Geordie Exile

Thanks for your comments, Ray. I grew up on Marden Estate, about 10 miles away from the pit. Was dragged a couple of time to Backworth Primary School when it became Backworth Drama Centre. And the artwork for the wagon etch is progressing, slowly, so watch this space...

You mean I needn't bother putting a stamp on that letter to the Patents Office, then?

Well that went up with fewer swearies than I expected. And only three bits fell off. The distortion is mostly the fault of the phone camera, it's squarer than it looks. Honest. I've just tack-soldered it for the moment. Now to add the two layers of corner columns, painstakingly folded using my (as-yet-unpatented) clamp-n-bend-n-pray tool. After that, infill the bits between the windows with brick-embossed plasticard, glaze it, floor and roof it, add the opening windows, and paint it.

I'm horrible aware I'm bouncing from project to project! Since Christmas, I've knocked up a shunting plank (no, I don't have a working loco to go on it yet!), built a Fencehouses P4 hopper, and started the artwork for my first wagon etch. I've also created an etch which I hope will turn into the tall windowed building at the back of this photo: Well, the etch arrived from PPD a couple of days ago. I've built the concrete pillars/horizontals as a series of laminates, two or three layers deep: (It turns out that a spare nasal swab from a lateral flow test is a pretty good solder paint brush). The pieces to the left are the corner columns - indented for the first laminate to fit onto the lintels, and then solid for the outer laminate. I've given the building a pretty good scrub with an electric toothbrush, but it still needs a good brush with the awful glass fibre weapon of torture. And then the folding begins.

Bob's sent me some etched stanchions: you laminate 6 together per stanchion (times 4 per wagon, times 14 wagons...)

Our posts crossed, but as you can see from my reply above that's my Plan B. Great minds!

I thought I'd been quite canny with a minimum amount of tabs, but having seen how (relatively) solid the sheet was I could definitely have used fewer. I kept them all at 0.5mm width, although two etched through so I'm going to check my artwork to see if those were narrower. Fold lines are 0.2mm, and again I think that might have been too narrow. The body of the building is too large to fit in a vice, so I've tried holding it flat with a steel rule while attempting a bend. Not bad, but not great. I hadn't thought of weakening the fold with a knife, so I'll give that a go, although I've accepted the possibility of adding (a lot of) microstrip ledges once everything else is done. Thanks, both, for the benefit of your experience. Richard

Well, my etch came back from PPD. First three lessons: - use the bare minimum amount of tabs. Every one of them needs cutting, twice, and filing, twice. - my window ledges (the horizontal red lines on the body of the main building above) ain't never gonna fold without bending the narrow window frames they're attached to (see pic). - next time, use the trick of fully etching (invisible) folds, with a couple of tabs, to make the folds much easier.

"Brave": you spelled "Foolhardy" wrong The geometry of the internal sides is doing my head in, as evidenced by the various paper versions currently littering my desk. But, this is the wagon I want, and I'm not on a deadline, so I'll keep plugging away. And as I think "what else can I put on a test etch" candidates for etching keep popping up (window frames, doors, obviously, fencing too, winding wheels to replace the 3D printed ones I was so pleased with a year ago...)

P.S. Here she is when she had a proper job, shoogling wagons around at 'my' pit! Photo credit: Sassaby/Flickr

Walk before I run! As @Kylestrome's demonstrated, I've barely got to grips with straight lines. Curves are for the grown-ups

Just re-read your post, Ben, and realised I misunderstood it. The two lowest planks on the sides will fold 30 degrees (ish) and sit on top of the solebar. R

Cheers, Bill. I'm not familiar with the book, and those dimensions would have been useful to confirm what I've got. I suspect the I've seen the photograph already, one way or another! Hey, Ben. If you're referring to the bit I think you are, that's the strapping which I've already considered in terms of the fold required. (It'll be etched as a side/end strap with a top-to-bottom fold. This before & after shows what my thoughts are: But it also shows I've got the width wrong on the bottom portion! My plan is to print the 'finished' artwork onto plastic card at 4mm scale to try a test fit before I commit to nickel-silver (and incur those costs!) Richard

Don't know if this counts as on my workbench, but it's what I've spent the last few evenings working on. Fenwick Pit was part of the Backworth system, which added 200 bespoke wagons to its fleet from 1938, many of which survived until the pit was shut. These 15t hoppers from Charles Roberts have an unmistakable end, with the lower planks not there - the only reason I've come up with is that it would allow the sloping interior sides to be banged to encourage discharging, but I'm open to other suggestions (saving wood therefore cost and weight?). There's dozens of them in this photo: (source: Flickr - Billy Embleton Collection) I've been playing with this using QCAD - at the moment I'm barely thinking about which elements get half-etched, or joined together and hinged. Rather I'm concentrating on producing 2D versions of pictures. This is where I've got so far: (Source: My desktop!) I'm up to 8 different layers so far. I've got to the stage where I'm working on the internal sides, with slopes, which meet, and I'm doing my best to remember O-Level trig! I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here, with advice from Bob Jones and the contributors to the etching thread, to whom: thank you. Richard

Excellent use of 'spoddling'

That's such a neat job with the strapping, Andy! And I did wonder about the axle boxes, as they seemed quite chunky. I'll get in touch with Bob - the instructions do mention cast stanchions which weren't available at the time of writing, and those on your wagons look significantly less chunky than my cackhanded attempts (and frankly, I've got a sheet of these etches, and I don't fancy trying to file another 60 stanchions!) Cheers, Richard.

