Hawk

Sorry for not posting a reply before, Pater!

I am indeed familier with your and Mikkels work, and a while back when I worked for the Norwegian Model railroad magazine “Mj-Bladet “ we ran articles from both of you. It did indeed inspire me a lot! 
 

I am a painfully slow modeler, but there have been a little progress on the diorama:

Long time no post, but some progress has been made. The roof subassembly has been completed, walls have been milled from Forex,  and the whole thing now looks like this:

The biggest subproject in this diorama is the overhead traveling crane. An object worth modelling all in itself. Riveted constructions are far more pleasing than stuff that has been welded tighter! 

I do not use real riveted joints  for this model, I just insert machined brass rivets (from either Old Pullman in Switzerland or Hassler-Profile in Lichtenstein) in predrilled holes in the nickel-silver parts and solder them on the backside.  Besides looking good, the rivets aligns everything up nicely and keep things in its proper place. 

For the steel trusses I milled another assembly jig. The connecting plates were soldered in place, and all the holes were drilled into the brass profiles using the connecting plates as templates. 

All the rivets inserted and ready to be soldered into place from the back: 

The massive beams have been made up from etched parts, and the subassemblies has been test fitted (alert readers will of course notice that this test was made before fitting all the rivets!): 

The shape of things tonight: 

I was a little over-eager when I machined the wheels for the cross slide, so I did not check was type of wheels the prototype have. There is absolutely no reason to believe that these wheels are single flanged, it is not like they are going to run through any paintwork! So I will probably replace them with double-flanged wheels. 

But I will hold back until I have some more pictures of the prototype. I will make a trip to the workshop early next year, so there will probably be no more updates until late January. 

NEXT: More work on the overhead traveling crane.

The first part of the model that I decided to tackle was the roof rafters. 

I was fortunate enough to find scale drawings of these. Based on the drawings I first CNC-milled a bending jig for the curved beams: 

The slots have a smaller radius than the finished beams, because even if the stripwood was steamed well before being placed in the jig, they flexed back quite a bit after drying. 

Another jiq was made for the assembly: 

The milled jig might seem a bit overkill, but I like to fool around with the CNC router at our local model railroad club. The main frames were built in the milled jig, then rest of  parts were added using the drawing on a soft particle board as an underlay: 

The milled jig was just too tight for adding all the parts. I Should have allowed for a little more slop in the milled channels. It is also a good idea to mill double-wide channels and use filler bits to hold the parts tight. You can see that I did this for the long, straight beams.

The jig also really paid off when I drilled the holes for the nut bolt washer castings for the curved, laminated beam. The holes were drilled using the CNC-router. 

To sand all the angles, a disk sander is almost essential: 

A 12" sander might seem large for modelling, but I really hate the small hobby-sanders. I had a yellow and green disk sander from a German company, and it really sucked.  I feel it is easier to do precision work on heftier machines, and the size is no drawback at all. I use double-sided tape to fasten aluminium profile guides on the table. The small piece of MDF is for supporting small parts while sanding. I often work with really small parts on the sander, and at times my nails get a little shorter in the process. This might seem like a dangerous practice, and maybe I should not advocate it... But a sander is an entirely different beast than for instance a table saw. I have by accident touched the sanding disk while the machine is running, but no blood has ever been drawn.

Nut-bolt-washer castings from Grandt Line were installed in the curved beams: 

Another time consuming task was to install all the iron rods between the woodwork: 

The rods are chemically blackened 0.6mm nickel-silver wire. 

Some images of the drilling process for the rods: 

A mockup with the semi-finished trusses: 

The finished trusses: 

Next up: Etchings for windos and the gantry crane

For a long time, one of the projects on my bucket list have been a shadow box diorama of  an engine house/workshop at the terminal of “my” railroad, Thamshavnbanen. Thamshavnbanen was a metergauge shortline in Norway with a length of only around 30 km. It did not have more than 5 electric engines, so their rolling stock workshop was of an managable size for a modelling project in 0-scale.  Earlier, I have modelled  one of the engines and a couple of the mineral wagons operated by this railway. 

The main inspiration for the project were these two images taken in the period that I try to model, around 1935: 

The building is still standing, and even if all the machinery is removed (it is used as a warehouse), it still got a lot of character:

Before starting the actual work, I made a couple of mock-ups: 

As the workshop is quite symmetrical with doors at both ends I also made a mock-up with a mirror. A half-model of the gantry crane could be used for hiding  the edge of the mirror:

I have concluded that the first design with the side view was a bit too static.  And the mirror concept is perhaps a bit too contrived. 

The design with the diagonal cut has some drawbacks as well.  What I find most troubling is that the floor area on the left in the mockup has a triangular shape that  dissolves the clear separation between the inside of the shadow box and the outside world. I dont know if I make sense, but to me the space of the shadowbox "leaks" out due to this. I want the shadowbox to be an enclosed universe, separated from the viewers universe in the same way a framed painting is.

After visiting the Lyon Museum of Miniatures it struck me that the most dramatic of their shadowbox dioramas was of the "missing wall" type, and with a depth larger than the width: 

Another feature that also really adds to the drama are the light sources placed way back in the scenes. 

So I decided to use the old black and white images as guides for the design. The viewing aperture of the diorama will be an cross-section right in the middle of the building  I feel quite confident that this is a good approach, but I should probably make an mockup before progressing too far with the actual construction.  

Next: Construction of the roof rafters

“If you done it, it ain't bragging.”

And Roy most certainly did it!