MrWolf

Loving the OCD, it's making me want to get on with my layout, keep doing bits at mine but I am holding off until I have completed my latest painting. During which I have been painting individual hobnails onto a boot sole amongst other things. There are plenty of examples of detail obsession around here. For instance I have just replaced two studs on my bike that hold the battery carrier to the frame. It now has two 5/16" x 3-1/2" CEI thread studs as it bugged me that a previous restorer had used two metric bolts. Once the battery, seat chainguard and oil tank are fitted, you can't actually see anything other than the end of one stud, but I know they're right and I only need one set of spanners now. Stop worrying about being obsessed with details, it's a good thing, it's much more common than you think. You're normal, deal with it!

Quite, if I had only been shown the pictures I would have guessed 40+ year old white metal kit or scratchbuild in 4mm scale, seems optimistically priced to me.

Interesting. SWMBO says that I have a Degree In Contemporary Knowledge. Generally she just calls me a D*CK for short... Why have RMWEB not added a tumbleweed emoji?

That's been for sale for ages, he was hanging out for £32.99 before Christmas, when I bought an identical item for the starting bid of £6.99 + £3.50 post. I then committed a cardinal sin, binned the box and the awful triang / kitmaster style wheels, built it with scale wheels and three links, painted it and stuck it on the layout. After a 40 year sabbatical, it has finally fulfilled its purpose. And I'll do it again!

That will be a supplementary charge for the "free refills" of coffee in first class at a guess. Fast forward half a century and think about all those piles of unsellable Triang Pullmans at swap meets and toy fairs.

I like that it "can be collected in person from our shop..." So it's £100 plus the fine for breaking the isolation curfew? Bargain. Pedants please note that I am fully aware that this is their standard selling template etc etc... Seems a little steep, not that I am an expert on Hornby coaches. If buying it will definitely add £100 to the value of your Brighton belle set then okay, we can dismiss the fact that it is basically a mass produced piece of plastic from China. But somehow I doubt it. Three days of lockdown and cabin fever is creeping in already, I'm looking at Southern region stock... Gotta go, it's gone really quiet and I have a nasty feeling that Miss Riding Hood is sharpening something.

Perhaps a very light wash in the lower corrugations of a couple of shades of green, which only really show in the last few millimetres near the edges and the odd tiny dots of yellow on the upper surfaces to suggest the kind of lichens that grow on tarred tin rooves (and asbestos ones) I used artists acrylic for lichen, with streaks of dark green mixed deliberately badly into it, picking up a tiny dot at a time with a 000 brush, remembering that less is more though!

Good to see you soldiering on, it's made me look at the pile of kits and slightly battered second hand items I have here. Not very exciting, but I have no excuse to avoid fitting 3 link couplings to everything I have now and progress is good. The UK lockdown means that today is the last day for a while that I have been able to hurtle across the old greyhound bridge out of Green Ayre on the motorcycle and wish there were still trains on it instead.

I have a couple of exclusive wagons if anyone is interested. They are both broken in uniquely different ways which I doubt could be replicated!

Interesting when you think that a Sherman tank weighs a minimum of thirty tons...

I sold a couple of new old stock car body parts recently. The starting bid was £95. Within an hour I got an offer of £75. I checked out the profile of the person making the offer, clearly a dealer with a score of over 28000. I ignored it and later that day the same person offered £85. I was certain that all he was going to do was put the parts straight back on eBay. He put a bid on the next day as I had ignored the second cheeky offer. The bidding continued and he dropped out at £150, the auction kept going and the parts finally made £245 plus £21 carriage (I didn't add anything for packing materials or my time) The parts I sold ceased to be manufactured by the OEM in 1957 and were never offered by an aftermarket manufacturer. If you have something that you and everyone else in the know appreciates is rocking horse manure, my advice is to start the auction at the minimum price you will accept and sit tight!

"but not actually sure if they can deduct payment from your bank without your specific authority or not?" They can as your bank account is linked to your eBay account and PayPal so that you can add or withdraw funds or pay eBay fees. I have had it done to me a few years ago. I sold a second-hand but unused NOS vehicle part which due to its size was quite costly to send. The buyer then complained to ebay that it was damaged (after leaving positive feedback) I kept up with my end of the process and the buyer was supposed to send the item back. The time period allotted by eBay elapsed before I received the part back and eBay automatically refunded the buyer £140 from my linked account. I never did get the part back, oddly enough. Ebay have tightened things up a little in the intervening years but still seem to lean heavily towards the buyer even if he is a chump

