Under the lid
Entry posted by MinerChris
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6 months to go to the DJLC. I’m not at all confident of ‘finishing,’ the aim now is to get it in a presentable state now stock is reliably running through all the pointwork. In fact if you compare the how much has changed since June from the top, it doesn’t look like a lot has changed at all – though at least an angle poise isn’t providing the layout lighting now.
The layout lighting is provided by three 60LED/m RGBWWW strips which seem at the moment to be more than adequate for the space required to be lit. Each of the 5 channels is controllable from an Arduino to adjust the white balance and eventually when I get some roundtoits, the ability to dim to a sunset/night mode. Each strip is attached to the rig using some aluminium channel which gets quite warm, not too surprising really given the power supply is 65W.
Although the top doesn’t appear to have changed too much, looking under the skirt shows that a spaghetti monster has begun to swarm beneath the layout. It’s actually incredibly dull to look at but with a reasonable number of colours and a half-hearted attempt to keep wires in a loom, troubleshooting hasn’t been too onerous. However, my old Maplin wallwart transformer was a casualty, (I won’t be getting another one of those…) after what I think was an issue between my controller and a short across a couple of sleepers that I had forgotten to gap. A fuse has been duly inserted into that line to stop that from happening again.
Despite the cautions of my peers from the midland area group, I’ve gone for servo control for the points, mainly due to the lack of space. I’ve fitted a power mosfet on the power feed to each of these, so that when they are not required to move, they cannot. There is also a big chunk of brass section between the delicate tiebars and the servo with engineered tolerance introduced into the mechanism to increase the angle required for the servo to move through.
I have had to sacrifice the traintable fiddle-yard (for now anyway) and replaced this with a quick and dirty cassette adaptor. It’s a shame especially as I’d had curved brass strips laser cut by PPD for this rather than having to make a Copenhagen fields mangle to get the exit tracks right, but I’d have probably spent at least another week more than I have trying to make it work.
You’ll have also noticed the distinctive shed roof has started to come together. Luckily, the National Rail media store has a copy of a drawing of this which was a good place to start to build up an etch artwork from though I refrained from getting it printed onto a mug as well. I’m a little dubious of the origins of the drawing as there are several things not quite right about it, but it’s closer than my guesstimates would have been.
Each leg is made up of four layers of 15 thou NS, which where aligned for soldering using a frame. Yes that really is a lot of scrap NS for not a lot of part – it took 3 A4 sheets. Four layers let me build up the roof joists and create a hole for the cross member to be soldered in. In the end, the holes that I’d etched to allow me to use 1.5mm drills to line everything up with were useless and the layers were aligned by eye.
I’d also etched a cutout in each leg piece in order to solder in the Y braces on each leg, though for convenience and adjustability these were designed as inverted V’s. A couple of long strips with square holes etched in made sure that the legs are the right spacing and approximately square.
After soldering in some transoms to the roof to give some rigidity to the shed and giving everything a cleanup, the spacers were then glued onto the baseboard. This then still allows for the roof to be removed while I build the rest of it, but lets me ballast over the top of the spacer strips to hide them.
Finally, I should mention that D869 of this parish has very kindly offered to build some appropriate motive power for the layout and his progress on this is on his new workbench thread. It should be pointed out that if it wasn’t suitable for his own micro layout, South Yard, he’d probably be building an M7 or a T9 instead, as he has threatened to on a couple of occasions.
Please hope for good weather for me over the next week, so that I might get outside to put some paint on the tracks.
Until next time,
Chris.
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