2mmMark

That seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Couldn't you have gone on the tour and made your own steam train noises?

It's a good idea to introduce some insulating medium such as superglue into the gap between stub axles. Stewart Hine's Standard Stock tube train on Copenhagen Fields once had a "failure to proceed" due to a combination of the HF lighting and a slightly too small gap between stub axles creating a spark gap, heating then melting the plastic muff. The failure had us puzzled for a while until we figured out what had happened. Very handily, Peter Clark was running the machine shop demo stand so making a replacement muff was reasonably easy. Alternatively, a small disc of paper or card made with a leather punch would suffice as an insulator. As a pious avoider of the Devil's Control Circuitry, I don't know a similar occurence would happen with that particular witchcraft the higher track voltage. Mark

The dimensions I use for DGs are: Bottom of buffing plate to rail - 4.5mm Mounting platform of coupler to rail - 5.5mm That seems to cope with most situations. Mark

Was that August 1988? We were also in Malta then and it was possible the worst holiday we ever had. We got switched hotels from St. Pauls to Sliema which was hugely overcrowded. Shame as we'd had a couple of very good holidays there previously. Made up our minds never to go back.

Something to consider in the next couple of day is how hot is your computer running. A couple of days ago, I cleaned the accumulated dust & fluff out of my main desktop pc, including the fins of the cpu cooler. A surprising amount accumulates in there. There's a useful Windows utility you can download called "Speedfan" which gives you temperature readouts of your system, cpu, hard disks and the ambient temperature inside the unit. Here's a screen grab of the laptop I'm using to type this now. It might be wise to shut down your PC during the hottest part of the day or alternatively, put it in the breeze from an external fan. Beware USB fans. It's easy to overload your USB system inadvertantly. Homebase have some nice small desktop USB fans. I've got one but I run it from a spare USB mains charger. It's dead handy on the workbench, just enough cooling breeze but not enough to blow your parts about (ooer Matron!) Another thing to do is to have a look at the back of your fridge or freezer. The cooling coils would most likely benefit from being cleaned. I found this out the hard way on Friday! Mark

2mm finescale modellers are often accused of being watchmakers so I found this programme on Radio 4 this morning made for interesting listening. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019457 The descriptions of the various machine tools made me quite envious! The broadcast programme is only 15 minutes but the podcast is 24, containing a lot more on the subject. Mark

Summer of 1972 for a few weeks, I was a Deviationist. Shovelling rock into Hudson skips is a great way to get fit. Best ever railway memory was the trip by gravity in a Hudson bogie wagon from Ddualt to Minffordd early on a sunny August morning, in order to get the train home. Almost as good was sitting at the rear of the 101 DMU (front was already taken) watching the Cambrian line unfold behind us. At that time, it had barely changed from steam days.

I shall most likely be doing that as I have a part dismantled Class 14 in NCB blue livery. Even discounted, the price for a Farish Class 14 is getting a bit silly. The NGS Hunslet is a better model all round. A revamped 08 is on the cards, having acquired a BR Blue body of the recent Farish one from the Bring 'n' Buy stand for £5. Thanks for the photo. I'm wondering if a black fabric curtain cut into strips might be a neat viewblocker of the sector plate. If the material was thin and lightweight, the stock might be able to push it aside. Probably needs to be a non-glossy material. Mark

We had to ask for the studio lights to be turned off as the layout was slowing being cooked by them! The layout has been on BP three times if I remember correctly.

Baking soda makes an excellent filler when mixed with cyanoacrylate adhesive. Non-food grade soda is available cheaply as a cleaning product. Mark

The Delrin muffs will last the life of the loco and beyond! I now use solder balls for a lot of my soldering, it's a good way of delivering a controlled amount of solder which is very handy in places where you want the bare minimum, e.g. crankpins Aluminium kitchen foil is an alternative to cigarette paper. It won't absorb any soldering flux, which is what can carry solder to unwanted locations. Something I do with layered etched coupling rods is burnish the crankpin holes with the shaft of a drill (the unfluted part). This acts as a parallel reamer and smooths the bearing surface. Mark

Been out with a couple of mates of mine, Curt & Rod.

If anyone is at loose end on Sunday 3rd July, may I recommend The Brooklands Motorcycle Show? https://www.brooklandsmuseum.com/whats-on/motorcycle-day There's a lot of interesting stuff lined up, we have some rare TT, race & record breaking bikes from the 1920s/30s/40s/50s on show, some rarely seen in public. BSA, Francis Barnett, Harley, Hollis Motorcycles, Indian, Royal Enfield, Triumph and Wardill will be on show - BSA with their new Gold Star, Royal Enfield with the recreation of the first motorcycle built by the company in 1901. The ABC/Bradshaw story will feature in a display, a marque not often featured. Allen Millyard is riding his Kawasaki Super Six to the event and alongside Allen will be Henry Cole & Guy Willison with their "Junk & Disorderly" autojumble. Silverstone Auctions & Bonhams are going to be there, also bringing some rare & unusual machines. For the first time Project Pit Stop, a new men’s health initiative supported by The Distinguished Gentleman's Ride (DGR) and Movember UK, will be with us. Weather permitting, there'll be the opportunity to ride up Test Hill on your own machine and there will be demonstation runs of various bikes in the morning and afternoon. And of course, a huge part of the event is the bikes people ride in on, ancient & modern, large & small. Pre-booking is strongly recommended to make entry smoother on the day.

