Fastdax

Brake Lights and Test Run Here's the rather messy result of cutting out the back doors and reattaching them using 0.6mm nickel-silver wire as hinge pins. I drilled through the cast hinge bodies on the van's rear panel and superglued the hinge pins to the doors. When cutting out the doors, I also had to cut off the rear light / number-plate panel. This gave me the opportunity to drill through the lights 0.8mm then 2mm: And embed 2mm red LEDs into the floor pan for brake lights. Normally this panel would be removed from the chassis with the bodywork but, like this, it can stay connected permanently to the radio receiver (when it arrives). There's a bit of cleaning up of filler and paint to do, but the LEDs give a good impression of the "Dalek's eye" brake light covers. One nice feature of the radio receiver I've ordered (Deltang Rx41D) is that it automatically lights the brake lamps when decelerating. I also added an on/off switch and wired the motor through this to the battery. Now we can see what the full 3.7V produces in terms of speed: I think this looks like a very reasonable top speed.

Back Axle The motor/gearbox unit is a ubiquitous 150RPM N20 gearmotor from ebay, as are the nylon 3D-printed bevel gears with 2mm inside diameter. The gears fit on the 2mm nickel-silver rear axle with a bit of boring out. The motor output shaft is 3mm so I had to drill through one gear, hoping that the 2mm hole would self-centre the 3mm drill bit. It did - sort of. The final gear wobbles a bit but stays in mesh with the axle gear. For rear axle bearings I simply used the Oxford axle location. It's a good fit for the 2mm axle. The motor unit was epoxied to the floor pan, with a few bits of packing to get it pointing directly at the axle. A lot of the plastic floor had to be removed to allow this. The previous picture also shows the modified steering cross-shaft whose shape stops the wheels turning too far. By varying the amount of bend in the 0.8mm wire, I can set the front tracking. I also made a front support for the front axle rocking shaft. The battery is a bit overkill at 1000mAh but it's what I had in stock already. It fits neatly to the van floor between the wheel arches. It should run the van for days! On the side of the steering servo is a tiny distribution board made from Veroboard. This allows all the positive and the negative connections to be made easily. For a circuit, I used Giles' diagram in MRJ #271. I haven't got the radio gear yet, but I should be able to wire the motor to the battery to see what top speed looks like.

Many thanks for the kind words David!

Not sure about that Giles, but many thanks anyway!

Front Axle I made the rocking, steering front axle as simple as possible since I don't have a lathe or milling machine. I also soft-soldered everything together. Giles did give me a demo of silver-soldering at Warley a few years ago but I'm hoping regular soft solder is strong enough. The front axle is basically four layers of 1mm x 3mm brass strip, soldered together in a sandwich. The top and bottom layers have rounded ends and 0.8mm holes for the kingpins. The middle two layers are shorter and are just for spacing. I set the kingpin holes 31mm apart as this should give an overall width of the front axle that replicates the original die-cast model. The steering stub axles are short lengths of 1.5mm square brass, with 0.5mm brass strip soldered on for steering arms. This 2mm sandwich fits nicely between the axle top and bottom plates. The steering arms have the holes for the cross-shaft linking to each other and to the steering servo set slightly inwards to form a proper Ackermann steering angle. This allows the inner wheel to steer more sharply than the outer, which is useful when negotiating tight turns. There should be a straight line from the kingpin, through the hole in the steering arm, to the centre of the back axle. The square 1.5mm stub axles are a tight fit in the 2mm ID bearings in the wheels, needing only a very slight wipe with a file on the corners to get them to push in tightly. (Pythagoras says that the diagonal of the 1.5mm section is 2.12mm). The swivel kingpins are actually a single piece of 0.8mm nickel-silver wire, bent up at the ends. This avoids having to solder in close proximity to the moving bits. The wire is held in its centre by a blob of glue, which can be broken if I ever need to dismantle the axle. A short length of 1.6mm ID brass tube soldered across the top of the axle forms a rocking pivot: I mounted the axle on a length of 1.6mm brass rod, which I superglued to different places on the floor pan until the ride height looked right. A lot of hacking of the plastic floor pan was needed to allow the front wheels to rock and turn fully: I'll fix the rod more permanently with epoxy and add a front bearing later. A tiny Hobbyking 5320S 1.7g servo is set into the floor to be the steering actuator:

Station Building I did manage to prime the main building: I also constructed two chimneys, each of which had many more parts than the whole main building: They now need chimney pots and flaunching. I started to 3D-print some pots but my Anycubic Photon seems to have split its transparent film, halting progress there. I have been distracted by making a radio controlled Austin K8 van though, as documented over on my workbench thread.

