Hawk

Thanks a lot! Havent started a layout yet, only a coouple of dioramas so far. But I would love to build a layout some day, there are so many great scenes to model on this line. Here is a little photo-essay, courtesy of Digitalt Museum. The photos go from port Thamshavn in the north to Løkken in the south: A lot to keep a modeler busy for some years!

Rather surprisingly, you can get turned rivets from a number of sources. Currently I get my rivets from Hassler Profile in Lichtenstein: http://www.hassler-profile.li/ He is a reliable guy, I send him cash in letters for payments, and have had no problems so far. Even if the site is only in German, you can order in english. What you are looking for are "Messingnieten", you find them under Home> Produkte> Schrauben... > Nieten> Messing Nieten You can choose from 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 and 1.0 rivethead diameters. For this project I used 0.6mm. 100 rivets cost CHF 9,50.

I am happy that my information was useful! It is a pleasure to be able to contribute to this fantastic forum.

Wow. Brilliant picture and modeling. Had to check out your blog to make sure that the station building was a model. I was convinced that it was the real building. The weathering is perfect.

Excellent set up! The full size threes in the background blends in perfectly with the modelled scene.

Here is a sketch of the bars:

The bending bars are machined from steel. I was fortunate enough that a friend made two pairs for me. But basically you need 2 pcs. of rectangular bars of your prefered length and a cross section of about 5mm X 30mm. You also need a second pair where one of the edges are bevelled. Ideally the should be 44 deg. so you can "overbend" the etchings 2 deg. In my experience the metal springs back a little, so 44 deg bevels give a perfect 90 deg bend. The bars need to be drilled to take the thumbscrews. One bar needs threaded holes. NB! Remember that you need to shift the holes sideways so that the thumbscrews do not crash when bending. Before my friend offered to make them, I searched in vain for a steel ruler of sufficient thickness and a proper bevel. If someone finds such a ruler it would be quite easy to make brakes like this. I get all my small drillbits from eBay. They are cheap, and for some obsure reason most Chinese and far east sellers offer free postage. The drill are meant for PCB drilling in CNC machines, but in my experience they work just fine for regular drilling. I use drillbits with 1/8" shanks. I prefer to use collets instead of chucks with my light Proxxon drill press, and I also use a CNC-router that only takes collets.

Time flies, and progress on the wagons have been rather slow. But I have finally made the brake shoes for the first wagon. My first idea was to make the brake shoes entirely from etched parts, and there is a picture of this design a couple of pages back. But then I realized it would be a perfect design for a wagon that eventually will lead to short circuits. So I decided that the actual brake shoe should be machined from an insulation material, and the hanger made from a etched part. I got myself a lathe dusted off, and I turned a ring with a slot for the etched part. Here is a little photo-essay on the process:

Ah, the brass hardware... Maybe the most frustrating task in this project has been the drilling of all the 0,35mm holes in the brass castings. Cast brass is pretty hard stuff, and the drill bits break at an alarming rate. I prepare a lot of the castings some months ago, but it seems I "forgot" to drill a lot of the necessary holes. So I had to brace myself for another drilling session. But this time I made a little modification to the drilling setup. This is how I initially set up the work: While the brass plate keeps the workpiece quite firmly in place, you can not feel it when the drill breaks through the casting and into the holder plate. And if you try to bore all the way trough casting/plate/casting I can almost guarantee you that the drill will break. This means not only wasting a drillbit, but also a quite annoying job with a dremel motor tool to free the casting from the plate. To succeed with this rather delicate drilling job you have to drill two holes, one from each side of the fork in the casting. Replacing the brass plate with a piece of stripwood gives an immediate feedback when the drill breaks through the brass, and I also think that the softness of the wood acts as a cushion. This is the new setup: The success rate increased immensely using this setup. You build, you learn!

Thanks for the kind words and the interest in my work! A little more work has been done on the wooden parts. Sides for the first wagon has been glued together. I thought this was gong to be a demanding process, but it turned out that it was far easier to glue them together than I thought. The challenge was to keep the tongues and grooves visible on the ends, since these will have the ends of the board visible. The process I followed was to spread a thin film of white glue on a plate of glass, and carefully touch it with the tongue of the board. This way glue was only applied to the top of the tongue, and with a little care no glue oozed out between the boards. I was careful to not apply glue to the last 3-4 mm at each end of the boards to avoid that the glue hides the tongue and grooves. After working so hard with the T&G boards, it would be a shame to hide them under glue! I also had to do all final sanding and painting before assembling the ends for the same reason. I am happy that the T&G´s are visible on the final parts. It is a quite subtle detail only seen by hawk-eyed observers and in extreme close ups, but I like it! The red side of the sides are brush painted with Humbrol 70 thinned 75/25 with white spirits. Before painting the read all sides of the wood was treated with silvered stain thinned 75/25 with isopropanol (rubbing alcohol). EDIT: The Silverwood stain has shown not to be lightresistant, so it has bleaced significantly. So I cn no longer reccomend this stain. Next up is to add all the brass hardware to the sides.

Thanks, Scott! A little progress report as well. (I am not even sure if it justifies a post, but here goes anyway) The opening mechanism for the side doors have been riveted together, and the connection to the hinges has been beefed up with two 1mm X 0,35mm washers: There are four such connection points for each wagon, and it was a pretty straightforward job to solder the washers to the etched part. You might argue that the washers are not strictly necessary but I think the joint looks much better when the washers+etched arm are thick enough the fill the forked gap in the blackened hinge entirely. Without the washers, there would have been a lot of "slop" in the connection. Here are the three other arms for the first wagon: In this extreme closeup it might be easier to see that this is a sandwich consisting of a 0,25mm nickel-silver etched part between two 0,35mm thick brass washers cut from 1mm brass tubing: By the way, I sincerely believe that I could never have soldered this assembly without my RSU and soldering cream. I don't think I would have been building metal models at all without this equipment. The Four Track Models RSU is my best modeling investment ever!

