Pikey

Finished - I had one spare piece of track! Realised just in time that you have to slightly file down the lugs where they connect into the next piece - and from then on I did 20 links without breaking a single one. Havent quite worked out how you join them up, but I've got more things to do before I can do that anyway. I've installed all 12 rollers (2 top, 4 bottom, each side) but I havent fitted the tension wheel yet, and the driving wheel shown in the photos I think needs modification before I can attach it to the gearbox output shafts. Think I might leave all this in plain brass, as it looks quite authentic. Although I guess the real colour would be a sort of black / dirty browny grey.

Here's my progress on the bulldozer so far: I've also made about half of the caterpillar tracks, and broken most of the spare pieces in the process, I really hope I've got enough left!

I've not used them for electronics yet, sticking with what I know there. Also, my soldering is nowhere near good enough to stick wires to those tiny pads! 'DasMikro' on facebook is their official page, I followed the links there to get to the product on AliExpress. I was a bit nervous about ordering from there but it all went smoothly

The third item of plant I'll use on my layout, in addition to the wheel loader and the telehandler is a Liebherr bulldozer. This is a kit from a company called DAS87 (a Chinese company with a deliberately German-sounding name). You can buy their stuff on AliExpress, and I've had good results with their 4WD Land Rover kit so I decided to order a Unimog and this bulldozer: It comes in a small metal tin with a plethora of tiny brass pieces, a couple of motors and a 3D printed body shell, cab and blade. It also comes with NO instructions (!) The kit costs £110 including delivery from China, and you'll have to pay VAT if customs decide to check your parcel, which on this occasion they did. Certainly not cheap, especially when you consider the cost of a servo, battery and receiver on top, which adds about another £50 to the project. Delivery took less than 2 weeks - well under the 20-40 days advertised. So far I've put together 10 of the 90 individual pieces of the caterpillar tracks, which is going to be a super tedious job. I should be able to use this to tidy up the sand and ballast bins on my layout

Same way I've done it on the Telehandler - a motor fixed to the bottom bit turning a threaded rod, and a nut fixed to the top bit. When you operate the motor, the threaded bar spins round inside the fixed nut causing the extending bit of the boom to move in and out I have a Kibri rail crane which I bought with the intention of motorising. This has been on the back burner for a while now, but I'll revisit it at some point.

I have replaced the motor operating the forks with a 4mm motor - which looks so much more in keeping with the original. I originally used one of these on the bucket of my Leibherr loader - but lifting a metal bucket full of sand or gravel, scraping it along the ground etc was too much for a 4mm motor so I replaced it with a 6mm one. But for this telehandler, there is no real weight ever going to be on the end of these forks, so although it doesnt work quite as well (it has a much higher starting voltage requirement, making it difficult to make small adjustments), I think I can overcome this with practise. I just need to tidy up the wires and paint it yellow now

I use Sol Expert for gears and motors, also batteries. I get the receivers, servos and a choice of some larger batteries from Micron here in the UK. I sell kits for £110 which include a pre-wired receiver, servo, battery, motor/gearbox, steering axle, brass tube for bearings, brass rod for steering linkage, presentation box, UK delivery and specific detailed instructions for how to convert a Transit van. Which if you price those parts up individually, including the postage from various places (especially Sol Expert in Germany) is roughly the same as you'd pay for it yourself, so I thought it was a pretty good deal - but so few people seem to want to buy them that I ended up just using my stock to make more models for myself.

Video of it working. Poor quality of driving, I've not got used to it yet!