Radio Controlled Austin K8 Van Lately I have been inspired by @Giles Favell's wonderful radio-controlled 7mm scale vehicles. His exploits in this parish, on YouTube and in MRJ #256 and #271 are to be wholly admired. In what follows, I give due thanks and acknowledgement to Giles' expertise and instructions, as my attempt is based heavily on his words of wisdom. For a while I've had a British Railways Austin K8 van by Oxford die-cast, so I thought I'd give it a try to make it r/c. It has a capacious van body to get all the r/c gear in. I'm not so skilled or ambitious as Mr. Favell as to attempt an Austin car yet! It has proper rubber tyres as well (important!) Most of the engineering required is concerned with the front axle. This needs free-rotating hubs, steering and 3-point compensation to keep all the wheels on the road at all times. The wheels are plastic with bosses for 2mm axles, so I carefully removed the bosses leaving a 5mm drill mark as deep as I dared, until it just broke through the face of the wheel. Then I could lube up the hub ball-races and dummy stub axles and epoxy them into the wheel backs, making sure they stayed perpendicular to the wheel. The trick with these vehicles is to get the steering pivot (the king pin) as far into the back of the wheel as possible, so the wheels turn on the spot without travelling forwards or backwards in the wheel well. That's why I got the hubs as far into the front wheels as possible. The lube allowed me to remove the dummy axles when the epoxy had set, leaving the ball race hopefully still free to spin. The van was dismantled, showing that the floor is in two parts - an upper and a lower. I glued them firmly together to be a rigid base for the butchery which would be necessary to get the axles in. While the body was in bits, I cut out the rear doors as I want to make them operate under radio control. This Oxford die-cast metal is tough stuff and I had to hack into the bodyshell quite crudely with a razor saw to get the doors out. I'll fill in the extra cuts in the roof later. And paint in where I have ruined Oxford's nice finish. Offerston Quay has a road vehicle route from off-stage at the right-hand end, over the railway line, and to the warehouse at the left-hand end. I want this van to be able to drive through the scene, do a three-point turn, open its rear doors and back up to the loading dock before closing the doors and returning once more to the right-hand end. Whether I can achieve this, we shall see! I've reached my 10Mb upload limit for this post. More soon.

Station Building A bit more progress, with roof sub-layer, extra wall layers, dental brickwork, window cills, unidentified hole in the gable, and a plinth. 'Standard Joe' measures the height: I think this is nearly ready for some primer, which always ties the whole thing together.

Station Building I was going to re-make the foamboard skeleton of the station building, but I realised that my mockup was dimensionally accurate enough. I stripped off the support for the canopy roof, planned where the windows will go, and extended the length a bit with new 3mm foamboard: Since I'm only making half a building, I have a cunning plan to extend its apparent size using a mirror under the canopy. Whether it works or not, only time will tell but I held a mirror in position to see if the effect works. The 'split' will be down the middle of the main doors: This is the right-hand end of the layout with all buildings removed from the high level: The wall cladding is 1, 2 or 3 layers of Slaters English bond plasticard brick sheet. The windows and arched header bricks are from York Modelmaking. The prototype station (Duffield - photo above) has 2 different sizes of windows but I only got one size from York, so I'm making this minor compromise. Progress so far. I trimmed off the roof overhangs as they were visually too thick. I will replace with thin card:

Thanks Barnaby, that's an interesting suggestion. I have some black India ink which I'll take a look at.

Wires and Cables Who was I kidding? Knowing that I could add detail made me kind of itchy until I had had a bash at it. So I added signal wires (single cores from multi-core layout wire), supported on cast brass pulleys, and anonymous cables, supported on laser-cut (4mm scale, but hey) hanger hooks: Even in 7mm scale, these details are tiny! They need weathering to remove the shiny finish and I'm pondering how best to do this without swamping the brick detail. Now I need to get on with the station building, although I've been distracted by @Giles' lovely radio control vehicles ...

PM sent. Edit: Messages crossed! I did build one of these wagons as recorded here and maybe it addresses your specific points.

Thanks Kit! The brickwork is textured, printed brick paper from ebay. Not Redutex, but the back of the paper resembles textured wallpaper. It gives the front a pleasing look.

Thanks Adrian. The bare board (in true lazy-man fashion) is not visible behind the parapet wall that's normally in place there.

Thanks Barnaby!

Point Rodding The left-bound point rod now connects to the turnout, via a compensator: I made a representation of a Midland Economical Facing Point Lock, as would be required here: When it's hidden under a cover, the lack of detail can't be seen:

Looking good, Ade!

I should make it clear that the signal box kit is by Rail Model (link) not LCut. The interior is mostly Springside whitemetal castings, with a bit of Severn Models etched brass parts added (plus some scratch-building). I do have quite a bit of LCut stuff, but I preferred the look of the RM offering.

Many thanks for the kind words again John!

Point Rodding I got round to adding some lead-offs from under the signal box and bellcranks and point rodding. There are signal wire pulleys also, but no actual wires. i may or may not add them ... The rodding is Wills 'OO' point rodding, which is well over-scale for OO but matches the MSE 7mm rodding quite well, as I previously wrote about here. There is a single rod leading left towards the single point on the high level and two rods disappearing off the right-hand end, under the station canopy, to who knows where?

Lovely!

Is that their standard OO range of backscenes?

Thanks Stuart.

Grass I've been playing with the static grass. The cruel camera shows all the little fibres I thought I'd vacuumed up ...

I must have a sort of reverse-auto-spell-check as I didn't even notice your typo until you pointed it out!