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flubrush

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  1. I found I had to do that when assembling the wagon wheel sets I made using 3D printed centres and parallel journal axles. The main axle ends were square and sharp and could quite happily cut their own seat when press fitting them. Jim.
  2. I think I remember from a discussion on wheel tyre metals many years ago that mild steel gives the best adhesion. But I doubt that we should worry too much about adhesion in S scale with the shortish train lengths we tend to have. There could also have been a preference for suppliers to use mild steel since it is an easier material to machine than stainless steel. Jim. PS. I think the longest train I saw in S scale was a train of wagons behind a MET tank on a continuous layout I had at my previous house in Yate. The MET tank was a scratchbuilt insurance replacement (by Vic Green IIRC) for Alan Cruikshank's original which had been stolen off a stand at an exhibition. Les and Carole emptied their stock boxes to provide the load and I think there was in excess of thirty vehicles behind the loco.
  3. Same here. I emailed an order for sleepers over a week ago to be paid for by Paypal. I received an email acknowledging receipt and stating that my order would be processed, but since then, nothing. I've tried emailing with no response and I resent the order today to see what happens. Jim.
  4. You might have a problem with their minimum order quantities. I remember the SSMRS ordering a supply of Code 87 bullhead rail from Wintwire some years ago. We wanted 1000 yards of rail to match the order we had put out for injection moulded chairs, but had to accept nearly 2000 yards. The final amount that we had to take depended on the quantity of undrawn source material used and that was a fixed quantity. Jim.
  5. The non-professional one I use (Emblaser 1) uses GCode - the standard CNC code. Jim.
  6. The Glasgow show started in 1967. I remember because I had promised a layout for the first show, then had to disappear on a long training course in England during 1966 and assumed that organisers would accept that I could no longer supply the layout. Came back at the end of 1966 to find that the layout was still required and had to build it from scratch in about three months. :-) The first show was held in part of the McClellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street and was crammed on the Saturday such that the Fire Brigade almost closed it down on safety grounds. Subsquent shows took a much larger area of the Galleries and still were extremely busy. I think I remember total attendancies of 20,000 plus. Jim.
  7. I dug out my copy of the manual as well and had a read through it. What jogged my memory was your mention of belt tensions and I had a read through the belt setup again and found that both X carriage bodies were not touching the frame at the bottom of their travel, with the right hand one being about 1.5mm away from touching. That would have put the X carriage at about the angle which would have given me the out of square error. So it was a bit of a fiddle to get the bottom belt re-tensioned to get the carriage ends both touching. Another test cut gave me a corner which was pretty well spot on. I'm not sure how long it might have been like this - whether I originally set it up wrongly or the belts have stretched a bit after seven years - probably the latter since I'm sure I would have set the belt tensions up properly when I built it. Jim.
  8. I've just set up my Emblaser 1 to do some cutting - it hasn't been used for over a year. :-) I'm doing some double sided etching and cutting and I'm setting up a guide to ensure accurate registration when I flip the MDF over. In setting up the guide, I used the Emblaser to cut a right angle corner based on (0,0) on a bit of MDF and I noticed that the cut right angle was not at 90 degrees, with the angle probably nearer 91 - 92 degrees. I can't remember if this is a problem that can be adjusted and whether that is mechanical or by programming the control board. Anyone remember what the adjustment procedure might be. I have a faint memory that I might have done this before. :-) I went looking for the Darkly Labs forum but that seems to have disappeared with only a list of old topics remaining. Jim.
  9. Basically, at the top of Buchanan Street, and quite close to Queen Street station. It was a short walk between the two stations. https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=15.9&lat=55.86566&lon=-4.25100&layers=168&b=1 Jim.
  10. Continuing on this thread, I purchased some of the 2mm steel rod from M-Machine and got it yesterday. I've had a chance to check it over and it is actually 1.95mm diameter measured with my micrometer. It's also not dead straight, probably been unwound from a coil and roughly straightened. But would probably be OK for short lengths like wagon axles, especially if you machine a wheel seat at the same time as the parallel journal. It machines very well with an HSS tool in the Cowells. Ordering from M-machine is a bit old style - you email them an order, they email you back to say the order is OK and can you phone them with you bank card details., A very pleasant lady took my details on the phone call and my order arrived the next day. One of the reasonably priced sources of 2mm (exactly) straight shaft is from the Far East via Ebay from an advert such as this https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/325232156039?var=514121653272&hash=item4bb958dd87:g:TdoAAOSw3qhiquGl&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8HoO0HiN495fjbrdE6RXTwyGwolNnO7Zw%2FjYSRPpZKRPM%2BsO2W7hEaUzwux2ZTucPVtLEvNy1z4kcaZCJ83i8GGjoQEKzivLyPpERH1RS4r54ZFF0y%2F2wrWGQS4F7kHVAgV0bsbTD3a4wlTenAujPUPevCCnMW7AWQxM93RwYZ04SaO06u8mjRGzb9%2FC%2BESYrB33o5e68unWHxrryeq4DXS5ZHjda%2BBSHuDRXZbBkvgiti77hxkErZrgXn5shHtDyeCwNc8Xf%2FxAtGOTnpb7H0f4Qqr1CYNaNgwxo8o6hJCZ%2B8h1I1pEHOu9S2OVTxl0RA%3D%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR9Sl1PqrYg The material I've received doesn't machine as well as the EN1A material from M-Machine or MK Metals. I wondered where the 1.95mm rod (M-Machine) of the 1.9mm rod (MK Metals) could have come from since there is no equivalent SWG size, but 5/64ths Imperial is fairly close to both. Jim.
