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Richard Hall

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Everything posted by Richard Hall

  1. A bit late to the party, but when I went down the code 40 / 9mm gauge route with "Longframlington" I ended up building turnouts to the American NMRA standard or thereabouts: 0.75mm flangeways, 7.65mm back to back. That actually works quite nicely with the wheel profile on most N gauge models from the last 20 years, but I decided that if I was going to hand-build my pointwork and adjust the back to back of every single wheelset I might as well go the whole hog and construct my next layout in 2FS. I have found the jump from fine-ish N to 2FS quite challenging and I suspect it will take a lot more fiddling before I have something which runs as well as "Longframlington". My two tips for beginners: stick to standard geometry straight pointwork, and diesels. I did neither. Richard
  2. I'm glad I haven't committed to taking Longwitton anywhere yet as progress has been frankly rather feeble. I have run into all kinds of problems with my point operating mechanisms resulting in a couple of blades parting company with the droppers: I may have to rework them which is a little daunting at the moment. Over Christmas I thought I would tackle a couple of the structures, not that there are many. I now have a station building and platelayers' hut, both built from Plastikard sheet and strip. I am now working on a road bridge using the ancient Peco mouldings as a starting point. The Peco model dates back to the very early days of British N Gauge and is a little oversized but I think I can do something with it. I need to get the backboards finished, then I can break the layout down and take one section home at a time to work on. @GER_Jon has been working on a grounded coach body for the station platform, which just leaves a couple of small sheds and that cast iron urinal. I am very surprised no-one has done the panels for those as an etching yet: any volunteers? Richard Richard
  3. D5177 worked military trains through to Woodburn on at least two occasions. I don't think it worked the Rothbury branch although class 25s were RA5, the same as a J27. Gateshead had a handful of class 24s from new in 1960 which could have turned up at Rothbury in theory, but the Claytons did not arrive until after the branch closed. Steamwise the Bachmann / TMC G5 is perfect, just needs a non-corridor Gresley or Thompson brake third to go with it. Only one: the Rothbury passenger service finished in 1952 because no-one used it any more.
  4. D5177 demonstrates why 2mm is very much easier if you just have diesels. It really is a lovely runner, and all I had to do was change the wheelsets. Meanwhile the Ivatt 2MT is steadily improving but still derails for no obvious reason when running tender-first. I'll get there eventually.
  5. Nice work, instantly recognisable building. It's a shame the real station building didn't survive: photos show it still looking very tidy in the early 70s so I don't know why it ended up being demolished.
  6. Shop 3 has a tender chassis etch to suit the Fowler tender, part number 3-180. I found that yesterday while looking for something else.
  7. I'm working on a 2mm finescale "Longwitton" at the moment. Early days, only got the wiring finished yesterday. I look forward to seeing your photos.
  8. A significant milestone: After leaving Longwitton propped up against a cupboard all summer I finally found the time and enthusiasm to blitz the wiring, result being that I can now run trains. There are a few rough bits in the pointwork but I am slowly working through them and soon had the 2MT and a few wagons ambling round without falling off the track too often. The 2MT runs terribly and limps like a three-legged donkey, and the J39 won't run at all on Longwitton as I forgot to build any sideplay into the centre axle, so it only goes in straight lines. Now I have a test track I can put a bit of effort into getting one or the other to work properly. My rewheeled Farish diesel runs very nicely but that feels like cheating somehow.
  9. I have done almost no 2mm modelling for three months because (insert feeble excuse here). The more I looked at the 2MT, the less happy I was with the valve gear. So I decided to be super brave and pull it all apart to have another go. I made up a new, slightly longer combination lever from a bit of nickel silver strip (ex Assoc mineral wagon chassis fret), drilled 0.3mm in more or less the right places and filed down to narrow it. The valve spindle is 0.3mm N/S wire and supports the forward end of the radius rod. Much better than my first effort, with the union link now roughly parallel to the slidebars. Istill have to cobble together some spindle covers which are rather awkward fiddly little things. The chassis is also in bits as a couple of wheels had come loose in the muffs. Loctite should fix that.
  10. Grrr. Looking at the 2MT last night while trying to figure out how to make some valve covers I realised I have fitted the expansion links back to front. Also the combination levers seem to be about 0.75mm short compared to the Roche drawing, which means the radius rod sits almost horizontal rather than being angled upwards towards the front. The union link looks to be attached slightly lower on the crosshead which doesn't help, downside of using Black Five bits I suppose. Question: do I go back and have another go (and risk ruining all my previous work) or leave it as it is and be pestered by rivet counters at shows for evermore?
