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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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Missenden Coming Around Again

Following our last visit to the Autumn weekend at Missenden I was sold on the idea of an RSU, fortunately I had a "significant" birthday a few weeks again and my wife bought (let me buy) an RSU as a birthday present. With about 3 weeks to go before the next Missenden weekend I as keen to try out my new toy. I did not want to go straight into attacking my High Level Black Hawthorn that I had worked on last time, so I looked around for an alternative. Fortunately I found a wagon kit I picked up a

March 3, 2014

2

Missenden - Another day in paradise..

...or at least that is the battle cry when the day starts. This autumn's Missenden Railway Modellers weekend has come and gone again, all to quickly as usual. After some organisational changes the team did splendid job of organisation so that it was seamless to those of us that attend, a big thank you to them. My project this autumn was the continuation of a High Level 12" Neilson Mineral loco that I started a couple of session ago. Although there were some problems, well only really on

October 3, 2016

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

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

It's been a while.... Servos, signals & points

In talking with St. Simon on Wednesday at the HWDMRS club night I realised it has been a while since I put anything on my workbench thread - checking back here I find it has been more than a year - how time flies! So, the latest thing I have been playing with is RC servos. This came about because we are looking at building a new club layout and need about 100 slow acting point motors - now that's a lot of motors and a lot of money for the likes of Cobalts etc. So I looked into servo - I used

June 3, 2011

1

Hot Spots & Speedos

Continuing in my catch up of things I have done in the last 12 months… I am a bit of a sucker for gadgets, so when I came across a chip that offered simple and cheap WiFi I started to think about using it for model railway purposes. I found on ebay a little board that had the WiFi chip on it, along with all the circuitry needed to make the thing work, the ESP-01 board. It was available for about £4 from the UK or about £1 direct from China - I had to have a play. The chip in question, an ESP826

June 1, 2015

1

High Level Black Hawthorn - ready for paint

I completed most of my Black Hawthorn at Missenden Abbey, however there were a few bits to finish off that I thought I would do at home, pipe runs, stays etc. Of course I didn't get around to it until today, needless to say those "little" jobs took a long time, very fiddly in places those pipes. However here it is, I think it is now ready for painting, after a bit of cleaning up. I added some lead shot in the smokebox before putting the door on and also in the base of the bunkers on eit

May 7, 2016

2

Hawthorn Leslie - Catchup on Daniel's latest project

This post is a bit of a cheat, since it is not my work I am showing. In my post yesterday I showed the stock I weathered, including Daniel's (my son) first loco build at the age of 11. Eight years later he is still going and here is his latest project, as promised. The loco is a High Level kit of a Hawthorn Leslie, he has been working on it over successive Missenden weekends under the tutorship of Tony Gee (t-b-g). It's now really at a stage of a few final tweaks before painting, a job

April 22, 2016

0

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

GWR Diagram R2 - first coach kit

I'm not normally a builder of coaches, although there is no real reason for this, just that I got hooked on building locos and the occasional wagon. As part of my desire to finish some of those long started and put aside projects I pulled this Blacksmiths coach kit out of the cupboard. I was given this for Christmas many years ago and got as far as doing a fold and soldering the two ends before realising I had messed up by not putting the tumblehome in the ends. Annoyed with myself at making a m

February 17, 2017

3

GT3 and 72XX progress

Well, for one reason or another I have not got a lot done recently or posted very much here on RM Web. I have, in the past 6 weeks made a little progress on a few projects however. My GT3 has got to the stage of painting, well primer at least, but will need some work still to sort out the blemishes the primer is showing up. I went on the Missenden Abbey weekend again this year and made some significant progress with my PDK 72XX kit. Hopefully I will get more time available to m

March 21, 2010

4

Dusting off the Duke - return of an old project

I've recently made myself a promise not to start any new projects until I finish some of the part built, stalled projects. We will see how long that one lasts, but by way of a start on this new resolution I got my Mallard Models GWR Duke out of its box and have done a little work on it over the last week. Although it may not look like it has progressed much, there has been a fair bit of fettling going on. I removed the pickups I had put on before, they were a little fragile and prone to