  11. Just picked this up on Western Thunder https://www.westernthunder.co.uk/threads/new-4mm-kits.11874/post-279493 Jim.
  12. The British film industry relied on Red Star to get film negative (rushes) to London for processing. All the major negative processing laboratories were in London - Ranks, Technicolor, Metrocolor, etc. When going on location for filming, one of the first jobs of a camera crew was to establsh the nearest Red Star office. There was also the return service from London to the various regional centres of the BBC and ITV stations. All the laboratories had small fleets of vans continually attending all the major terminii in London from early evening till early morning. The beauty of the system was that it worked from all over the UK wherever there was a railway station with Red Star handling - even from Wick or Thurso although packages might take more than a day from there. It actually worked very well and there were only occasional problems. Jim.
  13. Just to continue the wagon axle topic of a week or two ago, I was pointed to another supplier on the Model Engineer forum... http://www.m-machine-metals.co.uk/downloads/Metals catalogue.pdf ...and on Page 66 of their catalogue is 2mm diameter EN1A steel rod. I haven't bought any of this product but the supplier has a good reputation on the ME forum so hopefully it is actually 2mm diameter and not 1.9mm diameter as is the rod from MK Metals. Jim.
  14. I use a hand reamer to finish off the axle bores in driving wheels. The hand reamer has a slow taper on the end and I only enter the reamer from the rear of the wheels until the full diameter is only cut for about 1mm and the rest of the bore toward the front of the wheel is still the taper of the reamer. This means that axles can be fitted into the 1mm parallel section then the wheels can have a gentle press for the axle to start catching the taper. You can now tweek the quartering until all is running well then the wheels can be fully pressed onto the taper. It's also an easy way to get a nice press fit. Before I did wheels this way it used to be real fiddle to get a nice push fit in a wheel bore that didn't need a four inch vice and a pipe extension on the handle. :-) Jim
  15. He has just started a two week holiday, so I wouldn't expect him to be back until about 10th July. Jim.
  16. I had a quick look but couldn't quite work out the difference between some of their wheel alternatives. :-) But their prices are good and a minimum order quantity of 1000 is understandable although I noted that some products had 500 or 100 minimum quantities. I don't think I'll make use of them since I've got the time, and I've got to make the Cowells pay for itself. :-) I wonder if Barry might be interested in an article for the Gazette on how you negotiated your way around your order and whether a working knowledge of Cantonese or Mandarin was required. :-) Jim.
  17. How did you get on specifying your needs to China? And how were their prices. :-) Paul may be interested for parts acquisition. :-) I'm quite happy at turning up my parallel journal axles on the Cowells. I've done it up till now just using a knife tool in the toolpost and working off the dials. But I have a mind to try and make a tool to work from the tailstock. I think I remember the late Colin Binnie describing one in Your Model Railways so I will have to have a thumb through my old mags to see if i can find the article. Or I might get the Chinese to do them. :-) Jim.
