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
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
...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
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
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
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
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
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
When someone asks me about hobbies, I always say I am a railway modeller, but actually, in casting around for anything to put in my blog I begin to wonder what I have done in the past few weeks that could be counted as "modelling railways". Apart from layout operating at Wycrail and Warley the closest I have got to anything that might be seen as a modelling task is painting some figures and turning a piece of plasticard into an uncoupling ramp, scoring planks and rivets and painting it. The rest
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
Well, I finally got around to doing some modelling tonight, so much for a long weekend of doing what I want. Following on from a few hours spent during the evenings, the 72XX is progressing slowly. The handrails have started to go on, on one side, I have added the rivet strip around the base of the tanks, the lips on the cab roof and soldered up the cylinders and added the drain cocks. It's also now a 2-8-2 rather than the 0-8-0 it has been up until now. The chimney has just been rested in place
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
Following on from my previous post regarding the day Daniel and I spent in Princes Risborough working on valve gear, tonight I cleaned and degreased my eccentric cranks before having another go at attaching them to the ends of the crankpins. This time I used cyno rather than loctite and I appear to have had more success. So now I have all the valve gear attached and the rail motor runs with the rods all moving as they should, maybe not exactly as the prototype, but the best that can be arranged
Today Daniel and I spent the day in Princes Risborough community centre at the club's modelling Saturday. We both choose to spent the day working of value gear, in my case the valve gear of my NuCast GWR Steam Railmotor and Daniel on the inside motion for his Finney Hall.
In my case it was adding the cylinder covers, soldering the slide bars and adding the eccentrics. It all went really well, with the exception of the eccentrics that just would not stay attached to the crankpin end. I must h
Not to forget my other project, and true to the promise I made myself about not starting new projects until I finished some of the ongoing ones, I have fitted the crossheads and connecting rods to my High Level 12" Neilson that I have been building at Missenden Abbey.
It's not running perfectly yet, but I did some fetling this evening and have improved it somewhat.
Still some way to go before I am happy and will attach the rest of the bits - I have assemblies for the brake gear an
Well, the 72XX has taken a few small steps forward. Now we have the next problem, the motion bracket has been laminated from three thicknesses and now doesn't fit over the slide bars. I think I will ned to look at that when I am feeling more awake. But for now this is were I am. The cab roof and the slide bar are just laid in place, everything else is firmly attached.
I really do like this loco and can see it getting ever closer to being finished, or at least to be ready to be paint
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I realised it had been a long time since I last did an update when Daniel asked me if I was planning to post about our recent weekend at Missenden Abbey. I decided that before doing that I really should do an update on the things that I have been up to between the spring Missenden Weekend and the Autumn weekend.
At the spring weekend I took a break from my usual locomotive construction topic and spent the weekend with Ian Rathbone in the painting and lining room. This is not a subject I am g