  11. I'm not an especially good modeller. My approach is crude and my methods unsound. But just occasionally by sheer good luck I manage to pull off something like this: Even before adding weight and general fettling it actually runs quite well, at least in a straight line. I lengthened the driveshaft at both ends and it now shows no signs of binding up. The Black Five crossheads turned out to fit the Farish cylinders and slidebars perfectly. Advice to anyone else doing this conversion: don't even bother messing around with the Farish crossheads, just use the Association ones. It is a pity they are not available on their own: anyone want a Black Five smokebox door? I broke the valve spindle covers so I need to fabricate some replacements and find a way to secure the front end of the radius rods so they do not move up and down. Balance weights on the wheels, dummy coal load to hide the motor and then some new numbers. Blyth North (52F) had a handful of 2MTs for a short time in 1960-61, just long enough for a couple to venture to Rothbury. I know 46474 was one of them but I already have that one in N gauge. After this things should get easier: all my other locomotive requirements have inside cylinders. Richard
  12. More 2MT fiddling. Bad news first: I broke the piston rod off one of the Farish monkey metal crossheads. Things were already going badly by that point: as I feared the washers that were supposed to attach the connecting rods refused to stay put and I was half way through drilling out the pivot to take a nickel silver pin when the piston rod snapped off. Not to worry, I have ordered some of the brass Black Five crossheads from Shop 3, not exactly the same as 2MT ones but close enough for my kind of bodgery anyway. What to do while waiting for them to arrive? I thought I would see if I could get the thing to move under its own power, and I succeeded. That second photo requires some explanation. The Farish model has a coreless motor in the firebox. At least it should have: mine was missing the motor and its mounting plate which is why it was cheap. I have a small stash of this particular size of coreless motor: but Longwitton will be using the same controller as Longframlington, an old AMR feedback unit which works superbly with open frame motors and big cans, but eats coreless motors in about the time it takes to say "that isn't running very well". I had a dead coreless motor which I gutted to turn into a bearing support for the worm shaft, with a home-made mount Araldited to the chassis. It isn't exactly model engineering, but it works. In the tender we have one of a large number of Chinese 1015 flat cans that I bought for pennies: they are a bit odd as the brushgear is at the output shaft end but they are nice and torquey, and just narrow enough to fit a 2MT tender. Driveshaft is 0.7mm nickel wire cross drilled 0.3mm one end for a drive peg, simply bent 90 degrees at the other to engage with a hole drilled sideways into a length of 1.0mm ID brass tube. At the motor end the same size tube is used, with a slot cut across the end with a razor saw and the inner bore radiused a bit with a cheap diamond burr from Aldi. Needless to say the Mk1 version is a bit rubbish but not as bad as I thought it would be. I need to shorten the motor shaft and lengthen the driveshaft as the articulation isn't quite good enough, and I will be cramming bits of lead into every tiny bit of space in the 2MT body. The Farish model has traction tyres on the trailing drivers, and without these mine will just about pull its own tender at the moment. Richard
  13. A bit more work on the 2MT. I now have four bits of valve gear, eight joints, each of which felt like a total fluke that I would never be able to repeat. My beginner's luck still seems to be holding. In between ruining my eyesight with the valvegear I made a bit of progress on the chassis: This rolls very nicely and this time I remembered to put a bit of sideplay in the middle axle so it should cope with Longwitton's fearsomely sharp (22 inch radius) curved crossover. So much easier to do quartering with removable wheelsets. The pony truck frame is "live" to one side of the split chassis so I only insulated the axle bush on the non-live side. Only one more wheel for pickup but every little helps as they say. Next up, crossheads. I tried to attach the connecting rods using the Farish washers as per Nigel's excellent instructions but made a mess of it and I don't think I have enough metal left on the retaining pin for another go. So I will have to find or make some very thin nickel or brass washers (the Farish ones look to be stainless steel), solder a pin to them, drill the crosshead and attach the whole lot with a soldered washer at the front which should work in theory. Richard
  14. Nice work. @GER_Jon brought one to the Norfolk meeting on Sunday for everyone to admire and we were pondering on how to rewheel it. Now if the RTR manufacturers could stop with these ridiculously obscure prototypes and do a proper engine like a J27 or G5... Richard
  15. Not much time for tiny train stuff lately due to having taken on far too much work, but found a bit of time to be super brave and tackle my Ivatt 2MT project. I bought this minus its motor and gears for not much money, and it will be perfect for Longwitton if I can get it running. Association conversion bushes etc and a Nigel Hunt etch for the tender chassis and valve gear. The tender went together no bother: I learned from my J39 build, and this one has the muff on the centre axle narrowed slightly to give a bit of sideplay so it can go round curves. The J39 works well in a straight line but I am going to have to pull it apart or possibly start again with a fresh chassis etch . The bit of the 2MT which really frightens me is the valve gear, but look at this: It took me an hour, and I needed two attempts at each joint, but I have an assembly which moves freely without the joints waggling around. Beginner's luck? Almost certainly, but it does look a bit prettier than the Farish version with its giant rivets. Now if I can just make another one the same... Richard
