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GWMark's Workbench Blog

A blog by GWMark in RMweb Blogs

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About this blog

My various attempts at modeling and building bits for layouts

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Return of the Duke

Following a good weekend at Missenden Abbey with my new High Level kit I didn't want to just ditch the Duke in favour of the new kit. I had decided not to take it to Missenden this Autumn as there was little new to do on it and also the Black Hawthorn would fit better on my little shunting puzzle. It seemed sensible to make the most of the time with expert advice on hand to start something very different from my previous modelling attempts. So this weekend it was the turn of the Duke again.

October 20, 2013

5

One Missenden Weekend, Two High Level Kits

Today saw the end of the Autumn Railway Modellers Weekend at Missenden Abbey. as is now the custom I attended with my son, now 17, for a few days of locomotive kit construction. This year the numbers of kit constructors was down, with people being seduced by the laser cutting, scenery, weathering and electronics side of the hobby. This meant there were two small rooms of us loco builders, we were placed under the care of new boy Tony Gee in a room with 5 other 4mm modellers, whilst next door Kev

October 13, 2013

4

Preparation - Missenden Autumn 2013

The autumn weekend of railway modelling at Missenden Abbey is almost here again, once again Daniel and I will be attending. This time I am going to start a new project, the Duke is to a stage now that I think I can probably finish it at home, plus I am keen to start a project that will run on my little shunting puzzle. Therefore my plan for the weekend is to make a start on a High Level kit of a Black Hawthorn 0-4- ST. As part of my preparation I have started (several times) to read the ver

October 8, 2013

3

1701 nearing completion

My "quick diversion" ended up like all my other projects, victim to my lack of time, or is the a lack of commitment leading to excuses why I don't have the time. Either way it took longer to get to this stage than I had planned, but now I have the little saddle tank running and pretty much finished, it just needs some lamp irons on the front and the brake gear. I am holding off on the brake gear until I have resolved a clicking sound, which I think is a pickup catching on a spoke, but so far

October 6, 2013

1

A Quick Diversion

Partly from frustration and partly because I like to see things move I decided I wanted to do a little project that was going to be reasonably quick to get to a stage were I could run a loco. About 2 weeks ago, at Expo EM I purchased an unbuilt Wills Finecast kit of an 1804 GWR Saddle tank, last week at Railex I also obtained the etched nickel silver chassis from SE Finecast and some Gibson wheels for it. So on Friday evening I decided to make the chassis. These Finecast etched chassis go togeth

June 3, 2013

6

Missenden Spring 2013 - A family affair

The weekend of the 8th, 9th and 10th of March saw the running of the Missenden Spring Weekend, the 31st year of the Missenden weekends. Daniel and I were lucky enough to have once again received the weekend as a Christmas present from my wife - I suspect this is partially so that she can get rid of us for the weekend and partially because she knows we both enjoy the weekend and it is a present that does bring "more junk" into the house! Normally we are unique amongst the modellers that atten

March 11, 2013

3

Let the lining commence - GT3 progresses slowly

Partly because of lack of time and partly because I have allowed myself to be sidetracked onto other things progress has been a little slow on GT3 since my little burst at Christmas. I did manage to repaint the grills, giving them a wash of aluminium and then dry brushing the green over the top in an attempt to make the discs behind the grill show up better. I think I have got the effect I want, but it does need toning down a little, by the whole thing will need that at the end. So grills an

February 10, 2013

0

Dusting off GT3 for Christmas

I wanted a little project to do during that time between Christmas and the New Year, it had to be a small project as time would be an issue - it isn't fair to lock yourself away from the family for too long at this time of the year after all! But I wanted something I could look back on in these depressing first days back at work and think - 'I actually did achieve something during the holidays'. I decided my long mothballed GT3 project would fit the bill, no major jobs, just lots of finishin

January 1, 2013

2

Mallard Duke - some stolen time and a little progress

Despite having a long list of other things that I really should have been doing I stole a little time this afternoon and evening to work on the Duke - at least this time I know I will have done something on it between Missenden weekends! Not much has been done to the locomotive itself, I have added two overlays below the footplate that run the length of the valances and provides a row of rivets. Also some back-head detail has been done. The next major job is to do the springs, but I did

October 21, 2012

1

The most precious things....

Having just returned from another weekend of modelling at Missenden Abbey I intended to write up my progress on my workbench thread, then, last night I looked at it and realised I have not made an entry since the last time I was at Missenden, back in the Spring. This got me thinking, my plan had been to show off the progress with the model I had taken and talk about the events of the weekend, but I soon began to think that this gap in my workbench was more indicative of something else, at was at

October 15, 2012

3

Duke at the Abbey

This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the Missenden Abbey Railway Modellers weekends, I have only been going for a fraction of that time, and my son Daniel even less, but off we trotted on Friday afternoon for the now familiar routine of a weekend of uninterrupted modelling at Missenden. This time my Mallard Duke made a second appearance, all started well until I realised that the motor and gearbox choice I had made was not going to fit within the confines of the firebox and boiler. So

March 11, 2012

0

Transfix disaster

Tonight was going to be the night I got my 72xx to a runnable state, buffers, plates, a little paint touching up, coal, crew and transfers, Not too much to ask. It went fairly well, I had the buffers in place, the plates attached, the cab interior finished, except for crew and the transfer went on well. The I noticed my mistake, I had spaced the lettering differently on the two sides. Looking at my picture in Russell of 7240 I decided it was the side with the most spread out lettering t

February 3, 2012

5

72xx Paint Application and reassembly

Having now applied another coat of the Lifecolor acrylic loco green to my 72xx and brush painting the buffer beams and safety valve/whistles, I couldn't resist putting it back together to see how it looked. The black is Halfords Matt black car spray, the green is Lifecolor as already mentioned, the buffer beams Phoenix Precission enamel, the safety value/whistles are Humbrol enamel. All on a base of two coats of precision etch primer. So quite a mix of paints on this one. There are

February 2, 2012

2

Out with the airbrush - how brave do I feel?

