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I've had difficulties during recuperation trying to concentrate on matters, including railway modelling. :-) But the arrival of a new book from the Caledonian Railway Society at the beginning of this week focussed minds wonderfully. https://www.crassoc.org.uk/web/node/374 I've now mapped out what locos I might build over the coming years and started work on the driving wheels I might need. I make my wheels by using my CNC mill to cut the spoke centres from brass, then fit steel tyres. I have to hand code some of the files for profiling the spokes and that usually causes a bit of messing around when I try to remember how I did it last time round, maybe several years before. :-) So I opted to produce the code for all the wheel sizes I might need so that it is available when required. The largest spoke centre on the right is for a 5' 9" 20 spoke driver which will suit any of the ubiquitous members or the Caledonian large 0-4-4 tank classes. The larger of the bogie wheel centres is for a 3' 2" wheel which also suits the large 0-4-4T. The next larger centre is fo a 5' 0" 16sp driver which will suit any variant of the Drummond 0-6-0 Jumbo. It will also suit the Lambie Class 1 4-4-0 tank along with the larger bogie wheel. The smallest centre is for a 4' 6" 14sp driver will will suit all the 0-6-0 goods tank classes. It will also suit the diminutive Drummond 0-4-4T along with the smaller centre for a 2' 6" bogie wheel. These are test cuts using Plastikard to prove out some of my hand coded files for CNC - easier on tools and nerves when trying them out for the first time. :-) The centres also have the distinctive deep boss of the Caledonian drivers. The Caledonian from Drummond to McIntosh was an inside cylinder line, so could have deep bosses on driving wheels. But most wheels available are for outside cylinder prototypes, where the boss depth was restricted by the motion. There's no way I'm going to build all these locos immediately - that's not the S scale way. :-) But I'll probably start cutting brass on a set of the 4' 6" wheel centres for an 0-6-0T and I know I've got the files available for any other wheels when the time comes. Jim.

Some of the wheels on the SSMRS parts shelves are to the 4mm EM standard. Those will be the wheels manufactured by Alan Gibson Workshops - WW1, WW2, WW3, CW1 and the Gibson locomotive wheel range. I suspect that this might have been a deal that the late Robin Fielding had to come to with Colin Seymour to guarantee continuation of wheel supply when Alan Gibson retired and sold the business on. The Slaters wagon wheels, the CW2 coach wheels (original Alan Gibson) and the steel tyres to go with the brass loco wheel centres are all to SSMRS standard. The AGW wheels are also a bit undersize so watch out if you use them to design anything since Slater's wheels might not fit. Colin Seymour actually includes our S scale wagon wheels in his 4mm AGW range, listed as 3' 7" diameter wheels. :-) Jim.

The price to produce a similar set of gauges today would be a lot more than the £6 price which was set a good few years ago. I made a few investigations when Parts Officer with no results which would have provided a reasonable price. The ones in the stores at the moment were made by me on my CNC machine and are a quite basic bar and slot type - to fill a gap. However, I had an idea that might produce a gauge and had started to investigate the possibilities just before the AGM, but got no further for other reasons. :-) Basically my idea is to produce a rolaguage type in two halves mounted on a screwed rod. Then the gauge can be adjusted to whatever variant is required and locknutted. The only critical part in manufacture is the width of the slot to fit the rail. This means that stores only have to stock a basic gauge assembly which can be adjusted to suit. I was never really happy with having a set of four gauges for standard gauge and the three widened gauges. Too often you require several gauges of the same measurement when building pointwork and you would accumulate a fair number of non-essential gauges if buying in sets of four. I'll have a chat with Paul Greene and see what he thinks. We are now using quite a reliable supplier who provides our steel tyres and back-to-back gauges and who might be able to do the job. Jim.

I think that four foot radius is reckoned to be the minimum in S scale although some members have used smaller radii accompanied with care in selection of locomotives and rolling stock and probably a bit of judicious gauge widening. :-) Jim.