May 26, 2016

8

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

Duke relocation

Just to close this sequence of entries for the bank holiday weekend and my attempts at fixing the mistake of a few years ago I thought I would show where I was in the process of getting the dome and chimney in the right places. Basically I had fitted the smokebox and boiler the wrong way around and this resulted in the chimney and dome being further forward than they should have been. Today I had less time than I had hoped, domestic duties meant the toolbox was employed on garden gates rathe

May 30, 2016

3

Duke Dismantling - starting to resolve build issues

If you read my previous entry you will have seen that I managed to mess up somewhat when I did the assembly of the smokebox and boiler on my Duke. Both the boiler and smokebox had been assembled the wrong way around, this resulted in the chimney being too far forward and the dome being on the wrong ring on the boiler. I had thought of two option, reverse both the boiler and the smokebox or reverse the smokebox wrapper and move the dome without removing the boiler. I have had to go for the se

May 27, 2016

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

Desperately Trying to Finish Things

As I said in my previous post I am now less than a week away from my next Missenden weekend, this time I am down to do painting and lining with Ian Rathbone, so my plan is to try to get as many of my current projects ready to be painted, at least in some state. So I have spent much of the weekend, and last week, doing those last little jobs, you know, all those things you have been putting off because they are fiddly. In my mind at east none of them would take long, but of course I was deluding

February 27, 2017

2

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

Daniel's Various Project

I realised after Captain Kernow's comment on my last post that I had not been true to my word and posted some of my son's projects. So this post is really to redress that. I apologies for the heavy photo content. These are things Daniel has put together either at the Missenden weekends or when he was at home from University during the summer. The first item has been here before, at least in incomplete form, it's the High Level Hawthorn Leslie that he has been building. All finally ready for

November 25, 2016

3

Cylinder slope

I think Horsetan is right, there is not enough slope to cylinders, this view shows them better. A little more progress last night, I really ought to get on with the chassis however.

April 17, 2010

4

Catching up, GT3 finished and first weathering attempt

I see it has been a while since I posted here, this doesn't mean I have done nothing, just not written about it. I even failed to do my post-Missenden entry that I normally do - more on those projects in another post. This week I have been doing some weathering, mostly of Daniel's RTR stock that will be appearing on Hinton Parva when it goes to Quainton for the May Bank Holiday Steam Gala. However I also thought I would have a go at my GT3 since it now has the transfers on the tender, from C

April 20, 2016

0

Back to GT3

Well, the New Year period has enabled me some time to get back to doing a bit of loco building. The project, a resin GT3 from Golden Arrow with the detailing etches from Bill Bedford and Ian (macgeordie) of RMWeb. Progress has been slow until now, as with most of my builds, being interrupted by other projects, electronics modules for club layouts and the general things in life that take away our time. However since getting home from a Christmas visiting my mother I have built the buffer beam, ca

January 3, 2004

2

Arduino's, DCC, Servos, Stepper Motors & Cranes

For some time now I have been thinking about ways to make things other than the locomotives move on my layouts. Radio Control servos have become an accepted way to control the points and semaphore signals, but we could use them for more if we had a good way to integrate the proportional control of them into our control systems. So instead of just having something move between two positions we could make it move to any point we wanted. It was with this idea in mind that I started playing arou

April 24, 2016

0

And then there were two....

I attended the Amersham model railway show on Saturday with my teenage son, and he came away with a purchase. A part finished Cotswold kit of a 72XX! Now, I wonder, is he trying to outdo Dad here! Anyway, the upshot is that my planned day of working on the PDK 72XX got highjacked, first by household jobs like fixing a leaking tap, but then by aiding Daniel get his 72XX chassis working. By Sunday evening I had lost my work area and tools to Daniel who was busy soldering whitemetal steps to hi

April 18, 2010

4

An old project resurrected

The very first locomotive kit, if you can call it a locomotive, was a NuCast Steam Railmotor. In retrospect this was a poor choice for a first kit and could easily have put me off kit building for life, but I have liked the look of the rail motors since I first heard about them and the guy on the exhibition stall where I purchased it said it was not that heard to make. Oh well, you live and learn. Anyway, I started on this kit back in 2004 (as far as I remember), managed to solder the body t

November 16, 2016

5

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