S7 scratch building

[MarcD]

you just can't get through to some people.

 

Marc

[Regularity]

Whilst laboriously placing little cubes of styrene in place to represent nuts and boltheads on a demonstration stand, I have overheard a mother calling her less than 10 year old to “come and see how Hornby make their trains”!

 

OK, so she wasn’t an enthusiast, but really?

[Compound2632]

 

5 hours ago, Furness Wagon said:

you just can't get through to some people.

 

Marc

 

At least they weren't being assumed to be RTR...

 

On the other hand, all our models are eventually RTR (we hope) - it's just a question of at what point in the manufacturing process we get involved...

[MarcD]

The best one I've had we were at a show with our trade stand and a bloke came up to me and thanked me for bringing my collection of wagons to display them at the show. The 6ft by 2ft sign and the t-shirts were to suttle for him I think.

Marc

[airnimal]

 I am near the end now  with just a few bits to do. I have made the tie bars from .7mm nickel wire and filed a flat at both ends to solder them behind the etched w-irons. I held the wire down on my home made filing jig which make it easier to get them both parallel. I first filed one end first and used my dividers to get the correct length before filing the other end.

[airnimal]

Quote

 

Now that the cattle wagon is finished I am turning my attention to a wagon for a friend. It's a L&Y furniture wagon   

from a drawing in Vol 1 of L&Y wagons. It is to Dia 14. 

The blue coloured plastic is because I made the body slightly to short so I have overlaid with a piece of 20 thou plastikard at each end and sanded them back to size. 

[airnimal]

I went to Doncaster yesterday with my good friend Peter , we had a good day but didn't buy much. Not much to report on the modelling front as I am painting the lounge while my better half is in Australia cooing over our new grandson.

i have done a little on this L&Y wagon. Because it is not for myself I have made it to take cast wagon axleboxes. So they are easy to locate the the axleboxes I have added a couple of strips of plastic to hold them in place and at the correct wheelbase. The end doors have had the top row of .7mm MasterClub hexagonal bolts put on.

[airnimal]

I have done a small amount of work on the L&Y wagon.

The hinges have gone on both ends as well as the side knees. The inside ones are a bit unusual because they protrude through the floor. I presume the bolts would be countersunk so they would not get damaged by cart wheels when loading and unloading.

[airnimal]

After much head scratching I have decided that the hexagonal bolts were wrong. The reason I used the hex ones was because I was looking at a photo in Vol 1 of L&Y wagons to check I had got the shape of the side knees right and noticed that it used hex nuts. But the photo was in LMS livery and my brain should have told me to look more closely at the drawing and ignore the obvious. 

So I have removed all the hex nut and replaced them with square ones cut from plastic strip.

[airnimal]

I have made some rings out of 11thou phosphor bronze wire by rapping it around a 40thou drill. Then I twisted some 5thou brass wire to act as chain and solderd them together. It was just a matter of forming it to look like the end door fixing chain. It looks a little over size but I don't think I couldn't do it any finer.

i drilled a small hole in the body and bent everything to shape and superglued it in place.

Edited June 7, 2019 by airnimal

[airnimal]

I took advantage of the good weather yesterday to give the wagon a coat of primer. 

Edited June 10, 2019 by airnimal

[airnimal]

The L&Y wagon is being made as a pattern for a resin kit for the L&Y society and Lanky kits. This is the reason I have not drilled out the holes for the buffers or couplings. 

While I was painting this latest wagon I also painted the cattle wagon. I can't wait to finish this one to go with one I did a couple of years ago. I still have just enough etched fret of the bars left to do one more so I might do one with a roof.

[MarcD]

Pattern making. That would explain the use of solid axle boxes. They both look good.

 

I have being wondering this for a while. Does developing your own kits class as scratch building? 

 

Marc

[Regularity]

4 minutes ago, Furness Wagon said:

Pattern making. That would explain the use of solid axle boxes. They both look good.

 

I have being wondering this for a while. Does developing your own kits class as scratch building? 

 

Marc

No. It’s still building a kit, just a kit you originated.

[MarcD]

what about taking the parts from 2 different kits and making a third?

 

Marc

[Compound2632]

6 minutes ago, Furness Wagon said:

what about taking the parts from 2 different kits and making a third?

 

Marc

 

That's simply good old-fashioned kit-bashing.

[Regularity]

It’s quite simple. If start largely with a kit, or kits, it is kit-built.

Even if you made the pattern masters, drew up the artwork, did the 3D modelling, etc. That is the design and development of the kit which you then built.

 

Scratch building means building from scratch. Obviously not every single component*, but the vast majority of them. 

 

* I have a friend who routinely buys in the motor, the gears, the numberplates and the screw couplings. Even some of his wheels are hand-made, and the others are from cast centres for which he made the patterns. Everything else is hand made. Even the lining and lettering is done by him. And the results are superb - including working inside motion. He could make the motor, gears, etc if he had to. And although he works in S scale, no one does kits for most of his chosen subjects anyway,

Compared to him, we are nearly all complete amateurs.