As someone born in Glasgow and brought up on Clydeside, my recollection is that the city was never called "Glas-Gie" in local dialect, but "Glesga" with equal weight on both syllables. Edinburgh was called "Embra". :-) https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glesga Jim

Wheels on the way shortly. :-) Jim.

Ian, You will probably be OK. The society etches are 15thou nickel silver so there's about 8 thou thickness at the etch fold lines, which will be pretty strong provided you don't bend them too many times. :-) I always solder my fold lines because that's the way I've always done it. :-) Jim.

You just reminded me and I dug around in the workshop to find the bits for the spoked wheels. I'll see if I can get the Cowells working - it hasn't moved for over three months. :-) Jim.

In the UK, Ian Pusey drew up our track standards way back in the early 1960s and he calculated the gauge at 0.884" (22.45mm) to allow for tolerances - it should technically have been 0.883" (22.43mm) but we've worked quite happily to the "broader" gauge for fifty+ years. You could try having a discussion with Ian but I don't think you will win. :-) There are no special chairs for S scale apart from the slide chair available on the chair sprue. Providing low volume specialist chairs is an expensive business for a small sociaty so we hack the standard chairs around to reproduce the "specials". Any 4mm wheel with a flange width of 0.018" will run on our S scale standards - the Gibson 4mm wheels have that flange width and their flange depth is larger, being 0.025" against the SSMRS standard of 0.018". The tyre widths are usually at least as wide as the SSMRS ones. The SSMRS web site has a standards page here :- http://www.s-scale.org.uk/standards.htm The machine tools I mostly use these days are metric so I find myself working in metric when working in S scale. And when I use CAD I can scale to metric to work with the tools. I don't think anyone expects us to slavishly work with imperial rules. :-) You will find the constant 0.3969 come in handy in your calculator since that converts prototype inches to millimetres in S. Jim.

"The excellent 80's BBC tv series "Edge of Darkness" about nuclear skulduggery features of course the home-made class 31; a bit of full-size kitbashing with a wooden body built over three diesel shunters at the Middleton Railway because apparently BR wouldn't co-operate. But the scenes in the secret underground nuclear reactor in the mountains were done using miniatures, and rear-projection for a view through the window of an underground office. " Sorry to come back to this a bit late but I was otherwise detained by thhe NHS for a month or two. :-) But to pick up on a point in the first post in the thread - it wasn't rear projection in the underground office, but front axial projection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_projection_effect This gives better quality and requires a lot less set space that is required by back projection equipment. The projected material was shot on 35mm on a Mitchell camera and projected on a projector with a register pin gate to give stability. It all worked well considering we were advised that it was normally only attempted on a film stage, and not in a slate mine in North Wales. :-) Sorry for the bit of drift. :-) Jim.

Sorry for the bum steer on Plastruct. I was going on memory that their cross-sections were square. The ones I remember being off-square were some of the heavier Slaters Microstrip. Hopefully Evergreen is better. Jim.

Your other option is to go throuh the lists of good strip styrene suppliers and see if they do a size which suits - like Evergreen or Plastruct. Their strips are usually nicely square. Some of the cheaper strips are not. But cutting nice square strip from thick sheet is not easy. I actually use my CNC mill to cut any I need so that I get a nice square section. :-) Jim.

Justin, Sorry to here about the suspension of your activities. Hopefully back in business again later in the year. Jim. SSMRS Parts Officer (retd.)

My own preference would be to do the etch artwork on a good 2D programme. It usually has much better copying/pasting/array placing/grouping/etc., than Fusion 360. I find it extremely frustrating trying to do a 2D drawing in F360 when I could knock it out in a fraction of the time in AutoCAD LT or one of its clones. You might want to look at NanoCAD for a free 2D program, It is a close clone of AutoCAD LT and DraftSite. Bottom of this web page https://nanocad.com/products/ I've been using it since Draftsite stopped being offered as a free version and it worls well. I'm actually thinking of getting one of their paid for copies for some of the additional benefits. Jim

Bloomin heck, Steve, can someone slow you down? :-) There are those of us who are going to have a lot of catching up to do by then time they get back behind the modelling desk. :-) Jim

You've cracked thr PDF probkem. :-) Good to see this on the go again. Jim.

