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In between messing around with other projects I've started work on one of the Narrow Planet (NP) O&K 40HP contractor loco kits designed by James Hilton. http://shop.narrowplanet.co.uk/collections/loco-kits/products/npl-003 The kit is designed to go on a Minitrains Kraus chassis and does so easily. The quality of the 3D print is superb and with a soak in white spirit to remove any residue left from the printing process as well as a clean up of the sides with wet and dry paper a lovely smooth finish can be achieved. The etching is also well thought out and is gradually added to build up the detail. Obviously you can add as much or as little detail as you would like but I thought I would add some panel lines, add rivets from Archers transfers and a few other cosmetic details. I'm using the NP Bosna couplings which were fitted with the aid of a Greenwich coupling height tool. Here's the state of play this morning: O&K 1 29-9-15 001 by Mark Branson, on Flickr Various gauges of brass wire has been used as you can see and further pipework needs to be added. I've added the flanges to the clack valves as well as the valve on the side of the dome from plastic rod. Lines have been scored on the cabside and rivet detail will be applied. I've also reduced the the size of the dome shape on the smokebox door and added details from Microstrip and wire. The wheel is from a Mainly Trains etch. O&K 1 29-9-15 002 by Mark Branson, on Flickr Lamp brackets have been made from staples and the cylinders are in the process of being modified to bulk them out slightly. The chimney will be reduced in height and receive a lip as well. Here's a side on shot showing the added detail so far. O&K 1 29-9-15 004 ps by Mark Branson, on Flickr Steam pipes are to be added along with roof and whistle and the wheels and valve gear painted. Out interest does anyone know what the cab flooring is made from on these little O&K's. Is it wood or steel? Livery will be plain black but I'm in the process (Still!) of designing some decals for John at Precision to print for me which will be old gold for the locos and coaching stock of the FBLR. The loco's are to be named after sea birds, local folk and locations around Filey Bay. This is a lovely kit to build and I'll be ordering a 20hp version once this one is complete. More soon. Cheers, Mark

September turned out to be a busy month, so I didn't get as much done to the layout as I was hoping. Still, every little helps, so here are a few more progress shots from the Dale End sawmill scene... Dale End Diary 12 September. Nearly half way through the month and about all I have to show for it is a pile of pitprops. It contains about 100 poles, cut from bamboo skewers, and was as tedious to construct as it looks. In the prototype reference photos I'd found, the stacks were about three times as high, but there are limits to my patience. 21 September. Roofs have been painted and weathered. I think I might have gone a bit over the top with the rust though. A few more stacks of timber have been made, from strips of balsa. I suspect the timber should have coloured ends - I must check up on that. Heh, it's so easy to get sidetracked with this hobby. 28 September. Talk about a glutton for punishment, as another zillion pitprops get cut for a wagon load. There's nearly a whole packet of skewers gone into those two lots. I'm quite pleased with the cyclone, which was constructed from paper cones and tubes. It's a bit fragile and has already acquired a few dents, but now it's in place on the layout it should be safe. The supports are from Evergreen strips, and the curved inlet pipe is a section cut from a plastic shower-curtain ring. I dare say there are kits for these things, but it was very satisfying building it from scratch, even if it is more hassle and probably less detailed than a kit. Some heaps of waste wood and sawdust are starting to appear. They were sanded to shape from 'oasis' flower-arranging foam, then covered in PVA glue, and sprinkled with real sawdust and wood splinters collected after sawing jobs. Thanks for looking, Alan.

