Andy Hayter

Sadly not illegal @jamie92208.  French customs site clearly states that VAT is applicable from the first euro for all imports from outside the EU.

The old rules of thirty something euros being exempt was rescinded by the EU a couple of years ago.  You are right though that it makes buying small low value items hellishly expensive.   

One thing that can help is if you ask the seller to include your email address in the commercial invoice.  This usually results in an email from La Poste's  import department demanding the VAT but with a reduced fee to La Poste.

5 hours ago, MR Chuffer said:

Perhaps, but looking forward to tackling these although I have quite a few Geen kits, L&Y Diagram 3 and L&Y Diagram 1 , though I'm a bit concerned how I might weight the Dia. 1 2-part kit, unlike the whitemetal Geens...

Selective quoting missed off the "kits are as rare as rocking horse poo".  I and many others would wish that David's range would reappear.   Until then keep your rarities safe.

4 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

I don't think "fake" is what those two chaps said as they fell to earth!

But I would hazard a guess that one of the words they said started with the "f" and have a "k" in it. 

I agree Stephen I was more focused on the overall availability where the Midland at least gets a showing courtesy of Slaters.

18 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

Is it because there are now so many much better RTR wagons that kit building is less necessary? And the latest announcement of a 1907 RCH design will make even more kits redundant.

.

Jonathan

Really?

AFAIAA

no LYR wagons rtr and kits as rare as rocking horse poo if you exclude brake vans

GNR - yes we will get a loco coal wagon to RCH standards but most of their wagons of the period were on 9'6" wheelbase chassis.  We actually have more GER wagons - nothing wrong with that of course.

H&BR?

GCR - a few kits and Bachmann's 3 wagon club set where one is LNER and another CLC. 

.  

There are many holes even allowing for the promised but not yet delivered wagons.

Someone mentioned dark and gloomy a few pages back.  Same here.  It has been persisting down all day and to add to the gloom we had a 3 hour power cut probably due to the high winds causing HT cables to touch and short out the grid.  

Yes but without quite sophisticated analytical equipment and samples of all the thinners there is nothing to be done.

42 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

I knew about the surgical use of superglue but in my complete ignorance of such things I just assumed it wasn’t anything special and didn’t know that there was a medical version. Apparently with added plasticiser and some other minor changes. I don’t myself recall using it intentionally on cuts but I have got it in cuts unintentionally. 

There is probably minimal difference, except that the medical grade will have had to have had substantial medical testing; statistical analysis of the side effects (there are always side effects) and will have to be covered by huge levels of insurance- especially if sold into North America where any perceived defect is likely to cost millions.  

Pleased to say that our snow is disappearing almost as quickly as it came.  About half disappeared yesterday - and has filled all of the empty water butts that were set out just before the snow came. The rest is now melting fast.

Snow today.  From nothing this morning; I have just ventured out for the first time today to do the nightly rounds of emptying cat litter trays and filling food dishes and the drifts in places are crutch deep.  

Ah but I have an ongoing project* in the house.   Winter does tend to make the modelling room a tad cold so I have management authorisation to bring small projects into the house.

* More of that elsewhere later when a bit more progress has been made.

15 Degrees you say!  

Here it has snowed from around 08:00 onwards.  20 - 30 cm now with, in places, quite a lot of drifting.  

I am not even thinking of venturing out to cross to the grange and model floor.  

2 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

The secret to enjoying any hobby or interest in my opinion is to do it for your reasons and to enjoy what you do without worrying about whether others approve.

I agree but if you build layouts for public exhibition then outside approval is also required, so it is a bit more complex than your one liner.  

I despair of the "People who only xxx are not proper modellers" arguments.

The problem is that those who shout such negative (against others) comments do not realise that there is a whole spectrum of modelling and I am almost certain that they are not at the pinnacle of the I am much better/purer than you mountain.

To illustrate

You are not a proper modeller because:

You only run rtr out of the box.

You only make minimal changes to rtr items - number and name changes.

You don't build kits.

You don't scratch build anything;

You run on non-scale track.

You are using EM and not P4 (other scale combinations are available in almost all scales).

You have not modelled a real location.

You have truncated your real location. 

You have not done your proper research. That loco could never have pulled that piece of stock.  (Oh actually I don't have a layout but I do know what is right and wrong.)

So where do you sit on that spectrum?  

Me?  00 gauge.  Have kit and scratch built stock but am not afraid to use rtr.  Happily scratch building infrastructure but at the same time will buy in components such as window, doors, textured sheets etc..  

Ah yes. To misquote Kilgore, "I love the smell of Molybdenum Sulphide in the morning."

As a pre-war GCR modeller the only reference I can find for GCR dark wagon grey is on the Precision paints web site.  

As shown above it is much lighter and some sources indeed suggest LMS wagon grey as  good match, so your suggestion is a good one.  

With very limited access to Precision paints, I use Tamiya XF-66 light grey.

1 minute ago, St Enodoc said:

 

See:

 

http://www.minsocam.org/msa/collectors_corner/article/mohs.htm

But see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale

9 minutes ago, Tony Wright said:

Thanks Andy,

 

Then shouldn't it be Moh's hardness scale?

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

No No No.

The gentleman was Mr Mohs.  If you were to put an apostrophe it would be Mohs's - but we don't.

I don't understand the rules for these things but it is

Mohs scale for hardness,

the Beaufort scale for wind strength,

the Richter scale for earthquake strength,

Fujita scale for tornados

but for example

Newton's laws of motion.

It's Mohs harness scale Tony.  No apostrophe, since the inventor is Fredrick Mohs.

"To be a sport, I think that an activity needs to meet these three criteria:

1. It must be competitive in that there is the potential for victory or loss. The competing to be carried out by persons acting individually or in teams. It may also be carried out by individuals to compare their performance against a personal best.

2. It must contain a physical element requiring strenuous/developed muscular effort i.e. raises the heart rate, increases breathing or generates a sweat. This does not have to be a whole-body effort, but may be confined to part of the body.

3. It requires an element of developed/developing skill."

Since Mountaineering has just been mentioned, I will throw is potholing alongside it.  Criteria 2 and 3 certainly apply with both but the potential for victory or loss?    Victory perhaps against the objective to climb/descend your target and I suppose you could caveat that with "without loss of life"

@lezz01 I don't think you need the "2" in 2-Butanone.  There is only one configuration for a ketone bond on a 4 carbon chain.  So Butanone covers the molecule.

Sorry very off topic.

40 minutes ago, Long Line said:

 

 

What and who is irrelevant.. what i find concerning is that we are decending into a position whereby nothings going to get built unless we all rush out and state interest on proposed projects that arent even off the drawing board yet let alone reached EP or the pre build spending stage that we can look at.

 

What if folk just haven't heard of it yet? Not everyone sits glued to a screen awaiting updates or has a device pinging in their ear with updates hourly... they could be doing something else like modelling all the other stuff the rtr world don't do for example

 

Is it me or is this all going too far one way now!

 

 

 

 

Unless this is a model sold solely on pre-orders*, manufacturers already have a good idea of expressions of interest versus actual sales.  I think you read too much into this.

What is clear is that for more esoteric models, buying blind is becoming more and more the norm.  So far I have been lucky (?) and have picked up quite a number of models that would otherwise not have been produced

* In which case I would expect cancellation rather than delay.

3 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

Presumably they are stating no animal derived products were used (a lot of the materials used in commercial food production are animal derived).

 

Beware of presuming.  The quirks of British advertising law means that "something based" only means the majority of the ingredients are "something".   The rest could be very different.  In fact the only non plant based ingredients seems to be salt and acidity regulator (which might just be plant based but I doubt it) but some of the ingredients are highly processed.

Tomatoes (81%), Water, Fermented Soy, Modified Cornflour, Sugar, Rapeseed Oil, Salt, Acidity Regulator - Citric Acid, Spice Extract, Herb Extract

I think it got horribly expensive.

4 hours ago, rob D2 said:

Is their not like an NMRA standard set of eras ?

Yes full set of standards issued under the NEM norms.  The problem is they are centred on German railway history and sometimes they coincide with other country's development and often they don't get to a close match.