flubrush

I dug it up in Streetview and eventually found the bit of the building in the picture. :-) There's a fair bit of interesting architecture around that site which could come in handy. I note that all the brickwork seems to be Stretcher bond so I assume that the buildings might be steel framed with brick facings. That third storey does look interesting. It would be good to get some closer pictures of it to see what the construction might be, I assume that the pipe which features in the picture above might just be a soil pipe. :-) Jim.

Now that does look excellent with that large door to provide an exit from a loading bank alongside the spur and plenty of opportunity to add to what's there. I've also got a style of brickwork to copy. I get the impression that US builders liked to get a lot of relief into their brickwork and I would prefer to copy a known style rather than concoct something which may look a bit dodgy. :-) I'll start blocking something out - maybe model it in quarter scale - to see what I can fit in the space available. Many thanks. Jim.

At the moment my thoughts are for some form of engineering enterprise with a heavy-ish crane/hoist extending out over the track and a jetty next to where the car float berths, allowing unloading of heavy items from railroad cars or a ship/barge when the car float isn't around. I'm looking to get some depth into the low relief buildings to try to get away from thin low relief buildings between the track and the backscene. I might even wrap the building around the end of the baseboard to add a bit more depth with the spur disappearing into it. So I might have to make the buildings a bit more sophisticated than you suggest - and I've also got a laser cutter to put to good use to make some brickwork. :-) My rationale might be that the industry arrived on the scene after the harbour and rail head appeared and would have been early 20th century. I haven't thought of a state - just somewhere in the east of the continent that has a navigable river. Jim.

Dave, Jack, Many thanks for these pointers. I'll follow them up. Jim.

I've actually progressed a bit from the pictures above although it won't look like it. :-) But all the track is now stuck down on the trackbed, all the rail joints are done at the baseboard edges and the DCC track wiring is installed. Next job is to start installing the Tortoise motors. I'm also starting to look at what buildings will be placed on the leftmost board behind the car float, hence the request for info in my other thread. Jim

I'm sorry, I should have stated the scale, which is S, so I can't make use of the DPM kits. But their templates and tips could be useful for ideas. The layout is featured here in its early stages http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/114388-jameston-leven-river-rr/ ...so you'll see that there's not all that much room for low relief structures along the backscene so I'm going to have to do a bit of work to get some reasonable representations in there. I can generate laser cut brick so there shouldn't be too much of a problem to provide the base material to build the structures. Jim.

Many thanks for the pointers, I'll give Street View a try and see what I find. It's more really the style of building to copy rather than any particular building - i.e. the type of doors and windows and the brick formations that were used. Jim.

I haven't really set a specific location but probably NE coast and early to mid twentieth century. The layout will be set in the 60s - 70s but I'm reckoning on the structures to be much older. Jim.

I'm looking for pictures or details of the styles of smaller industrial brick built buildings in the US. I've had a lot of searching around on the internet and have ploughed my way through a lot of Shorpy but haven't really found any pictures of anything that I could apply to the structures on my small switching layout. The industrial buildings which I have found are quite large and would be out of place on my smallish layout. I'm looking for single and two storey structures - maybe three at a push. Any suggestions for sources of such pictures or details? Jim.

After a fair bit of messing around I've managed to produce sides, ends and the floor for an open wagon in S scale. The messing around was caused by trying to find a way to etch the plank and door lines in register on both faces of the sides and ends and I think I've cracked it now. The material is 1mm MDF which is pretty well spot on for 2 1/2" thick planking. These are the component parts with the sides and ends at the top being etched on both faces but the floor at the bottom is only etched on the top face. I used joints on the corners of one end to help with the construction of the body. These joints will be covered by the corner plates. I've used PVA glue to stick everything together, applied with a cocktail stick with any excess being cleaned off immediately. The next job will be to make the parts for the wooden underframe and also the strapping for the sides. I'll probably use my CNC machine to do that. Jim.

You might be correct, :-) As far as I can see, the Emblaser 2 is basically the Emblaser 1 but with a full, shielding case around it and a few other bits and pieces to extend its usefulness. You certainly don't want others around you without eye protection when operating an Emblaser 1. However, for the hobbyist the Emblaser 1 does offer the advantage that you can mess around with it as I'm finding out. I'm trying to get the machine to work on both sides of a piece of material in register and that has meant a fair bit of experimentation and adding bits and pieces to my Emblaser 1. This has been relatively easy since the original is pretty well bare bones and allows a fair bit of messing around, especially since you have built it from the basic parts. The Emblaser 2 comes with a higher power, pre-focussed laser diode but I believe that that will be available as an upgrade for the Emblaser 1 as well. I don't find the focussing facilities on the Emblaser 1 very good and any improvement in that area will be very welcome. :-) Jim.