How about a JCB Loadall then This was fun. I wanted to get something up and running without the pain that would inevitably come from fully implementing the 4WD / 4WS, so I decided to use a fixed driving motor/gearbox for the front wheels, and steer the rear wheels using the mechanism from the standard model operated by a servo lying flat underneath the chassis. This works 'ok' - although the dowels they use to hold the wheels on have too much friction to the hub so I had to drill them out and re-fit the hubs with a copper insert and new brass axle pins, and because the hubs are made of quite flexible plastic there is a lot of free play in the steering and sag in the wheels. The mudguards are also part of this moulding, so on the front axle I had to cut these off, bend them and glue them to the chassis. I used a 'G494' motor/gearbox from Sol Expert to drive the front wheels, which has a perfect ratio for a piece of construction machinery like a telehandler, and drives very well. The arm goes up using a 6mm gearmotor lying flat in the rear half of the body (the drive motor takes up the front half), with an S15 screw and a Z35 gear. This works pretty well but isnt quite aligned properly. I drilled the standard pivot out and enlarged the holes to 2mm - these now house short sections of 2mm diameter tube which act as bearings for the 1mm diameter rod. The forks are a similar mechanism but using a 19 tooth gear to save room. The motor for this is the biggest shame I think - if I'd just used a plain 6mm motor (the silver bit) it would look fine but would be too fast to be usable, so you have to have the planetary gearbox on the end (the black bit) to slow it down sufficiently to control the movement of the forks. The telescoping part of the arm is operated by a 4mm gearmotor turning a 12BA shaft inside some brass square tube with a 12BA nut on the end. This wiggles around a bit in operation, so I think a better solution would be a completely new arm made out of two brass square tubes that slide perfectly inside one another. The switch and charging socket are (partially) hidden in the engine compartment, but there are some hefty diecast lugs taking up most of the room, which by the time I'd realised this it was too late to drill both of them out without risking serious damage to the bits I'd already done. The 70mAh battery and receiver (RX43, servo + 4 motor control) are crammed into the cab, but it doesnt quite fit as you can see. I've also added an orange flashing led to the top of the cab, and this combines well with the green led on the RX which simulates the green light you'll see on these to indicate the driver is wearing their seatbelt Video to come. Here's some pictures for now:

I completed something else in a few days that was pretty easy to be fair - a National Express coach, using one of the Train Tech smart screens as a destination board: Plenty of room for a massive (for me) 750mAh battery, and all the electronics under the seats - except the battery didnt quite fit so I cut the middle few seats out in the end. The tinted windows mean you cant really see anyway. Hardest part was removing all the metal for the motor and the steering, as its a fully diecast chassis! I needed a voltage upconverter, as the screen runs on 9V and all the rest runs on 3V, but that was only a few quid from Andy at micronradiocontrol. The motor I used was this one: https://www.sol-expert-group.de/1zu87modellbau/Motor-und-Getriebe/Getriebebausaetze/Getriebebausatz-G735::1241.html as I had a lot of room I thought I'd try it. It has the characteristics of the 7mm based motors I started off buying from Germany, ie very noisy and will run really slowly or really fast, but without any real control over the transition between them. Not ideal, but also not expensive at under 18 Euros. You can see how it runs in the video, although I think the axle is ever so slightly bent which isnt helping.

That is first class

F-Pace is finished I'm not happy with the gearbox yet - some running in and a little oil might make it smoother hopefully.

With a sort of a bodge and a fluke in the sequence programming department, I've managed to programme the 3 different modes I wanted from the lights - off, headlights on, beacons on and headlights flashing. The roof beacon is slightly under-par for a few seconds until the flashing LEDs get out of sync, and then it looks great - but ultimately I would look to program each LED individually in a strobing pattern to accurately mimic the real thing Video below:

Yes, I've got one of them. They're not very good Its the wrong scale and its quite a basic toy-like model anyway, with crude steering and way-too-fast gearing making it almost impossible to manuevre at realistically slow speeds, and a plastic remote control. All of which contribute to it being a toy / gimmick that you will get bored of very very quickly. I think I played with mine for 20 seconds before deciding it wasnt worth the money - despite it being frankly remarkable that anything like that can be designed, manufactured, shipped, taxed and sold at a profit for under £100.

Finding the same problem trying to program the lights for the police car as I had with the ambulance. I cant get any sequence to work until you input the 'enable pad' command - and then as soon as you do that the light comes on and stays on and there doesnt seem to be any way of turning it off! Its very frustrating, as I seem to be following the code on the example on the Deltang website almost exactly - and their lights work properly. http://www.deltang.co.uk/prog4-seq.htm Other than that, the police car should be ready to go very soon.

