East Barnet Joint Stock - a workbench

[Chas Levin]

15 minutes ago, Rob Pulham said:

I have used a sheet of plate glass to solder onto for over 10 years without issue. I do periodically give it a scrape with a stanley knife blade but aside from that, it doesn't get much love.

 

Just an observation on your soldering scraps of etch onto the sides to help keep them rigid Chaz. It's a useful tactic and one which I use myself but I would suggest trying to use the minimum amount of solder rather than the blobs visible on the photos. This applies to all soldered joints not just the ones under discussion.

 

This is for a couple of reasons. 

 

1 - Solder in itself is inherently weak and when soldered joints fail in my experience, it's generally the thick solder that has snapped. A soldered joint with the minimum of solder really is much stronger.

 

2 - With less solder, there is less cleaning up to do. Which is even more important, if the solder is only there as a temporary measure.

 

Thanks Rob, very interesting. I do have a hefty piece of plate glass which I used for a while for soldering, but it's a little on the large size (about 13" square and takes up too much bench-top real estate so I decided only to use it for things like making sure all of a vehicle's wheels are touching the ground.

 

You're quite right about my having used too much solder there! It's a habit I'm still working on curing, born of early soldering fears of using too little - lack of confidence and lack of understanding as to how soldering works. I'd already thought I'd wick off some of the surplus while the sides are still unattached to anything else. I find the usual copper de-soldering braid that's normally used with electrical solder works very well with the stuff we use, but does need plenty of flux.

[Bucoops]

I've done very little modelling the last couple of months but it's still about 6 years of abuse.

 

[Chas Levin]

3 hours ago, Bucoops said:

I've done very little modelling the last couple of months but it's still about 6 years of abuse.

 

Thanks Rich: that's pretty good going for that length of time. I might try one - good to have a variety of tools for different jobs!

[Rob Pulham]

23 hours ago, Chas Levin said:

 

 but it's a little on the large size (about 13" square and takes up too much bench-top real estate so I decided only to use it for things like making sure all of a vehicle's wheels are touching the ground.

 

 

 

Hi Chaz,

 

At the risk of getting into a "mines bigger than yours" discussion, mine is 24" x 18" and it covers half of the top of my workbench, another quarter being taken up by a cutting mat and the rest by solder stations etc.

 

As happens with many modellers, I only actually solder on about 3 square inches at one corner of the sheet of glass, the rest being covered in tools and the various bits of detritus that collects during the course of a build. I do clear up periodically but I find it's soon back to where it was. That said, I have now made racks for pliers and have various pots and jars for files, nut spinners, etc. I am slowly getting into the habit of putting them back as I use them, so I am not as bad I used to be but far from tidy...

Edited May 9 by Rob Pulham
To add more detail.

[Chas Levin]

9 hours ago, Rob Pulham said:

 

Hi Chaz,

 

At the risk of getting into a "mines bigger than yours" discussion, mine is 24" x 18" and it covers half of the top of my workbench, another quarter being taken up by a cutting mat and the rest by solder stations etc.

 

As happens with many modellers, I only actually solder on about 3 square inches at one corner of the sheet of glass, the rest being covered in tools and the various bits of detritus that collects during the course of a build. I do clear up periodically but I find it's soon back to where it was. That said, I have now made racks for pliers and have various pots and jars for files, nut spinners, etc. I am slowly getting into the habit of putting them back as I use them, so I am not as bad I used to be but far from tidy...

And at the risk of prolonging the size joke, it sounds like your workbench is bigger than mine too! Do you use a larger soldering area partly because you also model in O Gauge? I seldom need a very large area for soldering as I'm only working in 4mm so that's partly why I'm keen to minimise the soldering surface size.

 

I must admit I am a bit on the tidy side though and I do rather like drawers, boxes, jars and so forth. Part of the recent change to my modelling space was to swap an old music studio desk for a much older rolltop desk, with a whole bank of cubbyholes, drawers and shelves...