Just got a supply of 1mm, 1.5mm and 2mm MDF from another supplier - http://maplestreet.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=mdf&x=22&y=10&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&manufacturers_id=&pfrom=&pto=&dfrom=&dto= ...whose prices are a bit less than 4D Models per square centimetre. They also supply using smaller sheets - 500mm x 250mm - which may suit some people. Also, they warn you that they order out of stock items from their suppliers on Mondays so if you order just after Monday and what you want is out of stock, you've got a week to wait. They also have a minimum order of five sheets for the 1mm thickness. I've also found out that picture framers use 2.5mm and 3mm MDF as backing board and my local picture framer supplied me with a 4' x 3' sheet of 2.5mm for £5, and he cut it into smaller pieces so that I could get it in my Citroen C1. :-) I finally got the extraction tube fitted up in my bedroo0m window and the Emblaser1 in the Really Useful box is working well, and fumeless. :-) Jim.

Alan, Nice one. :-) I had thoughts of doing something similar since my son-in-law had gifted me some nice 6' x 2' sheets of ply a short while ago and I had thoughts of buildign a box from that. But I make a fair bit of use of smaller RU boxes and I wondered if they made one big enough to house the Emblaser, and they did. :-) So it might have been a bit more expensive than using my freebie ply, but only about £26 more expensive. :-) I do like your exhaust exit arrangements. At the moment I can only exhaust through an open double glazing window which might mean freezing in the winter. But I might try and devise a plate to clamp over the inside of an open top light to take the tube end and keep cold draughts out. Jim.

Nick, I would always expect to stick a work piece down on the table in some fashion. At the moment I'm using electrician's tape at the corners of paper and thin card. Certainly, if thin card or paper was laid with no method of retaining them, then the airflow might move it. Jim.

BigD There are sixty 10mm holes at the other end of the box to act as an intake. Jim.

Mindful of the issue of smoke and fumes and not wanting to have to cart the Emblaser outside if I was doing work that generated a lot, I've done a quickie to, hopefully, deal with the problem, The box is a 70 litre Really Useful box which holds the Emblaser quite easily with just a restriction on how high the laser head can be raised when in use. I reckon I will get up to 20mm clearance under the laser cover so that should allow me to work with the materials I am liable to use. If I want thicker, then I have to go outside with the lid off. :-) The slinky style tube in the top picture is a three metre flexible plastic pipe from Screwfix which will be stretched out to put through a window. The fan is a 14W Xpelair bathroom extraction fan from Screwfix. The lid of the RU box was cut to let the 100 diameter flange on the back of the fan poke through and the flexible pipe is lightly clamped to it. The Emblaser has been bolted to the floor of the box with four 6mm bolts about 25mm in from the bottom corner screws on the Emblaser. Sixty 10mm diameter holes were drilled in the end opposite to the fan to allow an air entry point. I'll see if this is sufficient when I put the setup to the test. The area of the holes doesn't quite equate to the area of the 100mm diameter of the fan - about 66% - but I'll monitor the fab to see if that causes any problems. The best deal I found for the RU 70L box was from Viking Direct - by far the best delivery charges with the box arriving the day after ordering. All the other bits came from Screwfix or B&Q. The whole lot cost under £50 I'm aiming to have the Emblaser situated next to the window in my spare bedroom to provide a ready opening for the hose. Now on a technical matter, has anyone tried to cut glazing material. I've got the 4W laser and I tried a small test on a piece of PETG material at various laser strengths and didn't even mark the surface (I left the protective coverings on). I was using settings I had been using for 200gm card. Jim.

Just received my A4 version yesterday and it is now up and running and printing the calibration file. I was thrown a bit during construction since the transfer round the buttons had been stuck on the wrong way round and there was a bit of confusion as to what went which way part way through the build process. But I worked out what was wrong and all was completed. One question - is there a supplier of suitable safety glasses over here in the UK. I've got the pair supplied with the machine but I now realise that I can't work with anyone else near the machine so I'm looking for another one or two sets and getting them from a local supplier might be a bit less of a hassle. Jim.

Adrian, Thanks for that. I now remember that opening an account was mentioned a bit earlier in the thread but I hadn't realised the that was before you got into the online pages. Usually you are asked to register an account around about the checkout stages. Jim.

Adrian How do you actually order? I've visited the Engraving-Supplies web site but have so far found no method of online ordering and paying. Is it by email? Also, I noted in other discussions that black card cuts better than light coloured card. Would the same apply to the Trotec materials. I've got an Emblaser 1 arriving on Tuesday if ParcelForce are true to their word. :-) Jim.