Can you check the images in the .zip file from the slicer. It looks as though all the supports started printing, then there's nothing on the bad end until part way up the container side whcih then prints to the top. A check of the images will show if parts of the images are missing therefore causing nothing to be printed in parts of the body. [Later] Just thinking that it could be either part of your LCD screen or the LEDs underneath not working during part of the print. Jim.

I put my Emblaser 1 in a large Really Useful Box, added a small bathroom extractor fan to the lid with a piece of flexible pipe leading out of the window and also drilled a few holes in the body of the box to let air in. I think it cost me about £50 and it keeps the smoke from the laser cutting out of the room. I'm still alive and I haven't been aware of any strong warnings against using MDF with a laser cutter if you get rid of the smoke. [Later] Just remembered that I showed it in the Emblaser thread a few years ago Jim.

You might want to consider the Emblaser Core which is the updated version of the Emblaser 1. https://darklylabs.com/emblaser_core/ There is a long thread on RMWEB about the Emblaser 1 and several of us members have used the Emblaser 1 with success. The basic model costs about £760 but you have to add he shipping charges from Australia and then the import duty which I believe is 4.5% on the item cost plus shipping charge and then plus VAT. Jim

Raising this matter again after nearly nine years :-) I could be building some of the track for a model of Ventnor. I found the map showing just a bit further up in this thread The slips in the yard are not actually slips, but overlapping back-to-back turnouts - tentatively named "Outside Barrys" on the Templot forum. :-) I've dug around to see if I could find a picture showing these, but with no luck. I did have a dig around on the NLS map facility and found an OS map of 1906 revision which showed the same track arrangement in the yard with the turntable at the end of the platform still there. The next OS map available jumps to a 1939 revision which now shows two double slips in the yard. So it looks as though some time between the taking out of the turntable and 1939, the trackwork in the yard was relaid. Does anyone have any indication when this might have happened? In the drawing above, the points of the switches are very close to the adjacent crossings in the station throat so it might have been that overhauling or replacing parts of the station throat required the use of more standard parts which reflected back as far as the slips in the yard.

A new stand appeared on the morning Jim. :-)

Good to meet up - super running locomotives which match the quality of paining and scenery. Jim.

the reason I bought a bulk pack of syringes was that I suspected that the solvents we use might affect them. But my experience has shown that Butanone (MEK) has little long-term effect on the syringes. I've just checked the three syringes I've used over the past year or so and they are still in working condition. I always empty them if I think they will be on the shelf for some time. I think that the only solvent I found that had some effect on the syringes was Plastic Weld but only after a period of use, so probably taken as acceptable considering the low cost of the syringes. Jim.

I got my syringes and needles a few years ago. The syringes were a pack of 10 x 10ml and the needles were an assorted pack of 25 IIRC. The suppliers don't appear on Ebay these days but there are a good few advertising syringes and/or needles. Here's one for a pack of five syringes and needles https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/5-Packs-10ml-Syringe-With-5Pcs-14-ga-1-5-Blunt-Tip-Needle-5Pcs-Clear-Tip-Caps/263808616478?hash=item3d6c38081e:g:Ix0AAOSwoF5cdmPF ...and if you search on Ebay for syringes and needles you can find a lot more. The advert above is sourced in China so you would have to wait a week or two for delivery. You might find others with quicker delivery. Jim.

Correct. :-) It was taken just east of Dumbarton East on the trip back to Glasgow - mid 1960s. I had never seen such a clean Blue Train. :-) It wasn't to open the system. I haven't seen any other pictures of this royal train. I think I remember it being quite well publicised at the time and I expected a lot more people to be taking pictures. Jim