rdr

i've had weller, antex and many more brands, but if you're just soldering track and similar jobs get yourself a 60w cheap chinese one with a bag of replaceable bits. There's usually an adjustable one for around £8-£10 or £20 with an electronic base on ebay. I've had these for quite a few years and they do the job well.

18 hours ago, teaky said:

I for one would be interested to see the construction to date.  Do you have any photos please?

very much under construction atm, which keeps getting sidelined by the need to work in the same space. It's for my layout "intermodal" and has undergone several design changes  and a house move. I have a thread for the layout on here "Intermodal in P4". The current and i expect the final setup will be five 1.5m long boards connected inline with the first two being the fiddle yard/traverser. I'm using roller bearing drawer runners to support the traverser boards and it will be controlled by a computer.

3 hours ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

I have never seen anything like that before. The main problem that has to be solved is reliable indexing both ends for all of the routes on the traverser. (The sum of the added spacing between lines on the traverser to produce the fanning out, may not exceed the traverse at the LHS as drawn.)

 

How large is the fiddle yard to be? If not too huge an alternative is to put the whole fiddle yard on the traverser. Then all lines can be straight across the break, and there is potential for multiple parallel running lines at both ends and 'any running line with any fiddle yard road'.

I have an 8 road 3 metre long traverser under construction that holds all the stock when not in use and splits in two to make it portable. The whole 8 road traverser moves with stock.

13 hours ago, kipford said:

Guys

thanks for the responses. I have no intention of sanding the print head, but the raft idea is great. Just running it through Chitubox now to add one. I will probably not be able to do another print until Friday. But I will report back the results.

i ran my machine with the original blue finish on the build plate for quite a while, but now and then a print would come unstuck or curve away from the edges. My bed was pretty flat so i didn't need to sand it to make it flat, i sanded the blue finish off and it improved the adhesion about tenfold. Now i need to make an effort to remove the print from the bed and all the failures i had before are history.

that's a major failure, are you still running your bed unsanded

16 hours ago, Railpassion said:

Am I missing something?

i'm referring to the thread content not your post, but as you have said there is a need for a better control system.

what you've asked for is easy to do, all you need is a transmitter, a receiver a power supply and a f/reverse speed controller. Also most modern controllers have a "models" feature which allows the controller to only drive one of the many "models" (tracks) you have via another receiver and speed controller. You could use this feature to power certain sections of the railway or if the mood takes you, driving the loco with it's own battery.

top hat refers to the outside shape of the bearing, cylindrical body with a large shoulder and no through hole. I would expect there to be two different versions for solid or pin point axles.

reward, without a second thought. 

a bit more work has been done, not as much as i would have liked though. The large radius curve idea has been shelved and the earlier end on traverser rekindled, mainly due to a fear of derailing on the curve and access to the fiddle yard which would be up against a wall. I'll have to shorten each board by 100mm to fit the 5 x 1628mm boards into the longer half of the workshop. 

Frames have been shortened and test fitted, so all is good there, legs now need to be made to support the frames in situ. As soon as i have the boards up on legs i'll post some pics.

this is going to sound even more bonkers, how about a 40" long carousel/magazine, like a revolver magazine in a gun only having the bullet space to hold the train.  Obviously the roads would need to be hung to remain vertical, also you could have it intersecting both roads so either priority could be used and have quite a lot of roads.

hconn, try facebook marketplace

try facebook marketplace

Herbert, good on you. P4 is not hard to do, trackwork is easy, there are kits to mod locos and changing wheelsets is a doddle. What you might want to consider is a 3d dlp resin printer, you'll be suprised what you can actually make for yourself. If you can use a cad program like Autocad, you can make you're own track parts, chairs, sleepers, literally anything if you can draw it. Don't listen to the negative comments from some, P4 looks amazing and runs amazingly well.

I took the missus to a model show this year and she's not into railways at all, but it was a treat for my birthday so she put up with it. Well after showing her the layouts and explaining the scales and different gauges she was a bit confused, so we sat down and she said "why are there so many different versions of 4mm scale". I explained the reasons and she said "can we go round again, so i can see the difference", so we did and at the end she could pick out the finer scale em and p4 layouts quite easily. I asked her how she could tell, she said "they looked nicer".

modern rc is so much easier now compared to the old days. I spent a lot of years in rc car racing when i was young, but the difference in battery life now is massive, with better motors and electronics it's a completly different hobby. Be carefull with charging the batteries if a LIPO fails you will not get the model back in a recognisable state.

It's an amazing sight to watch an rc controlled loco wander around the layout, as smooth as silk with no pointwork problems and running perfectly at very low speeds. I converted a Lima Western to rc, looking back it must have been around 30 - 40 years ago, but it drove so well i would never again use track power. 