After a small interlude to try my hand at building pointwork it is back to the long term project of the 72xx. More track work will follow, but that will have to wait until after Doncaster now - I'll pick up some more C&L components there. My PDK 72xx has moved on a bit, the lamp refuge and the lance cock have been added, it was given two coats of etch primer, from a spray can and the footplate and smokebox have been spray with Halfords matt black. So the project for Sunday was to spray t

January 30, 2012

2

New Challenge

Obviously I don't have enough unfinished, or un-started, projects, so this weekend I decided to try something I have bean meaning to have a go at for a while - making my own track. To be precise A C&L B6 turnout kit that I have had on the top of the cupboard for nearly 2 years. Why did I choose now? I have no idea, other than I had to wait for some paint to dry on my 72xx, you know what they say about paint drying! Anyway, after 2 evening, about 8 hours, I now have this.... One

January 22, 2012

5

Railbus returns

In the last few days I have returned to a stalled project, my Dapol Railbus. The interior has been painted, and some passenger have been painted and added. I have also painted the lining on the doors and the kick plates. Glazing has been added and the Railbus put back together in the hope I might get to run it at the club open day tomorrow. Unfortunately I have yet to find a crew that will fit in the rather confined cabs, so it has host drivers at the moment. Also I need to add windscre

November 25, 2011

2

Have workbench, will travel

Last weekend saw the Autumn railway modellers weekend at Missenden Abbey, this also coincided with Daniel's 15th birthday a few days before, therefore we both got the weekend of modelling as a birthday present for Daniel and an early Christmas present for me. So the workbench was relocated from the kitchen table to a seminar room in Missenden Abbey. This is the 5th time of going to these events for me, and the 3rd for Daniel, the chance to have a complete weekend, Friday evening until Sunday aft

October 14, 2011

1

Wet weekend in Bucks

Well, it was forecast to be a wet weekend, at least on the Sunday, and with the looming return to school this week Daniel and I decided to make Sunday a modelling day. The idea was to setup on Saturday evening and then spend the entire day on Sunday making progress with our various projects. My aims being to get my 72xx to a state in which it could be painted, to get the GT3 to the same point, the finish the interior of my Railbus and maybe to drop my 802 in boiling water and sort out the wa

September 5, 2011

1

PDK 72xx Haulage test on Hinton Parva

I've done a bit more work on my 72xx, steps have been added, vacuum pipes, smoke box door and a coupling loop. So I thought it was time to see if it would pull anything. So it went back to Hinton Parva tonight, I borrowed the coal rake normally pulled by one of the two Garretts at exhibition and off it went. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqXNVKTKNzM It seemed to manage with the 68 loaded coal trucks, but did have a bit of wheel slip if not driven with care. Still a bit more work to d

July 20, 2011

5

72xx In Motion

As promised I did a little video last night of the 72xx moving on Hinton Parva. It's not the best video ever and it is a little short, but it does show it moving. http://youtu.be/xWOIUcAB2Fo Later I had it doing circuits of the club test track, it was taking 10 minutes to do one circuit, I'm not sure of the size of the test track, but I think it is about 20 feet by 10 feet. Now all I need to do is finish it, there's that word again, "finish", I must look it up some time, something to

June 16, 2011

3

Train detection to the nth degree

Following a trip to see the excellent McKinley Railway, and a conversation about the RFID projects I had done before I have started another project - just what I need, one more thing to add to the list. What I am looking at is something that can read the train id and feed it back to the computer that is running the layout, however there is more to this than just reading the RFID data. The RFID readers I have used can not be placed close together, they interfere with each other. So I need

June 14, 2011

0

72xx progressing slowly - in more than one sense

The 72xx that have have been building for quite some time now has progressed a little more since my last posting here. For some reason I only ever seem to work on this when I go to the Missenden Weekends, so one or two weekends a year makes for slow progress. The job tackled this year was to get the chassis moving under power - this took somewhat longer than expected, mostly because it turned out that not all my insulated wheels were! I'm sure you can guess how I discovered that one. A lot o

June 7, 2011

6

XpressNet Interface

Tonight's little triumph on the work bench was to finally work out what I got wrong with my XpressNet computer interface I was building. The result a fully functional interface between an ageing laptop and my low-end DCC kit (a Lenz Compact), however this gives me access to do things over Xpressnet, and if I every do get around to upgrading the compact I will be able to control lots more. The immediate gratification came in setting up WiThrottle and driving a sound equipped loco from my Andr

June 6, 2011

1

Dapol Railbus & Branchlines motorising kit

As a bit of a diversion I also built this back in March..... I purchased it as a used kit at Astrolat, the "chassis" had been built and I just had to finish it and build the interior and body. These went together very quickly, most unlike me. Unfortunately the wheelset was P4 - how did I not notice that one! So I ended up cutting the axles, big mistake, one is now too short and the back to back is a little too small - need to replace the axles some time. True to form, I may have

June 5, 2011

5

Resprayed Neath & Brecon Saddle Tank

Some time ago I made a Dean Sidings Neath and Brecon Tank loco, which I managed to mess up the spraying of. I finally took the plunge and stripped the resin body, using Phoenix Paint Super Strip. My initial concern was what it might do to the resin, but I need not have worried - it was fine. The only casualty of the stripping was one lamp iron that was easily replaced. The loco now sports a respray - using aerosol cans this time, Phoenix GWR Green and Halfords Matt black. The result is much

June 3, 2011

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