Thanks a lot for the encouraging comments! I really hope that my postings can inspire others to try their hands at scratch building. It is a lot of work, but fun too!

No, these casting were produced by a very fine Swedish modeler named Erik Walde. They were casted by Kore Brass from Erik´s hand built masters. They are not entirely correct for my wagons, but close enough.

Long time no post, but the last months of modelling time has been spent redesigning the etching artwork. The second generation of etchings has now arrived, and the the test build has gotten under way. I took my chances and ordered etches for 20 wagons, and so far I have not discovered any major flaws. One of the changes I made was to have the fasteners for the long rods that goes parallel to the wagon line up proper. Here is the test assembly: It might look trivial, but if you look closely you will see that there is in fact a rather complicated relationship between the parts involved. The present state of the wagons: And about those etches for 20 wagons, my latest estimate is that it will take at least 60 hours to build one wagon. I have to find ways to speed up construction!

I´m mighty impressed by the RC lorries showmn in this thread! One day I might try to build one myself for a display layout. I wonder if anyone have tried to build a programmable RC lorry? What I would love would be to "record" the manual driving of a RC vehicle, and to have a computer/controlling device that can replay the movements.

I agree, of course. A scale drawing made with methods like this will always be an approximation. I would use it only as a last resort, or in addition with other bits of information.

I beg to differ. If there is less distortion in an image, the vanishing points will move further apart, and this will increase the distance from the horizon line to the Station Point. Just like you are further from the object when you use an telephoto lens compared to when using a wide angle lens.

There really should be a photoshop plugin for solving this... I really got my hopes up with Gimp, so I was quite disappointed when I read in the "help" information on the perspective function that it does not really take perspective drawing rules into account, it just removes the distortion.

Thanks for pointing med towards Gimp! It is certainly helpful for removing the distortion. But I still try to wrap my head around the main challenge: Is it possible to remove the distortion *and* remove the foreshortening without knowing any of the objects dimensions? Given that the object in the photo indeed is a box with all sides at 90 deg. to each other and that opposite planes are parallell. The result would of course have no scale, but the proportions should be correct. I would think that using 2 point perspective drawing techniques in reverse, this should be possible!

As the prototypes for my scratch building projects are pretty obscure, I often have to make scale drawings based on photos and a couple of known or even guesstimated measurements. But I have never been able to figure out the exact procedure for removing the perspective from the photos. In theory, it should be possible to make a scale drawing by constructing a two-point perspective drawing ”in reverse”. So I tried a little experiment. I wanted to see if I could calculate the correct height (Z) and width (Y) of this wooden box using only the picture and the length (X). I have made it a bit simpler for myself by taking the picture straight on without tilting the camera, so Z is unshortened. So the challenge is to remove the foreshortening on X and Y: Using standard 2-point perspective drawing theory I established the horizon and two vanishing points: Then I constructed the View distance, station point and measuring points: Next step was making a measurement bar and finding the unshortened length of the X and Y sides: Now it should be just a matter of scaling everything so that the width becomes correct based on the known X dimension of 153mm. This should in theory give the correct Y and Z dimensions. And measuring the height on the drawing gives indeed the correct height within a reasonable margin. But the Y came out too short, only around 80% of what it should be. I did the same experiment with a diffent box and got the almost exactly the same error. So I am doing something wrong. Does anybody have a suggestion for where I went wrong? I would also love to hear from others that have tried to make scale drawings the same way, and maybe with methods that actually work… Any input is very welcome !

Your results are very convincing, but how do you avoid cutting throught the paint at raisesd detail like rivets?

Brilliant work! Have you descriped your painting and weathering techniques anywhere?

You are right. That the floor resembles an inverted "V" is quite obvious from the prototype shot at the very beginning of this thread. You can clearly see a triangular opening in the end.

I tend to agree. At © I think we can see a groove in the board. If you look futher up in the opening, there is no sign of texture or cracks. The lighting is also better here, so any cracks should be visible ( B ). This indicates that there is metal sheeting covering everything. Scrutinizing the image I have also discovered som shadows behind the hinges (A). Could there be some brazing supporting the fixed three plank part of the sides?

The biggest challenge for the master was that the long, thin design made the waxes very brittles. I wanted the irons to be just 0,3mm thick, but had to increase the thickeness to 0,4 mm. Several other printing services refused to go below 0,5mm. The other problem was the hex nuts. Most of these had a bolt sticking up, and this bolt had a diameter of 0,3mm and height of the same. These printed OK. But on each iron I needed to drill a pair of 0,3mm holes for nickle silver pins that are used for pinning the fittings to the wooden sides. These blind holes should also have a diameter of 0,3mm and a depth of same. The problem was that some of these holes pinted just fine, and som others closed up. Prescision wax needed to fine-tune their machine and process to get the print right, and I think they tried two or three prints before they succeded. My impression is that Prescision Wax takes great pride in their work, and that they threat every customer just the same, no matter how small the job is. I will certainly use the company in the future. By the way, the pocess for these parts were a bit unconventional. Wax prints are usually used for making a one-off metal master wivh inturn is used for making a silicone rubber mould for the production waxes. With a metal master, you can choose between using heat vulcanisation rubber or room temperature vulcanisation rubber (RTV-rubber). But Dave made a RTV-master directly from the Solidscape wax print. This is not an easy task with a fragile wax master like this. Prescision wax was hesitant to even ship the wax print to the US, they had serious doubts it would survive the journey. I do not know the details of your master, but I feel certain that if anyone will be able to pull it off, it would be Prescision Wax and Dave Sciacca/Valley Brass & Bronze.