  16. Field trip for what might kindly be described as a slow-burn layout build. Sixty years on from closure and the remaining wooden bits are steadily decomposing but the road bridge remains in good fettle. I'm slowly working my way through the wiring as I get time: I can now run the Jinty through the entire scenic section without it stalling or derailing. The servo motors for the fiddle yard points are in place as are the inter-board connectors: I'm using the same DB25 connectors as Longframlington, in fact almost all the electrics (handheld control unit, power supply, connecting cables) are shared with the earlier layout. The motive power department has acquired a motorless Farish 2MT to be rewheeled when I get round to it. I'll probably put a flat can in the tender as I did with Longframlington's 2MT: my old AMR feedback controller gives exceptional slow speed control with larger iron core motors but really doesn't like coreless motors. I thought about going DCC with this layout but squeezing a chip into a J21 or J25 is a challenge too far. Richard
  17. Even a few feet of usable track provides a good boost to morale, and this morning I have been trying to do something about the motive power shortage by fettling the Jinty. I found among other things that the right hand centre axle bearing sat fractionally lower in the frame than the others, so only the centre driver on that side was in contact with the track. So I had to remove the wheels, carefully elongate the hole in the frame, refit the bush and then do the quartering all over again, and now found that the chassis was slightly twisted longitudinally. I gently corrected it with a pair of pliers at each end, fiddled with the quartering some more, straightened a wheel that was fractionally off-square in the muff, and finally I have the thing running well enough that I dare not fiddle with it any more, apart from that I will fit Simpson springs as it sometimes stalls even on plain straight track. I'm still not sure what to do with it: the Gem body is a bit out in its dimensions and does not quite capture the appearance of a Jinty. And in any case Jinties were unknown north of Newcastle. But it will do nicely for track testing, and if it behaves itself I might one day build a micro layout for it.
  18. Headed more or less in the right direction. I took a day off for my birthday and got all the track laid. Easitrac glue is great, I wish I had discovered it earlier. One potential problem. I'm doing all this at my workshop which is 45 minutes from home. I was about to start tracklaying and realised I had left my nice brass sleepers behind. It then occurred to me that one of my baseboard joints was right in the middle of the concrete sleeper section so I couldn't use the brass sleepers for that one anyway. So I have just laid the track across the joins and will mainly rely on the ballast to hold everything rigid when I cut through the rails. I might insert some nickel silver pins vertically into the board and solder the rail ends to them: I have had to do this at the join between the two lengths of concrete sleeper track to deal with a slight misalignment caused by the non-standard construction method for this bit of track. I managed to get enough wire droppers soldered in to be able to run my J39 a few feet back and forth at the Norfolk AG meet last Sunday. Since then I have been adding more droppers and installing the point motors and relays for the crossover: Wiring follows my usual method, two substantial busbars of tinned copper wire, with single core droppers. Point motors are the MERG micro servo based units, controlled by a MERG control board, with a Chinese relay board for frog polarity switching. Very cheap, easily adjustable for speed and travel, and reliable so far on "Longframlington" under exhibition conditions. Longfram did its last show in late 2019: I dug it out of its storage box a couple of months ago, powered it up and everything still worked. I can now run trains through the entire scenic section which has thrown up a couple of issues. Firstly one of the points is slightly narrow to gauge at one spot. With the mixed plastic / soldered construction I am hoping I can soften the plastic chairs with solvent and ease out the gauge with a soldering iron on the brass chairs. It isn't far out, just enough for a light four-wheeled wagon to ride up over the top of the blade close to where it meets the stock rail. Second issue is a lack of anything to run. My diesel haas wheels slightly too small, so the sandpipes catch on the crossings, and 7.5mm wheesets are out of stock at the moment. The J39 is rubbish in various ways: back to back too narrow, not enough sideplay on the centre axle, and lacking in adhesion. So I'm reworking the Jinty chassis for rigid suspension and pondering a North Eastern J27: same wheelbase, same driving wheel diameter... Richard
  19. I like that idea very much. On N gauge layouts I have soldered the rails direct to brass screws but it is hard to disguise the result. Richard
  20. Thank you everyone for your input. I was a bit unclear there: the idea of dismantling the boards is just to ensure they are not stuck together from laying the templates. I will then reassemble them for tracklaying. I am going to try the cast brass sleepers across the board joins, glued down with epoxy and the rails cut once everything has set. Good idea on the plywood, Don: I have a pile of offcuts from "Stobs" stacked up next to the layout but I hadn't thought about using them. Richard