  18. While I'm on a roll, I thought I would put something on here about my sprung wagon underframes. My wheel manufacturing was actually to provide wheels for these underframes. The problem with springing wagons is that you need a fair amount of weight in the wagons to get the springs to work well. With covered vans, there's no problem in adding weight within the upper works, but with any kind of open wagon, you're stuck with whatever weight you can get into the underframe. So I chose to make the underframe from brass section and I made up the parts by CNC machining them from brass sheet. Here are the parts having been cut out with one set removed. The reason for making them this way is that I can get sizes exactly to scale without having to mess about altering nearest size metric stock to suit. Here are the solebars and headstocks of one underframe with a 10 thou nickel silver floor to fit in them. There's a small rebate machined round the top inside of the solebars and headstocks to accommodate the floor. I made up a small jig to ensure that the joint between a solebar and headstock was at right angles when soldered. The other pair were also soldered in the jig then the two pairs are soldered together all square. The completed underrame base with its floor. Floors were soldered into the underframes... ...and the "W" irons are soldered in, butting them up against the protrusion on the inner sides of the solebars, and this sets the wheelbase for the wagon. The springs are then fitted to the "W" irons... ...007" plain steel guitar strings - by far the best material for wire springs since they uncoil to be dead straight. The bearing carriers, wheels and axles are then fitted and this can be a bit of a fiddle getting the springs in the correct place. But I'm getting better at it. :-) I'm also fitting single ended S&W couplings, and there's additional lead sheet ballast in the trough of the "W" irons. And here's a rake of the underframes with couplings, ready for some Caledonian van bodies and a brake van. The buffer stocks are my 3D prints and I'm using the 12" buffers from Parts. They are sprung using springs from Model Signal Engineering. These underframes come in at around 38 - 40 grams in weight and that is just about right for the 0.007" springs with the bearings sitting about half way up the total 1mm movement. If bodies get a bit heavier then there's 0.0075" and 0.008" guitar strings to deal with them. I also did an underframe for the RCH wagon kit. :-) One thing with this method is that the brass underframe sucks up heat and there's no way that a wimp of a soldering iron will be any use. My 45W iron can just about do something if you hang around for a while, but my 100W Weller, my RSU and my small gas torch are more likely to be used. Soldering to the nickel silver floor is a bit easier with lower wattage irons. The other matter is attaching detail to the solebars and I'll do that by making the solebar sides, probably in styrene, with all the detail, then gluing them to the brass underframe. I've actually allowed for this in the width over the brass solebars. Jim.
  19. I had been doing a fair bit of wheel work over the winter and I meant to show some of it on here, but got involved with rebuilding a garage roof. :-) I've been making wagon wheels with 3D printed centres. This is a follow on from my making wheels for the Parts shelves in 2019 when it looked as though I couldn't get supplies from our suppliers. But Paul has got supplies from Slaters, so the emergency is over. :-) I actually managed to produce almost 100 axles back then, but I had a lot of problems getting the TIR of the wheels within acceptable limits. The Slaters wheels had a TIR of up to 0.003" so I aimed for that, but had a lot of scrappage due to loads of wheels out of limits. I decided to have another go at producing wheels on axles to see if I could get around the problems, and this time I would do all the work on the lathe. I had been using jigs and press tools for the previous work and thought that might be where my problems lay. So I made up a magnetic chuck to hold the wagon wheels in the Cowells, using a nice big bit of brass bar that I dug out of scrap box. Here are the bits - main chuck body lower left with two holes for magnets. Above the body is the back cap to keep the magnets in, and the two small neodymium magnets top right. The body with the magnets inserted. It's important to maintain an air gap between the magnets and the wheel flange so that you can get the wheel back out. Once the magnets and the tyre stick together, they are the very devil to part. :-) You can see the very shallow ridge on which the flange sits to hold the wheel tyre true and away from the magnets. The back of the chuck with the rear cap in place. The chuck with a wheel in place. One unintended plus for the magnetic chuck - you can eject a wheel and insert another one with the lathe still running. Here's a wheel being pushed out with a rod through the headstock. The magnets still hold the wheel against the chuck and it's easy to pick off the wheel while the chuck is turning, and also to put another wheel in place. This is quite important if you have got a fair number of wheels to do. Each wheel has three separate operations - centre drill, drill through for undersize axle hole, then open up with hand reamer and each operation is carried out on each wheel. So if I'm doing two dozen wheels, that's sevety-two wheel changes, and it wont do your lathe motor very much good switching on and off for every change - unless you've got a clutch on your lathe - I haven't. :-) Here's my test bed for wheel concentricity - a bit basic but it does the job. The axles have parallel journals since I'm using sprung "W" irons. And after all this I was still getting out of tolerance wheel sets!!! Until I decided to check the parallel journal axles and found that the journals were not concentric with the axle outer diameters. The axles had been supplied with the the wheel tyres but I had never thought to check them for TIR. They are actually 1.9mm diameter rather than 2mm and I suspect that the problem might have been gripping them in a 2mm collet. I tried it with the DA collets in the Cowells and they did not chuck up concentric. However, one benefit is that if the wheel centre is out of tolerance, you can rotate the wheel on the axle until one error cancels the other out. :-) If anyone is also interested in making wheels with 3' 1" diameter tyres, then I have hundreds of them and I can get them to Paul so that he can supply them from stores at some suitable price. I have also been looking for a source of 2mm rod to make some more axles and it's not an easy material to source. Susie pointed me to some EN1PB rod sold by MK Metals and I got some of that. It machines beautifully, but it is a bit rusty (pre-weathered :-) ) and is only 1.9mm diameter. I also sourced some 2mm rod from far Eastern suppliers, marketed as axles for model cars. Here's a typical supplier https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/166076025159?hash=item26aae70947:g:ZKMAAOSwZLJkVKCB&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA0Lu93FyEUVgMaPvYiCnI9KSBGCF13inkroREQen45FT0YvMW9CMovmjg69RVoNJYf5CdLs8RsX2Jqa%2FD4dXjpDCbwvCj0%2BqJPunmFyy5tbOgHCXRsBB2HJ%2FbrkiRlWKWZhw82Mg%2F0TImH2YnthmafaDX0EKsJVh5Y1hDURvWN%2FLNhBsaGBTtbXQyOsxEmKGB2tOIXlpq4%2FVeL1jQac0ni9rLLEhJg0bEougAWenqDIXQPxGt5I5ZvvviYJjQt7FxfydmZUnB8Gw6HurcV0HnqlA%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR7Cf5vieYg This material machined fairly well and the rod is plated and spot on for 2mm diameter. I'm also going to machine reduced diameter wheel seats on the axles, which, if done at the same time as the parallel journals will mean that the journals are concentric with the wheel seats. :-) I have heard it said that that is why Slaters have reduced diameter wheel seats on their products. :-) Jim.