Rob, Mindful of domestic sensitivities - although I have never had any problems when cooking styrene at 100C - I wondered if holding the side in a former then wafting a hot air gun or a hair dryer over it might produce the same result. It might, in fact, be quicker since the styrene will get up to heat much quicker than in the oven. I'll machine up another side and have a bit of a trial with my heat gun and see what happens. If it works, and it is a lot quicker, then that will suit me down to the ground since I have four coaches to build quite soon and cooking umpteen sections at twenty minutes each will take for ever. :-). Jim.

Rob, You might try cooking them in an oven over a former to heat form the tumblehome. I've been doing this on some 1:32 scale coach sides in styrene and it works well. Here's the former with the shape milled in the MDF however the former could be made more simply by shaping wood by carving and sanding and sticking it to the MDF. The lower edge of the side is located under a lip in the alloy strip. The two pieces of alloy "U" section are now clamped down to hold the part on the former before popping them in the oven. One development added after the pictures above was to fit washers the thickness of the styrene under the alloy strips at the clamping screws. I found that even mild clamping pressure could cause slight deformation of the styrene under the clamps under heat treatment and the washers prevent this occurring. I use two clamping strips since there are machined bolections on these sides and I wanted to avoid damaging them. One wider clamping strip would probably suffice for sides with no protruding detail. I cook the sides at 100C for around 20 minutes. I find the time to cook by starting at about fifteen minutes and take the piece out and release the clamps and see if it springs up towards being straight again. I pop it back in for another five minutes and try again until it doesn't spring up. I started using this method since I couldn't find an easy way to do the job by dunking the parts in hot water - a method I had used previously to heat form styrene. Jim.

Ken The barge will be removable to do the crane shunting of stock. I've got a daft idea to actually load the hopper cars at the dockside with some form of conveyor system and the loaded hoppers will have to be emptied off the scene. The size of the barge will be about 24" long with two roads holding three cars each, so it shouldn't be too much of a handful. I might get round to building a second unit if it makes life easier. :-) Jim.

This is an S scale layout which I've been working on since the early Spring. The layout is 12ft long and up to 15" wide The back story is that an exchange point was set up in the River Leven to transfer minerals from sea-going vessels to shallow draft rail road barges to allow the materials to be shipped further upriver. Once the harbour had been established, other small industries sprang up around the pier to make use of its services. These industries also made use of the barge connection to import materials and export products via the barge connection. The track is scratchbuilt using Code 82 FB, 2mm ply ties, home made tie plates and Andy Riechert's small 0/S spikes (Proto:87 Stores). The track design was done in Templot and all the track was built off the baseboards on 3mm cork bases with the Templot printouts stuck to them. Every tie is spiked so tracklaying was not a quick operation. :-) Just this last week I've managed to modify some baseboards from a previous aborted project to use under the track. The main modification was to raise the track base using thin ply sheet and 44mm x 15mm softwood strip to provide relief to allow modelling of the pier and the barge jetty. The barge itself will be removable and act as a form of hidden siding. Two shots of the layout with the track parts laid temporarily in place. The space in the foreground of the upper picture is for the pier and will carry two tracks. The space in the foreground of the lower picture is for the barge and its loading bridge. This slightly closer shot shows the trough down the rear of the boards to accommodate Tortoise motors. I had originally intended to use servos to operate the pointwork but I had a pile of Tortoise motors salvaged from a layout some years ago and thought that I might as well use them since I could find space to hide the beggars. :-) The point motors will be hidden by low relief buildings and I might have to saw a few holes in the ply backscene if access is too restricted with the buildings in place. The reason for the ply backscenes is that the boards are designed to fold up into a box for transportation - you can see one of the partly fitted paste table hinges on top of the backscenes in the lowest picture. The next work will be to fix the track down permanently, get it wired and get the Tortoise motors fitted. DCC will be used with sound chips in the locomotives. Jim.

A hand reamer - which has a taper on the end. Ream from the rear of the wheel and by controlling the depth of insertion of the reamer, you can leave a small section of taper in the axle bore which provides a push fit for the axle. Jim.

There actually was a malt distillery in Dumbarton, within the boundary of the big distillery - now flattened. It was just behind the main office block on the High Street and had several of the big copper stills. I don't think it was ever sold separately, but only used in the blending of the grain whiskies produced in the main distillery. But I've just found out that I must stand corrected :-) https://www.masterofmalt.com/distilleries/dumbarton-grain-whisky-distillery/ I suspect that might have been the stock remaining when the distillery was closed - bit pricey. :-) I actually worked in the main office on the mail desk during school summer holidays in the 1950s and I do remember mail to and from many of the malt distilleries which have now become household names. In those days, single malts were almost unknown to the drinking public and were used primarily for blending. My own favourite tends towards Speyside - the Macallan, with Highland Park a close second. I also get Auchentoshan since it comes from Dalmuir, my father's birthplace. I also occasionally go for one of the heavy Skye malts if I want the small of peat in my nostrils. :-) Jim.