I have now received a new set of wheels of the correct diameter (8mm) and I have given them a quick spray of primer (one set black for my second Terrier and this set grey for painting green and black for my Southern livery Terrier). The next job on the chassis was to drill out the 0.3mm holes for fitting the brakes and the 'Simpson Spring' axle pickup wipers. Two of the brake support holes require drilling into the side of a glass fibre PCB spacer. Typically, my drill bit broke doing the last hole. I had to unsolder the spacer, remove the broken drill bit, put the chassis back into the jig and resolder the spacer. Then I had to redrill the holes with a fresh drill bit. Now I was ready to start fitting the gears to the accurately turned 'muffs' and fit them in the chassis temporarily with some long pieces of axle steel. The muffs needed a little triming to length, and drilling and reaming to give a tight push fit on the axle steel. I also drilled across the centres of the muffs to let air escape and to insert superglue if required when the wheels are finally fitted. The gears were deburred with some fine emery paper and then fitted to the chassis. They would not turn. The main worm gear was fouling the axle muff. I took the axle muff, inserted a length of axle steel and mounted it in the jaws of a mini-drill. I then used a good small file to reprofile the muff to give room for the worm gear to rotate. Once refitted, everything turned freely. The turned muffs do appear to be better than the old ones. I might return to the '09 Diesel Shunter' I started building previously that suffered from non-concentric gears, to see if they improve things. Well, that was it for the evening, the broken drill bit and gear-muff interference problems meant I did not have time to fit any wheels. Hopefully next time ...

hello and welcome back to the blog i'm now thinking of a MGR hopper train I will be resparying the Hornby e.w.s hoppers into rail red replacing the couplings plus bigger buffers and adding real coal if you want to know how to do it or where to get the buffers from go to everard junction on YouTube and it's called the big wagon project will be uploading pics soon. regards the loco shed

It was as I suspected, the superglue had bonded to the poly glue and pulled it away from the plastic of the chassis. I cleaned up the surfaces with a scalpel and then filed them flat with a needle file and re-applied the superglue and they bonded . Just to make certain I stuck a square of 2mm thick plastic card across the join to reinforce the join. (1st photo) I did a trial cut of one of the design pages using 0.5mm white card (2nd photo) mainly to check it fitted against the modified chassis, this looked to be in order. In this photo you will see one roof layer on the right and the two roof templates that I will use to check the profile when I sand the roof to shape later in the build. One of the apprehensions I had with the class 50 model was the not so fine finish. Although the enamel paint had provided a fairly tough coat on the cardboard, it left a lot to be desired in my opinion. I was chatting with a French friend who's a designer and he suggested I sprayed it with acrylic ink, he thought this might result in a finer finish. I agree with what he says but have reservations as to the strength of the body once complete, some more experimentation is on the cards. As the livery carried on the southern prototypes was British Railways black I thought it might be prudent to use black card. (3rd photo) Here in France it is possible to buy card in various colours as well as weights and I just happened to have a couple of sheets in stock. ( in stock meaning the pile of junk in the corner of my bedroom). I cut this into A4 sheets and used one to cut some more parts, which was successful, I had feared the card would be too tough to cut through, because I'd already experienced this before when I first used the Silhouette. Unfortunately the cutting mat has now lost all it's sticky so the second sheet shed some of its parts and jammed the cutter enough to shift the mat slightly. This resulted in the parts being cut all wrong, so now I have to buy another cutting mat or find some genuinly re-positionable adhesive before I can carry on. In the design I drew all the lines to be cut in red and all the lines to be scribed in blue. There's tick boxes for each colour. I ran the first cut with the blade set at Number 1 and scribed the blue lines, then did three more passes, one at setting 3, one at 6 and finally one at 7. This provided a clean cut through, at 6 some places don't quite cut right through. The scribing can just be seen in photo 4, the lines scribed were 1/ two parallel horizontal lines as guide for silver stripe halfway up 2/ various panel positions 3/ positions of doors In the two outer layers I have arranged for the doorways to be cut out, on the next subsequent layers the doors are filled in, just the door windows are cut out. I did this to alleviate the faffing around I had with the class 50 doors, where I cut all the doorways out and then had to trim and stick back all the door blanks to fill the holes, dohh. Hopefully this will result in cleaner doorways on this model. Here's the pics- When I get a new mat I'll continue with the next installment. Regards Roly

Ok so last night was an evening of sorting out a few electrical niggles that have cropped up and setting up the lighting rig. The original one was built for us but when tried wasn't sturdy enough so Ian's been adapting it with new fixings.mthen a lick of paint and we're starting to look like a real layout... Minor butterflies that we may have overlooked something and the realisation we'd Iike more time to test run everything has set in but the feeling is positive and looking forward to going live at Taunton show in three weeks.