  20. According to my father, who knew the Subway in its rope worked days, it was the smell of the preservative treatment for the rope, which was probably liberally plastered around the track. The smell of it hung around for many years. I used the Subway regularly in the 60s and 70s and the smell was still very distinctive. I dare say a blind person would never have any problems locating an underground station. :-) I've been away from Glasgow since the modernised version appeared so I don't know if the smell has survived the modernisation. Jim.
  21. Nige, I've just done a wee bit of trawling around and found a reference in an advert to refer to a Peco Technical Booklet No. 21 for information about the wiring of the scissors. In this advert :- https://therailwayconductor.co.uk/model-railway-track/product/peco-sl-e383f-streamline-n-code-55-scissors-crossing-medium-radius and the booklet advertised here :- https://cheltenhammodelcentre.com/publications/peco-show-you-how-booklet-no.21-wiring-layout-(points)/p-syh21 It's only a quid and might save more hair being pulled out. :-) Jim.
  22. Nige, I don't know the Peco scissors formation and its wiring so I can't make any other comment about it. But I would have assumed that the four crossing noses of the turnouts were fed from the switch blades, and the two crossing noses of the diamond were of the insulated variety. This so that the "average" modeller could install the formation without having to worry overmuch about wiring and frog switching. It could be that what you are trying to do is conflicting with wiring/switching built into the formation by Peco. Other than that, I have found out that applying frog juicers to complex trackwork formations is not easy when you have to try to provide sufficient distance between adjacent juicers' rails to avoid interaction. In one case I had to rebuild a complex formation to allow me to stretch distances between crossing noses to avoid conflict between juicers. In my correspondence with Tam Valley, I got the impression that they were slightly bemused by complex formations which were fairly common in the UK prototype, but not in the US prototype. :-) Jim.
  23. I was hanging on to see if any other more expert user than I would respond. :-) I had a similar problem with a half scissors on an S scale layout I built a year or two ago and I contacted Tam Valley about the matter. They then explained that for the two crossing noses associated with the diamond, they have to be controlled by paired juicers - I had been controlling mine with two single juicers. You have got their hex juicer in the picture so, if you haven't done so already, set the link to pair a couple of the outputs to control the diamond's crossing noses. Also, how are you controlling the other crossing noses on the scissors? I also had problems with feeding the crossing noses associated with the turnouts on a half scissors on an N scale layout. I again queried the problem with Tam valley and they said that there should be a gap between adjacent crossing noses using juicers or the juicers will tend to interact with each other. They recommended a gap of at least the wheelbase of a powered bogie between the insulated joints of adjacent juicers. The way I got round this was to control the polarity of the crossing noses associated with the turnouts from switches linked to the turnouts' tiebars and only control the diamond's crossing noses from a dual juicer. Jim.
  24. If you are interested in the Pugs, there was a J.N.Maskelyne article way back in 1938 on the locos with drawings and details. I remember getting involved in building an S scale model of one some years ago and we couldn't source any decent official drawings. The cross section of the saddle tank with dimensions is especially helpful. Jim.
  25. Another possibility might be FS120 where 2mm Association track and wheel standards are applied, pushing the 2mm 9.42mm gauge out to 12mm and everything else opened out proportionally. The same process was applied to create FS160 where the 2mm standards were squeezed in to 9mm gauge to provide a more realistic track for European and US N scale to 160:1 scale. https://www.fs160.eu/fiNeweb/standards/HANDB.php Jim.
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