Have a look at this system, it's very similar to my DCC AIR i'm developing. http://bluerailtrains.com/2016/04/30/bluerail-trains-dead-rail-system/.

All the benefits of dcc with zero track power.

Man on fire

Wild things

A quiet place

10 cloverfield lane

One flew over the cuckoos nest

Peters friends

here's a few to get on with.

agreed,  the times look ok for the grey resin. Not used it myself but i've seen other posts around the same values.

i'm a bit at a loss to see the point of EM. I've heard that the conversion of stock is easier to manage than P4, but there must be other factors that justify making your own track and modding stock to another fictional gauge.

P4 over OO, well it is about the look of the track and the feeling that it's right, pointwork has the correct clearances and actually looks real. Yes there are some that will show you a length of ballasted code 75 OO track and say "who needs P4 or EM, look at the realism of code 75". Yes i agree that it does look good albeit without any real comparison, but it all falls down when you look at the points/turnouts.

I like the look of P4 and enjoy making track and modding stock, but if that's not what you want out of your model railway then code 75 in OO looks a good option.

code 75 does make a major difference to the look of the track

it's taken a few weeks to settle in and setup the outbuilding as a workshop, so the next step is to make the main room in the spare 8 x 5m area to the side of the garden. This will add on to the outbuilding giving a pretty good sized "shed", and space for "Intermodal".

Plans have been tweaked and nudged and the fiddle yard has been moved to the rear of the layout. The plan is still in four main sections of 1630 x 1000mm with the added sections of 1630 x 500mm attached to the rear. This time the fiddle yard has an end traverser rather than the main boards traversing, this saves weight and keeps the boards thinner.

The overall size of the layout is 6560 x 1500mm

To explain the layout, passenger trains come through a tunnel to the second board and pass below the station forecourt and into the platforms, loco hauled trains will be able to run around on the second road. Container trains will also appear through the tunnel but on their own road entering the yard past the station forecourt and into the yard. There's a single loco traverser at the end that re routes the loco to the centre road to run around.

There will be two cranes to unload and load containers from the two small/medium container ships which should keep things busy, to either the trains or the section between which will have trucks waiting to be loaded. 

Directly above the station forecourt is a model of mine and my neighbours house, i thought a cameo appearance would be nice and it fits well in the space just after the road tunnel exit. Next along to the right is the station car park and following that is the staff car park and offices for the dock. A konecrane container lifter has pride of place just before the actual dock in it's own hatched off area. The dock is the final area with two ships full of containers ready to be shifted.

Both container cranes are shaped with extended arms like demonic "TT" shaped titans to cover the ships and trains while rolling along the edges of the roadway for the trucks.

DCC AIR is coming along nicely and has been tried by others already, good ideas are often thought up by a few people at the same time.

i've got it on chrome, plus a smaller ad at the bottom of the page.

here's an easy way to do it with a calculator.

Take the measurement, let's say it's 100mm in 7mm scale, then divide it by 7 and then muliply it by 10

100 divided by 7 x 10 = 142.857

the date is set, September 2nd, phew, finally moving. itchy fingers have been very active on templot and i'm up to plan number 72, that's a lot of ideas and changes. Way too many ideas have come and gone, some have been incorporated others have been forgotten, but the basic idea has been strong throughout all.

In my hiatus i managed to pick up a 42" hewlett packard 800ps printer which will print from sheets or a roll, so plans are afoot (well a bit longer that a foot) for a continuous printed track plan of 9.7 metres.

it is a major undertaking to operate a layout in an exhibition for one day, let alone two or three, so i take my hat off to all who make the effort to not only exhibit but also construct. 

We must remember who actually pays for the exhibitions, without the visitors whether allied to the hobby or not and at whatever age, there would be no exhibitions. You could say a layout at 50 - 60 inches high is designed to give a certain look when viewed at that height and children could be lifted up to view it, but then who lifts the wheelchair bound adults and not everyone is 6ft tall. I have a friend who is chair bound and used to love doing the rounds of the local ish exhibitions, but the trend of smaller but higher layouts that entice you to look closer to it, are totally out of bounds to him. He rarely goes to the shows now and i saw the interest die off for him over the years because of this viewing problem, which is really sad.

I attend exhibitions to see the quality of work, but most of all i want to be "entertained". I'm quite critical but fair, and appreciate the effort that has been made to get to this point.

"whose comfort is the most important" you make your own mind up on that one.

the point of an exhibition layout is to entertain the visitors, but there is also the thought of how to make that happen. It must be viewable for all but also able to convey the view that the exhibitor is after. After all it's the exhibitors view that made the layout and all the thought processes and designs were either from memories or pictures that captured the idea to start with. You will know what height to make it when you see what you've made.