  21. A little bit of progress: I shortened the trestles a bit, put in some bracing and attached an adjustable rubber foot to each one so that the whole thing rests on three (adjustable) points. It's as close as I am going to get to making Flexichas principles work in 2mm. It still wobbles due to the uprights flexing, perhaps I should have used 2x2 instead of 2x1. But it isn't a big problem for now. Next job was to lay out the Templot prints for the trackbed. I have three different rail heights (PCB, wood sleepers, concrete sleepers) and about 0.2mm between each one. So I printed the templates on 180gsm card which is about 0.2mm thick and used one, two or three thicknesses as appropriate. Every tried laying out a perfect circle of Templot templates? It isn't easy. I started out by printing them on paper, laying them on the boards and then fiddling until I thought I had the alignment right. But by the time I was three-quarters of the way round replacing paper templates with card it was obvious that an error had crept in and my two ends were not going to meet in the middle or anything like. On close inspection I spotted a slight dogleg where two templates joined just past the crossover: luckily this was all 2/3 layer trackbed and I was able to make a correction on the second layer as you can see on the left hand side of the photo. There is still a slight misalignment but it is right in the middle of the storage loops and very easy to adjust out when I lay the track there. Templates were glued down using PVA spread with a mini-roller, then another layer of PVA to seal them. There are a few spots where the wet card has cockled up but nothing concerning. I'll leave it to dry thoroughly, lightly sand the trackbed, give it another PVA coat for luck, then I can start drilling holes for point mechanisms and so on. I plan to lay the crossover first and then work outwards. I probably ought to dismantle the boards before I start, just to make sure I haven't got too much PVA between the board joins. Not quite a model railway yet, but heading in the right direction. About a month to the next Norfolk area group meeting so I had better crack on. Richard
  22. Thanks you so much for these, a few there that I hadn't seen before and will be studying very carefully for details I had not spotted previously. Very little to report due to work commitments. I was hoping to have some track down in time for the most recent Norfolk AG meet, but no such luck. Last weekend I cobbled together some baseboard trestles but they are a bit too long (no problem for a man with a saw) and the whole thing wobbles like a jelly (a bit more of a problem for someone whose carpentry skills don't extend much beyond sawing things in half). I think I need to put some bracing stays in. One of the nice things about a circular layout is that the baseboards are impressively rigid when bolted together. The last of the three-way points is nearly done, just blades to make up. I finally bought a 0.5mm file at horrendous expense and it has proved invaluable for easing checkrail and crossing clearances. I might get something running yet. Richard
  23. Slow progress the last couple of weeks but I now have the first of the two fully chaired turnouts for the scenic area. Needs a little bit of tidying up but should look quite pretty once painted and ballasted. The second one is now underway, incorporating a few lessons learned from the first. I'm going to try fitting the checkrails to the chairs before soldering the stock rails and chairs to the sleepers as a single assembly. I had a lot of problems sliding the check rails in and bending the ends with the stock rails already fixed down. The motive power department has just discovered that someone is offering 3D printed bodies for a J27 and G5 via Shapeways. N gauge rather than 2mm of course, but potentially interesting if I can identify a suitable chassis. I wonder how an M7 compares to a G5 in terms of coupled wheelbase. I know the driving wheels are larger. Richard
  24. Looks like four sprues of brass chairs will not be enough for one turnout. I should probably have counted chairs rather than guessing, but that would require a greater talent for forward planning than I possess. This is starting to look like a rather extravagant way of building pointwork at £4 per sprue, but Peco N gauge points are nudging up towards £20, so maybe it's not so expensive really. I'll keep telling myself that. Thinking ahead, I'm going to have three different rail heights to contend with (plain PCB, chaired PCB / Easitrack, concrete sleeper bullhead) so I need to start pondering what is going to go underneath the track. Maybe two different thicknesses of card? After previous disasters I will very thoroughly seal it with gloss varnish before I glue anything to it. Richard
  25. Slight change of plan as I was missing one of the pages from the template I printed out at work for the second 3-way, and the home printer and I do not see eye to eye most of the time. So having established that my not very good plastic solvent will stick Easitrac chairs to styrene sleepers, I set about the first half of the big curved crossover in the scenic section. First stock rail and frog in place, second stock rail being "charged" with chairs. The mixed PCB / plastic construction is similar to the method I used to build the pointwork for "Longframlington" but with brass chairs instead of chairplates. I think they will look rather nice when finished: here is a rather cruel close-up of the frog area. The crossing nose is supported by a flat piece of nickel silver: I tried using an etched chairplate but it proved too fiddly. As usual I haven't ordered enough components: I thought I had enough brass chairs for two turnouts, but I think this first one will use them all up. It just occurred to me that it will be much easier to cut, fill and sand the insulation gaps in the PCB sleepers before I add any more rails. In fact it would have been better to do them right at the start. I rather enjoy building pointwork. Richard
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