[Compound2632]

There's a spectrum:

1. build a kit exactly as the designer intended
2. modify a kit to produce a better representation of the prototype than the designer managed
3. modify a kit to produce a variant of the prototype
4. use a kit as a starting point to model a different prototype
5. use parts of a kit to model a different prototype
6. use parts of several kits to model a different prototype (2-6 generally introduce other bought-in components and/or home-made components)
7. use bought-in components together with home-made components to build a model.
8. build a model using exclusively home-made components

Exactly where the boundaries between kit building, kit bashing, and scratch building lie is debatable. My wagon building is firmly at the kit building/bashing end (1-5) whilst Mike's is clearly 7, which I think most people would call scratch building. But they're all modelling.

Edited June 10, 2019 by Compound2632

[Caley Jim]

I hope there is not going to be any suggestion of some sort of hierarchy in this debate. Surely what is important is the satisfaction and pleasure the builder gained from the exercise? For the record I've done 1-7 of the above, but have neither the skills nor facilities to make motors, gears, wheels etc. 

 

Jim 

[airnimal]

Oh dear ! Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water ..........

i was a member of the O Gauge Guild for over 35 years but I have not renewed my membership this time because of the corrosive and negative comments by a couple of people on their forum. 

I hope the same thing doesn't happen again here. 

I do demos at exhibitions to help people try building models without using kits. I find helping people gives me enormous satisfaction as well as learning from others which helps my modelling to improve.

if we are going to take issue with what we call it them I will be out of here pronto.

i don't claim to be any better modeller because I very rarely use kits. If I had to wait for the kits I wish to have models of I would be waiting a very long time. So I scratch build, simple !

Edited June 11, 2019 by airnimal

[MarcD]

I only asked as I trained as a production engineer and with a background of using technology to makeup for my lack of hand skills. So as I couldn't buy the kits I wanted to build so it was easier for me to develop a kit and build that.

I have developed a few wagon kits that will not go out because they aren't ever going to ever be of interest to anyone other than me. 

Marc

[Regularity]

5 minutes ago, Furness Wagon said:

I only asked as I trained as a production engineer and with a background of using technology to makeup for my lack of hand skills. So as I couldn't buy the kits I wanted to build so it was easier for me to develop a kit and build that.

I have developed a few wagon kits that will not go out because they aren't ever going to ever be of interest to anyone other than me. 

Marc

Well, then it’s a case of using your skill set to make the models you want, so who cares and why worry, but you did ask! (And making things from your own kits is still building from kits! But why seek for labels?)

 

I have, in the past, made a single side and a single end and then produced RTV rubber moulds and hand cast my own “kits”, for opens and vans. To these I add floor and roof from sheet material, plus a few items from other sources. I don’t think of them as kits, neither do I think of them as scratch builds. I just think of them as models I made.

 

I don’t think there is any “hierarchy” in this: one simply does what one can to get the models one wants. The methods of doing that are largely immaterial and completely personal, and person A may well derive pleasure from a different way of doing it than person B. Personally I would rather have less that had more personal meaning to me: none of my locos is entirely or even mostly my own work, but they all have had some personal input from me*. My wagons, on the other hand, have a fair proportion of scratchbuilds amongst them. My 3 coaches use etched zinc sides from Trevor Charlton, and they were a right b*st*rd to solder together. They also use various etched components from Alan Gibson (himself, not the company) acquired 20 years ago. I wouldn’t say they are scratch built, but neither are they kit built. They are simply made by me using various components to get the models I wanted. I have an as yet unused 2D cutter which I will one day learn to use to create styrene doilies for making coaches. No idea how that gets classified compared to cutting out the panelling by hand (which I can do, but it takes me forever and I am not happy with the results), but I don’t really care.

 

* A friend once unkindly pointed out that over the years, the only thing I haven’t done to build a loco is to turn a chimney and dome. Unfortunately, the various tasks have been spread out over a number of different projects... Mind you, he didn’t complain about the ready made working loco chassis he acquired from me for nothing! It had split frames and metal wheels, too!

 

The aim is to get the model railway that you want, using the resources (time, money, skills, tools, etc) available to you, in a manner that brings personal satisfaction. Some prototypes require scratch building. For some, this is OK and they may even look for such a prototype. Others have an expectation that the major RTR manufacturers will provide to their every whim and need, regardless of commercial viability.

[Tricky]

Good grief. Maybe discuss this somewhere else (if indeed it merits discussion) and concentrate on drooling over and admiring Mike’s superb work? Let’s not scare him off. 

[airnimal]

Tricky, thanks for that, much appreciated.

Back to the wagons ! 

Nearly done on this one but it will be heavily lime washed as the photograph taken in 1890 in a Coventry goods yard shows. The photograph appears on the LNWR society forum under goods yards.

Edited June 11, 2019 by airnimal

[MarcD]

Lovely does not do your work justice.

Sorry for sparking a debate on your string

 

Marc