End stanchions added. They don't come with the kit, so I've filed down some plasticard. They ought to be finer, and riveted, but my skills don't stretch that far. I'll file them flush(ish) top and bottom tomorrow assuming the glue holds. If ever something cried out for 3D printing, it's these. Their chunkiness, rivets and tapered form in three planes don't seem to lend themselves to etching.

An A3 sheet of Bob Jones' wonderfully detailed NER P4 coal wagons arrived before Christmas, and I've spent the last couple of days tackling the first one. I struggled with the strapping, both internal and external, as each side comes as a single overlay, which you solder on then remove the 'sprue' and tags. I may resort to superglue for the next one. The unpainted result is very shiny, as I got an ultrasonic bath for Christmas.

Ah, that's a possibility. I 'inherited' some old n-gauge stuff ages ago that included a couple of point motors. The packaging didn't look like Association bags. Now I know what they are, thoughts turn to what they will become! Richard

I've barely been doing this long enough to acquire the makings of a gloat box, let alone forget what it is that I've bought to put in it. Or so I thought. I have two of these; a 30mm length of 1mm rod, with a 7mm length of copper (?) tube. Anyone any idea as to what they might be?

Thanks to everyone for their advice (as ever!). I've ended up trying to recreate the entire building in 0.25mm n/s. It's been a steep but rewarding learning curve. The whole building is a single piece, square in plan so each wall is replicated and separated from its neighbour with a fold line. I've added some right-angled triangles to assist in making the square actually square (and it's just occurred to me that I should have added half-etch lines for them to sit in - ah well). The rest of the pieces are the concrete elements, which when laminated will be either a quarter or half millimeter proud of the surface. I had considered doing these in plasticard which would have significantly reduced the cost, but the sharpness of the lines and the accuracy of the measurements clearly gives etching the edge. The holes under/above the window apertures will be infilled with brick-embossed plasticard. I've emailed it to PPD for them to validate (or otherwise) and give me a quote. I'm quite etchcited! Richard

Is the upside-down photo a test to see if we're paying attention?

Thank you all for the pointers. I like @bécasse's idea of etching each aspect as a whole, or even the entire building as a oner - three half-etched score lines and it'll fold very neatly. As @Caley Jim says, it'll prevent any problems with alignment. Plus significantly fewer tabs. I think I'll take the process one step further and have the concrete columns and cross-members etched too. Laminating them onto the window frame layer will be a much neater job than cutting lots of lengths of plasticard. The brick infills will remain as plastic card. Hmm, and as I type this, can I have these etched too? Although I suspect they may be well below tolerance, I might have a bit play with that...

Morning all (and a happy new year to you). I'm currently playing with recreating the tall building in the background of this photo. Apart from the covered conveyors, I've now got 2mm versions of all of the other main buildings, so this is the last I plan to tackle for the colliery. All four faces of the building are the same as the aspect we can see, so it makes sense to me to try my hand at CAD and etching as the whole edifice is windows with the occasional brick! My thoughts are to more or less build it out of clear acetate as the structural bits, with windows, walls and columns laid on top. Each window consists of a 4x5 grid of panes, with the central 2x3 panes opening, as we can see on the 2nd window down, 3rd from the left. I'd like to model several of these open, to relieve the symmetry and monotony. So: I've dipped my toe into CAD today, using QCAD which I've found nice & easy to use, and come up with this... ...which pretty much covers an A4 sheet. It's a tessellation of three elements: the frames of the left- and right-hand windows, which don't open; the frames of the middle two columns, which do, and the frames of the opening sections. In a closer zoom, these are they... The dimensions are in millimetres, so the frames are 0.5mm wide. There's a semicircular notch where the hinges are of 0.25mm radius (my intention is to overlay the smaller window onto the hole for where the windows are shut, and to fit the former through the latter pivoting on the notches where they're represented open. After all of this very long preamble come my questions: - should I contain every element within its own frame, or simply frame the entire etch and add tabs between every element? - is there a 'normal' spacing between tabs? - is there a 'normal' spacing between elements? - there's a whole lot of holes in the etch: might the etcher object to this amount of waste dissolving into their acid soup? (I've not picked a specific etcher, although PPD are front runners at the moment) - as this is my first attempt, can the more experienced folk spot anything I've not considered (fragility??) (I haven't quite figured the sequence/contents of each layer, but I'm happy to work that lot out) Thanks everyone Richard

I was hoping someone else would ask! (I don't have the merest suspicion of a suspicion)