Leaderboard

Had a good few mornings with the Ivatt, along with otherthings it has been moved along quite nicely. I have finished all the soldering and managed to give it a coat of primer. The filling has been done on rhe loco. Also my mistake has now been rectified. If you has not noticed I had forgotten to put the cab roof gutters on before priming. I am really pleased with the way this is coming on, I know there is still quite a long way to go before it is finished. I will see how it all looks tomorrow, and if all is ok and the weather is fine I will give it a coat of black.

Hi All I will be able to do more modelling, now the malicious case against me, by the Crown, for Assault has been dropped. Blog entry, re the completion of the Dairy Building, to follow shortly. Lisa

After following TomE's approach I've been playing with some test ballast examples. Above shows what I have finally decided on using on Colwyn, it's a 50/50 mix of Treemedus Earth power and Carrs fine ash ballast, all fixed with (still wet and slightly glossy) Kleer. I will do a more indpeth write up when it gets applied to the layout. Thanks again to Tom for the advice Another experiment was to prepare the plastic Easitrac sleepers to take paint more readily, this was done by brushing on a 50/50 wash of water and EvoStick wood adhesive (green bottle, red lid). It was a bit thick going on, but it did even out ok, even with 4 coats of red oxide primer the rail detail and chairs are not lost. All in all, a small victory for me. Hopefully progress can resume!

Jon, There is no need to pre soak the area with Kleer, just add a few drops near the side of the ballasted area and it soaks through. It behaves like very thin super glue, if that makes any sense.

Tom, Like you I have never done any 3D drawing work before. The only experience I have of even 2D drawing goes back an 'O' level in Technical Drawing 30 odd years ago! However, I do find SketchUp an easy tool to master, and find that the ability to enter the size of an item manually really helps. For example if I want a cuboid of 0.2mm x 0.6mm x 0.15mm, I would choose the rectangle tool to draw a rectangle of any size, then type "0.2mm,0.6mm<RETURN>", this can then be push/pulled to the depth of 0.15mm by pulling to say 0.3mm, then typing "0.15mm<RETURN>" which will reset the manually pulled depth to the entered figure (SketchUp doesn't unfortunately allow (unless someone knows different) setting the "snap" to a finer resolution than 0.1mm). Ian

If you thought, 'at last he's made a post' then I appologise for the slight excitment that may have erupted inside you. This isn't mega interesting, but good news. Point blade finally here!. Len, one of the guys who runs the company is seriously ill, thus the delay. Just hope he is ok. Expect some updates in the near future regarding points.

The T1 can move under it's own power. After the problems with the chassis on the J, it was something of a relief that it needed very little adjustment to run smoothly. Just some tweaking of the bogie pivots and some slight enlarging of the cutouts for the bogie wheels. The pickups are a bit non-standard due to the odd design of the chassis - a piece of PCB was bolted to the top of full length frame spacer between the frames. The do work. The main castings have now been added. I'm battling the base of the dome with filler to get it reasonably smooth. It wasn't the best casting ever. The inside of the cab, showing how far back the flywheel projects. I think the backhead will need to be slightly further back than it should be to hide this. And lastly, a quick update on the E2. It now has the correct smokebox saddle/cylinder covers, and I'm working on the tank top beading. The cab openings have been enlarged, and the tops of the tank and bunker adjusted to match the real thing. Why Hornby got these wrong I don't know - they are nothing to do with the dimensional compromises needed to fit their standard chassis.

Hello. I had an enjoyable weekend, on Saturday I went along to the Narrow Gauge Show at Sparsholt College and enjoyed my time there. I chatted to a few poeple there and was equally inspired by some of the layouts and display. One of the people I spent some time talking to was Allen of Worsley Works fame and I left with a few goodies from him to try out. Allen has added some more items to his collection of 2mm Scale Narrow Gauge stock including some Irish Narrow Gauge engines and coaches. He kindly gave me an etch of one of these engines to build and see how it assembled... The prototype for this engine is a Kerr Stuart 4-6-2 which was based on the Londonderry and Lough Swilly Railway. An obscure prototype I know but an intersting engine netherless. This gets me onto the reason for this post. I am a strong believer in the idea that if something looks right then I am happy with it. As I have worked in 2mm Scale pretty much exclusively I feel I have a 'good eye' in getting things to look right and 'fit'. I really dont understand why there are people who have serious hang ups about getting everything exactly to scale, even when this means altering the dimensions by 0.2 or 0.3mm, to me this is a secondry priority and I dont mind making compromises to get things looking right. Of course sometimes I can struggle finding a sense of scale... The above picture is a good example of this. All these engines are to 2mm scale, at the rear is my standard gauge pannier tank, then its the Irish narrow gauge Kerr Stuart engine, followed by my attempt at the narrow gauge engine Prince. The difference in size is huge and to my eye at the moment they just done look right, but I am taking a leap of faith and carrying on with these as according to the drawings they are all correct. The thing is, is it really that important to get things right to one or two decimal places when things that are built to scale can be so different? I dont believe so and I will carry on building things my way.... Missy

Looking at your pictures, You have a single chimney Castle class loco with the flush sided Hawksworth tender. Looking in my books the first one I found that suits that combination is 5087 "Tintern Abbey" And yes, the plates are available from 247 Developments. HTH Frank

Is scale that important? It probably is if you're trying to boil water in a furred-up kettle.....

Paul's right, Julia - some of the larger NG stuff rivals the smaller standard gauge stock (think of that huge South African Railways loco at Quainton - it's 3'6" gauge!), and Prince is tiny anyway. Not sure about the chassis on those etched NG locos though.... Glad you enjoyed the show - or the bits of it you visited, anyway! Andy

Brookford now sports twenty one feet (a scale quarter of a mile) of two foot gauge track, around the existing yard area, then leading off up an extension to a new area of baseboard. That's 14mm gauge in 1:43 7mm/ft scale. Hudswell Clarke well tank by P L S, on Flickr The track is built with Peco Code 82 flat bottom rail soldered to PCB sleepers as it's all being covered with cinder ballast to rail web height. Image by P L S, on Flickr Image by P L S, on Flickr Lots of scenic work to be done up the "hill" - the extension has a gradient of one in thirty - not too unprototypical! Anyway the Simplex will haul its train of seven tippers up ok, even with lead weighting to steady them. Image by P L S, on Flickr There's now more of a scrap dumping area in this corner, probably to include the remains of a runaway tipper wagon that came off at the bottom of the i in 30 ! Image by P L S, on Flickr Here the trusty electrostatic teastrainer (flyswatter from eBay and teastrainer from Poundland - total cost £3.79) is brought back into use. Image by P L S, on Flickr The additional grass is being scattered using matt varnish as adhesive, while the rails and flangeways were protected with narrow masking tape. Image by P L S, on Flickr The loco is a Simplex diesel, from a Nigel Lawton kit, modified with the addition of a cab, while the tippers are from the KBScale range, using his pin and single link couplings. Image by P L S, on Flickr The fuel bowser wagons are from KBScale as well. They are half way through their weathering process, as is the loco.