible to see the BR insignia on the tender! I've noticed I also need to paint the bolt ends on the brake-gear.
I'm very pleased with the way the different components came together. T