After a brief delay I have now received the receiver (lol) and fitted it in position on the underside of the roof. There's just enough space for a 70mAh battery underneath it. While the glue was setting, I've also started work on what remains of the chassis, cutting out a slot for the switch. I still have to fit the charging socket and obviously the motor into this piece.

Here's the steering axle assembled, using the model's original wheels which are massively oversized - a scale 22" compared to I think 18s on the real one. This actually causes me a bit of a headache, as to get them to turn I will have to raise the ride height by quite a lot. Hopefully it wont look too bad. The second photo shows the linear servo test-fitted upside down and back-to-front - this is to get the larger of the two cogs at the back and out of the way of the front left wheel on full lock. Photo sequence is now up to date as of yesterday, and I'm now waiting for the receiver so I can wire all the lights up and program the flashing sequence:

The standard model (with a roof beacon placed on top for effect only) I bought this on saturday afternoon. By Monday evening I had the headlights installed and tested: As it happens, when I tested the blue roof beacon, it didnt work - so on Tuesday I ordered a clear roof beacon, which arrived on Wednesday and was duly fitted: I had also started to test-fit the steering axle at this point, having cut up the parcel shelf to make a spacer to mount the front wheels far enough away from the body so that they turn properly. I've also filed a tiny bit from the wheel arches, and I may yet have to file a touch more.

Inspired by the ambulance, and following Oxford's release of the Jaguar F-Pace police car, I thought I'd have a go at one of them too. Its quite a lot bigger than a Land Rover Defender, so it should be relatively easy If I remember, I'll try and do a sort of step-by-step photo sequence as I go along.

I've just finished an ambulance, complete with flashing emergency lights (and all other lights including indicators, head and tail lights and reversing lights etc) I'm not happy with the motor, its jerky for some reason, so I need to sort that out. And I dont get why the grille lights are on instead of off in the normal state. I've used the programming function to make the grille lights 'flash flash flash pause', which was quite tedious to do but the effect is worth it I think, specially in combination with the beacons which use flashing leds, it makes a good likeness to the multiple flashing/strobing lights on the real thing. A good tip I found out from a dutch 1:87 modelling Facebook group, is to use black nail polish to mask around the LEDs where they fix to the back of the light fittings, because its thicker than paint and doesnt conduct electricity. So you can paint it on liberally without risking a short.

Ooh, another patron of the art of making tiny RC stuff Transmitters I use are the Orange TX6i, available from HobbyKing for about £70, or the Jumper T8SG, available from Micron for about £90. The Jumper is smaller and more versatile/configurable but the Orange has really good control sticks and runs on AA batteries. I've not found anything cheaper that has the functions you will need. Steering axle is impossible to make in OO I'd guess, but you can get different width ones from various places. Sol-Expert has a few, also MCCCarParts in Holland and KKPMO in Poland do them. If you want a kit containing all the bits you need for a OO gauge van, I sell these for £110 although I am short of a few parts just at the moment. Search @JPModels2018 on Facebook for more info

I have fitted 8 yellow LEDs as marker lights on the trailer for the DAF XF: Also I'm experimenting with a system to raise and lower the jacks to allow auto coupling and uncoupling. Its quite a simple setup - just a bent 1mm diameter brass rod through the stanchions which I've drilled out, and a threaded nut on the top bit. The gear on the end of the threaded bar is operated by a worm gear fixed to a motor glued to the underside of the roof of the trailer - which moves the feet up and down.

Have you got a 'speed' control for the steering channel on your transmitter - if so, you could slow the steering right down to give a more realistic look. Other than that (and needing a driver) it looks thoroughly excellent

Bargain! They're £5 for a pack of four from Sol Expert, hence I dont usually use them :-O

Latest project is a DAF XF. This one is going to have both rear axles driven, all lighting functions including being able to flash the top lights, and will also have a driver in the cab. I've tried to do a twin axle drivetrain before, without success - but that was before I had a 3D printer Selected progress photos below: