craigwelsh

Pity about the holes in it, looked like it was going to make a lovely bird bath .

Its a very nice bit of work by the useful Hutfield though it did weigh a fair bit!

Laser cut card sounds a less laborious solution to the brickwork than the individual chits!

The buffer height on this wagon matches that of the other. I used the S4 multigauge to check, also since removing a little bit of weight on the cattle wagon it is almost inline with the other two now. I'd guess less than half a mm difference. Seems I had a wee bit too much weight for the springs.

 

Any idea where I can get spare spring from or the material it's made from? I know it's guitar string but the metal type.

Ernie Ball plain steel from Strings Direct, from .10 to .12 usually.

Do us another 20 and we'll have em .

Sadly not quite for Castleton but they do look great Tim!

There is a wants area http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/forum/39-wanted/ . The blogsare for showing off work being built.

Still trying to resolve how I am going to wire up the layout but am hoping to have a chat about this on Friday. At present I am thinking of having the Up and Down Main wired seperately and the yard split into two - the coal and ash roads into the shed as one; and the sidings at the side of the shed as the other. The roundhouse will be another. Then of course, when it is extended to a circular layout there will be two for the fiddle yard.

I was thinking more of the split between DCC accessory power and track power. Either using separate boosters or circuit breakers on the track to protect the command station allowing it to still change the point motors. Your sectioning make sense though. We've got 5 pairs of bare copper sub bus on slattocks approaching the junction - Bury up/down, rochdale up/down and the goods loop and we'll probably add one for our yard there too. These are currently powered off either of our two 5 amp boosters so the down and up trains cant short each other out. Its also how we've had DC on one circuit and DCC on the other.

The only issue i've had so far is Dick having a lose screw in the choc block on his DC controller!

I suppose you could laser cut mounting plates in a decent thickness of ply for the Cobalts perhaps? You may have to manually countersink them though.

I'm pleased with the results of the decision to replace the flexitrack - thanks.

 

Oh and congrats on the job.

I do think its an improvement even if you had been alright with your newer C+L.

Thanks for that, its a relief to have something to get back into after xmas. I'll be down in Cardiff Thursday for a decent break before I start.

When Paul said you had that working i;d thought he meant attached to the layout.. I'll be interested to see the mounting bracket you use on them when Chris has one for you.

Are you going to run them off a separate power district or just fit a circuit breaker on the track bus?

I think keeping ply plain line on the mainlines will be worth the extra efforts.

Any closeups possible of the bogie spring mount would be great too for my Mitchell Castle in the cupboard.

I'd thought Philip Hall had been doing something with a Hornby Castle in P4 on the Scalefour Forum Mike? Interesting about clearance issues as I hadn't checked.

That has made quiet a difference to the feel of the layout. Expensive stuff? and where from?Mike

I've updated the bottom of the post to reflect the info, i've also discovered its sculptamold not mould!

£6.50 for a bag and we only used 6 handfuls so far so I don't think its that expensive as a means and even if plaster bandage were cheaper this is much lighter for an exhibition.

It does make a difference to visualising the layout I think.

Craig, did you lay this over the foam board, or was it used to fill in the area in photo 1... which looks like a big gap to fill.. or did you layer some board as in photos 2 and 3 first?Thanks... Jon

Photo 1 just shows the test piece I did posed on unfinished embankment. That embankment will need another layer adding before sculpting and covering with sculptamould.

The foam was landscaped before the covering shown in the other photos was added.

HTH

A nice overview of the system. Mike was working on the production booster last week; Slattocks is powered by two of the 5A booster prototypes.

The new throttle firmware to deal with loco handoffs is going to be useful, our throttles were upgraded to that firmware last Monday.

Control through WiiThrottle is very responsive with the system though the more useful aspects of CANUSB are DecoderPro programming and the ability to have a nice JMRI panel for pointwork.

The forthcoming CAN Servo board is being used by us for signals - 4 servos per board. We think we'll need to run a separate 5V bus for those though to avoid any power on twitches if powering from CBUS 12v.

Good to see another implementation of this system.

Crying out for a magazine centrefold or poster that .

Might help Brian flog some more bits too .

The last picture in particular works for me as the brighter nature seems to mix in the body blue and weathered brown a bit more and gives it a natural light tone.

Did the Tufnol come with the etches? They seem to have gone from the e-shop at the moment so i'll have to ask Jeremy about getting one to test.

The finished article is really superb and im glad you've got a bit of trackwork starting to go under it. Hope you have some track gauges though, those pips are very much a general guide. Regarding smaller points, B7s are probably a decent minimum, there are some details about the issues with A switches http://www.clag.org.uk/switch-traverse.html

This is all 16/0.2mm from CPC for the droppers, think we bought about £40 worth of rolls so i've got another couple of stripy colours yet for the goods yard and inner lines off the junction.

The green is actually old RS wire mainly stripped from the original install. Its an absolute pain to tin compared to the CPC new stuff so I wish i'd bought a new reel of green!

The CBUS and Tortoise drive wires are 7/0.2mm iirc as we really didn't need the amperage through those and the physical size difference is another good physical identifier of use.

Signals should be quite obvious too I think as they will probably use the original looms the servos usually come with. Magnets will probably get orange 16/0.2mm .

good luck with that

Uh, cheers

i built it as per the kit but now i have finished it & looking yes the brakes or lever is the wrong waylooking on the finney web site link below the kit in the 1st & 2nd photo is built the same as i havehttp://website.lineone.net/~cbwesson/4mm%20LSWR%20Van%20photos%20page%20%202.htm

I'll have to mention that one to Gerry, oops .

Did this take a decent amount extra compared to the average wagon kit in the end?

Looks spot on that

Craig can I assume this is the MMRC Dick who checked over your pointwork.... if so I'm sure my chair positions should be kept under wraps:-) Photos of the Slattocks dropper tags would be appreciated but I make no comment on your final sentence.

that's the one.

Wiring info up now. Wires are poked through the bottom of those tabs, soldered on and then snipped off the top. Once tested buried in ballast.

http://www.rmweb.co....e-about-wiring/

Haha fair enough. Can't be as bad as Paul's TPO saga . I'll be popping down to Cardiff this weekend to ask him more awkward questions about that .

Don't show Dick some of those chair positions, hope your switch anchors are all present and correct too .

i'll try to do another blog post soon on the Slattocks wiring so you get an idea what we attach to our dropper tags.

Can I assume this is laid onto new Templot alignment that Morgan completed?

I recommend the solder too, use it on my own underframe kits too. Bill Bedford has had sheets of little washers with the coach kits to account for variation in axles and bearings.

Personally I use Kean Maygib too for consistency and along with their wheels there is a slight bit of slop but i've not had as much as 1mm. Might want to try some Gibsons with those wheels, they usually cause splay so might be right in this case.

50g with 012" i'd say, you'd have to go a bit lighter if you used .010" on BB units.

At the moment Richard @ DCC Concepts only sells lamps with one led each way, but he is looking at putting 4 leds into one lamp. Now that will be an achievement and a half.

Could use red/white bi-colour leds.. http://www.unique-leds.com/index.php?target=products&product_id=1972

I hope that wood up there between the ties was supposed to have bowed like that!

Looks like a lovely old garage in itself actually!

Toddler? Am I missing something? Chris

Railway Modeller... apples and pears etc..

If there aren't pictures it didn't happen Tim...

I think the article was by the rmwebber mentioned.

I'd really recommend the MERG units where you can control the throw of the servos electrically. There are a couple of threads in the p'way section here showing them used on signals. Each board can control 4 servos I believe.

For our club layout Slattocks we'll be trialling an 8 servo board that plugs directly into our CBUS accessory system. We went for CBUS as it had advantages over DCC accessory control and we only need 4 wires going around the layout, 2 control, 2 power.

I really like this concept. As I see it, the letter-box view is an under-exploited means of avoiding the traditional birds-eye-view (which I think does little for most layouts).Making the front corner rounded as suggested above sounds like a good idea, eg:http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevardmedia/4014228666/in/set-72157622241440317

Heh that album has pictures of the furtive "You wana see my 00 gauge in the car park" episode at S4um..

I'd missed this earlier, looks good Bryn and I concur with the thoughts on overhanging the lighting and curving things.