[Chas Levin]

I've removed as much of the excess solder as the de-soldering braid allows - it looks worse than it is! When it comes to removing these pieces, I'll clip them into short sections to drop out the lengths between the solder points but bend up a few mm next to each solder point to act as a handle and they should come away easily. In any case, they serve their purpose, in making it possible to handle the flimsy sides in their current state, so I can get on with working out the body structure:

 

 

Meanwhile, in other news, a very enjoyable visit to Stamford for the Market Deeping MRC exhibition, terrific show from all concerned. It was also great to meet @Tony Wright and @Woodcock29 in person, always a nice moment with people you've only known through writing. Alison and I were busy chatting to various people and I didn't take many photos, but The Neuberg Project's 1913 layout caught my eye:

 

 

 

It's an RhB 1m gauge railway and although I usually stay with standard gauge, I can never resist a Swiss layout. In this last picture, look at the penny farthing bicycle in the middle of the photo, leaning against the lampost: the focus is not great on it, but hopefully you can see the incredibly fine wires of the spokes!

 

[Chas Levin]

Happily I realised that as well as neglecting the inner partitions, I also hadn't been paying enough attention to the two end fold-ups that I dealt with early on and then put away. They're intended as end bases for the body, complete with locating and fixing holes:

 

 

 

Big relief, as I've been floundering around a little - in my lack of scratch-building experience - trying to find an entry point with the body construction: where to start, in other words! These pieces provide a very sensible place to start:

 

 

There was a slight inaccuracy such that the fold-up at on end wouldn't quite sit over the corresponding hole in the chassis, because it was already hard up against the ends of the edge upstand:

 

 

I took a fraction of a mm off each end of the upstand rather than mess with enlarging the hole (and possibly losing it's centre alignment) or losing the straight leading edges of the fold-up:

 

 

On an unrelated note, going to make a plastic 'hump' to go under a wagon coal load, I couldn't find the Milliput former I made a while back and tried holding a piece of 20 thou plasticard strongly clamped between two dessert spoons while pouring boiling water over it, which worked really well and was far quicker and easier than other methods I've tried:

 

Edited May 13 by Chas Levin

[Chas Levin]

One of the issues to contend with is that while the extruded aluminium roof shapes produced by various people in the past for LNER use are of the right profile (see earlier comparisons further back on this thread) they're fractionally too narrow, being 34mm where the dimension over cantrails for the Sentinel roof is 9', or 36mm. Thinking about this and about how to widen the body ever so slightly to avoid an overall impression of narrowness, as well as how to attach the sides, looking through photos, there's this interesting picture of the bodyshell from the 1938 LNER Magazine article series on these 'cars (which you can see in this thread which is all about the Sentinel and Clayton vehicles) - this is the photo itself, cropped from the page:

 

 

Part of the accompanying text tells us:

 

“The sides of the coach are made of light steel framing with steel waist panels. The side pillars are of tee section attached at the lower end of the under frame solebars by means of angle knees. The waist panels are of steel sheeting riveted to the side pillars and flanged on the upper and lower edges to provide the necessary longitudinal stiffness.”

 

There are two interesting features here: one is the way the sides' bottom edges are held slightly away from the floorpan by the 'angle knees', described in the NuCast white-metal kit instructions as 'body pillar bases'. 

The other is the various types of flanged sections providing rigidity. I'd already started thinking about something like that to produce the inset doors, but it could be done other areas that need stiffening. Also, there's a horizontal flanged piece running all the way along the sides' tops and that might provide a way to widen the appearance of that edge too, where it meets the roof...

[Rob Pulham]

Thanks for the link Chaz,

 

I missed that thread at the time but it will come in useful down the line as I have a 7mm Clayton Railmotor and trailer in the stash. I have missed out on a couple of the Westdale Sentinel Railcar kits (saw them too late when they had already sold) But I live in hope that one will turn up at some point. I have just noted that Worsley Works also list a 7mm scale version.

[Chas Levin]

9 hours ago, Rob Pulham said:

Thanks for the link Chaz,

 

I missed that thread at the time but it will come in useful down the line as I have a 7mm Clayton Railmotor and trailer in the stash. I have missed out on a couple of the Westdale Sentinel Railcar kits (saw them too late when they had already sold) But I live in hope that one will turn up at some point. I have just noted that Worsley Works also list a 7mm scale version.

 

Morning Rob, very pleased you've found it of interest! It was Mike Trice's suggestion that we start a separate thread, dedicated to livery and other issues connected with the railcars, because the discussion - mainly at that point about the livery colours - on this thread was turning up some useful info for other modellers, who probably wouldn't know it was there, buried many pages in someone's own modelling thread.

THe Westdale kit looks terrific - I'm sorry I don't model in O Gauge!