There can be lots of reasons for putting a high price on certain items. I have a rusty old BSA ladies bicycle at the shop, it would normally command £20-30, but with the exception of the main frame and handlebars, all the components are the same as the WW2 air portable Parabike. A highly collectable device commanding around £4500. There are specialist dealers out there asking £200 for a brake caliper, £40 for a seat stem, £300 a wheel AND getting that money too. If I sell the civvy BSA, all somebody else will do is break it up or spend £900 on a frame to create another parabike (shades of Brooklands Bentley replicas) The silly thing is that the civilian ladies bike is far more rare than the military version, I think it should be preserved as is, so it sits there with a £1000 price tag. Anyone not in the know will think I am bat #### crazy. I am certain that the same parallels can be drawn with certain model railway items, but what I have seen here so far looks like speculation at best!

Historical accuracy. Before we had mobile phones to distract us, we used to do strange things like check out the talent or (shock horror!) strike up a conversation...

We might be taking the mick out of him, but seriously, who can blame him? If people are willing to pay the price asked, he would be a fool of a businessman to ask less. (clearly, there are some railway fans out there who have WAY too much money, but I digress) sometimes if you ask daft money for a few items, people will trawl your stock for a bargain. It's common enough in the antique trade.

The same seller has some real beaters of "Kit built Hornby Panier (nice typo) tanks weathered" Yard brush weathering but shiny conrods and flangeless drivers. £15 on a good day at a model railway show. For £60 I can buy something much more modern, better detailed and better running. Today's rant has been brought to you by the words "overpriced" and "junk". Peace. Out.

Damn. I used to have an old Airfix/kitmaster L&Y Pug that I chopped the cab off and attached plasticard skirts to when I was about 14. (Some bogus Swansea & Mumbles Tramway device I think) There may still be bits of it buried in the garden at my mothers house... Of course I would have to sell it for enough to make a 400 mile trip worthwhile...

Buy it - then buy an air rifle! Or perhaps I can lend you something a bit louder and more accurate?

Those figures look just the job. I only need a few. Each to their own, but I often think that layouts are overpopulated and definitely too many cars, despite the fact that there were around 75000 of them on British roads by 1930.

Looks more like Danny Trejo than Uncle Adolf to me, maybe you should lengthen his moustache and make him a scale machete (roughly 11mm long) Has anyone else noticed that a lot of period male figures have inappropriately long hair? It's like watching a 1960s war film

Can anyone recommend a range of 4mm figures that look right for the 1930's early 40's btw?

Sometimes items that are technically underscale help with a sense of size and distance if carefully placed. Your HO figures won't look out of place inside the building even with OO 4mm figures on the platform because there is a scenic divide. On my previous layout, there was a dirt road that went under the line and climbed up towards the backscene, it dipped away sharply before hitting the painted hardboard to help disguise the dead end, further helped by stands of trees. I still wasn't happy with it and stood a small Austin truck on the rise in front of the backscene to further disguise things. It actually looked out of scale and emphasized the fact that the world had an "edge". I replaced it with an old HO scale plastic kit of a Ford model A pickup and that actually helped give a sense of distance. This was because it was the only thing that the eye could see that the mind could put a known size to, the trees and hillside could have been any size. If there had been a 4mm figure standing next to it, it would have been obviously under scale, but it worked better than true scale within the constraints of its immediate environment. If that makes sense?

Something that I can't replicate in the cabs of my steam engines. Jaffa cakes tend to either melt or pick up a lot of coal dust. I can vouch that smokebox jacket spuds are a culinary delight though! On topic I am really impressed with the lengths that you are going to with your buildings. I am in the midst of creating drawings for my station building, a much more modest timber affair. I wasn't going to model the interior, (only the signal cabin and locomotive shed) but this thread has changed my mind! (PS, Thanks, I hate you all...)

Is it possibly a worse crime that some of my wagons have the same number? But consider this. If every aspect of our layouts and stock were perfect, what would we do then? We would have to fill our time with 'normal' hobbies like watching tv or football (or combining the two by standing outside Dixons on a Saturday afternoon and shouting at the televisions) or worse still, taking up golf... I have been assured by SWMBO that if I do, she will be cashing in my life insurance a good deal sooner than I think.

"I swapped it for some of the junk I'm never going to use" is another useful phrase for your arsenal. This works for a whole raft of hobbies and you generally find that SWMBO doesn't actually care that much unless you start asking awkward questions about the contents of her wardrobe. In return, you must be prepared to believe dismissive statements such as: "My friend / mother gave me those boots, she never wore them" or "It's a vintage dress I got from a charity shop".