The sliding magnet system as described in the April 2007 2mm Magazine worked perfectly all weekend on British Oak. I use 6mm dia by 6mm long cylindrical magnets through 4mm of baseboard/trackbed + 1.8mm of track. Neodymium magnets don't lose any noticeable amount of magnetism. Mark

That's a very good suggestion. The photos and video I have show a variety of hoppers in use. I only need four, so they can be a "maximum effort, no detail spared" production.

aaannd.... breathe! So the rush to make British Oak presentable is over and judging by the reaction at Expo, worthwhile. Interesting to talk to people who've made use of the original Beginners Guide to get started. The book definitely served its purpose. The layout performed very well but then it shouldn't be too hard to get such a small amount of track and three locos to behave properly. The Jinty and the Austerity lived up to my hopes with their replacement Tramfabriek motors, the Jinty in particular being a smooth steady slow runner. The extra weight in all the locos obviously helped. The 08 always has been a good slow runner with its 80:1 geared chassis, unfortunately let down by the original Poole Farish body with all its faults. However, I acquired a Bachmann Farish 08 body from the Bring & Buy for a fiver. A chassis transplant ought to be possible. Sadly, the paint job on the Jinty needs redoing. The orange is way too bright and the Vallejo paint I used was very difficult to brush on evenly. By contrast, the Vallejo grey/black went on quite satisfactorily. In any case, the chassis needs finishing (brake gear & crankpin washers) and painting. Talking of painting, the static grass needs a blow over with some matt varnish to kill the shine. This will need some careful thought to ensure the right stuff is used so as not to clog up the fibres. Aerosol matt varnishes are available but I think it needs a more delicate approach using an airbrush. The prime contender for the varnish is Micro-Sol Flat, which can be let down with water for easy spraying. The magnetic unloading of the NCB hoppers as described in an earlier post actually gave the layout some purpose making the operation more interesting. I still await the release of the Farish Class 14 in British Oak livery which is now said to be available sometime this year. Mind you, the price has crept up to £130ish discounted. Having seen the N Gauge Society Hunslet in the flesh, one of those is very tempting as it's £50 cheaper. I believe a simple 2mm finescale conversion is being planned for these locos. Here's the only shot I took of the layout over the whole weekend Chris Higgs took a couple of photos which I've taken the liberty of cross posting here: I'm always fascinated by how others see my layouts, with camera angles I haven't tried. Thanks Chris!

Nice photos, Chris, thanks! The orange on the Jinty is far too intense, it looks like a 1970s Laverda Jota. It does need a repaint, I used Vallejo acrylics and the orange just didn't go on very well. The black/grey I used on the rest of the loco went on very nicely. Mark

Made it to Derby!

"We asked for permission to drill some holes and Don said "bore 'em"..."

Looking back through my archive of 2mm magazines, the Rydes Vale was definitely at the 1961, 1962, 1963 & 1965 Central Hall shows. This is confirmed by some notes that Bert sent me when I was editing the 2mm Magazine, where he mentions using the same screw holes in the parquet flooring at each exhibition. I wonder if the Central Hall authorities were aware of that? The last show was after the death of HH ("Pop") Groves early in 1965. That must have been hard work for Bert as his father worked almost full time maintaining the locos. There's a photo taken at one of the earlier shows (1961?) with Bert operating the layout and Pop with his back to the camera, sitting at a workbench. Bert told me that the dust & fluff collected by the locos was considerable. Of course, there was no restriction on smoking inside, either. The exhibition report in one of the 2mm magazines tells of 12 hour days from Tuesday to Saturday of Easter week. My recollection of Central Hall in the 1960s & early 1970s was of a pretty crowded hall and a wait to see the layouts. In the final years before it moved to Wembley, I used to go after work in the evenings, riding my BSA Lightning 650 into town from where I worked at Heathrow. It was easy to park right outside the Hall after 6pm. The show was much quieter in the evenings, I found. Not something I'd do today but the journey times were much shorter then. Less traffic and no speed cameras... 😉 Central Hall had many shortcomings as an exhibition venue but definitely had a certain sense of occasion about the MRC shows. The MRJ show of 1990 recaptured a lot of that but at the cost of horrendous queues and overcrowding. Mark

Going through a box of bits & pieces (which I'm bringing to Derby) I was given by Simon's uncle, I came across this. Anyone who's ever built a 2mm scale signal will appreciate what's involved!

I think the Avonside 0-4-0 featured in an early Association publicity leaflet, unpainted but looking equally exquisite.

Don't tell him, Piko!

As a former IT person, those seven words say a lot!

Could the new hosting company assist in providing some progress reports on the restoration process? That might take some of the heat off. We've all become so used to the RMweb image firebox being fired little & often with pictures that it's easy to forget how many terabytes of data there is behind it, all needing shovelling back into the tender. Mark