brossard

Congratulations on your first outing. Layout looks really good. Sorry to hear of your mishap, but it's something that can occur. At my last outing I had some solid core wires break on me. Happily I was able to repair, but it is terrifying. After the show, this spurred me to review the wiring of the entire layout, stripping away solid core wire in favour of stranded. John

I got the main wall done: The vertical buttresses were harder to get right than you might think. I had to redo three because they got askew. Requires some repair to the walls using brick patches and totally recovering the buttress. I was struck with an epiphany today. The kit I am building in the T026, which it turns out is the original. I realized today that the kit has been upgraded and is not T026a. It looks quite a bit more refined than the original. I shall do the upper parapet for mine. I sure wish I had realized this earlier. John

I didn't do anything on the warehouse today as I had our weekly meeting of MBOGS (Montreal British O Gauge Society). Tea, coffee and banana bread plus a good natter. Upshot is I agreed to upgrade the layout with DCC Concepts levers, encoder and snubbers. Yesterday, I progressed the walls: You can see it scrubbed up right nice and looks a lot better than the disaster above. I show one of the buttresses of which there are five. These will hold the walls together along with ledges between the buttresses. Note the blank wall at the corner. Consistent with Sod's Law, I found the prodigal window after I had done that. One of the issues with the windows are the arch lintel. My dodge was to obtain just one wall section from Lcut: This was scanned to PDF (for some reason the JPG wouldn't scale properly). These are printed, cut out and glued to self adhesive label. I used artists felt markers to colour the bricks. John

A point of clarification, I assume you mean 145C solder. Will this method work on 188C solder? I hope your hair dryer doesn't have the heat to melt paint and/or solder. I shudder to think what that would do to ones hair. John

Oops, should have said, it's Weller as well. John

I bought a Weller 80W iron a couple of years ago. A huge disappointment as the bit turned black almost immediately. So, there's a non recommendation for you. Depending on the thickness of the brass you might consider a mini torch although I've never used one. My 50W soldering station has been man enough to tackle my 7mm kits up to now. John

Try a replacement bit. I bought a Weller replacement wand (from Amazon) for my soldering station not too long ago. At the same time I bought replacement tips. Tips will wear out after a while but not in just a few hours of use. My Weller 20W stand alone iron has been champion. I have used the replacement wand quite a bit since then with rosin and regular flux without any issues. One thing I swear by is the use of brass wool. Frequent wiping of the tip on this keeps the bit shiny. You could use a damp sponge but the wool is more convenient IMO. John

Progress report. Windows have been glazed: I used canopy glue. I also applied black pigment to give them a weathered look. Somewhere along the line one of the small windows has gone adrift. That's OK, I will make a bricked up window. I have started covering the walls. This is the ground floor. I did half to illustrate the steps. Note the upper arch has been coloured. Also note the arches need a lintel. I have a plan for that. There will be sills as well. The upper windows turned a bit problematic. I found that the lower windows were off relative to the upper windows. My solution was to cut out notches and glue in some 5mm foam board. You can see I've traced the window shape. Here's the outer wall over the inner: This shows that the windows are better aligned inside the apertures. After cutting out the unneeded foam board, I started covering: So, I'll finish covering these walls and get on. One other thing, you may require extra brick paper as I did. Download TX02, Brown Brick to match. John

In my experience, the coach structure is usually pretty straightforward whether the material is plastic or brass. It is getting them finished to a good standard where the trouble starts. I've been there and done that, and no I'm not putting my hand up.

I'm of a mind to make a tutorial for the construction of Scalescenes kits in 0 gauge. Honestly, the only real difference between 4mm and 7mm is the size. First off, the basics - card. I get mine from an art store. The kits call for heavy, medium and light. This translates in 4mm to 2mm, 1mm and 0.5mm thickness. For 7mm, I scale this up as best I can. Now, you can get 3.5mm card and I have some, but it is absolutely exhausting to cut. Instead, I use either 3.5mm foam board or, if I can't find that, 5mm foam board works fine. Light and easy to cut. For medium I use 2mm card and for light, 1mm card. Tools: Some obviousness here, steel rule and heavy knife with renewable blades. Sanding stick to remove cusps after cutting. Worn out Xacto knife. Use the back of the blade to score paper before folding. Glue stick for adhering the paper print to the base layer. There will be times when the card edge is exposed, this can be remedied by the use of felt marker. The one show is ancient from Letraset. These were replaced by Winsor & Newton but now they're gone too, sigh. Check your purveyor of felt markers. I spent some time gluing the templates to the base layers and I've been cutting those out: I left this half done to illustrate the steps. On the right is the base layer with the template glued on. Because the area is quite large I used spray adhesive and a roller. Card is medium so 2mm thick. The apertures needed a fair bit of sanding. Cutting these out is extremely tedious. On the left is after the cover layer was glued on with the glue stick. Finally, windows. I have finished these: On the left are Lcut windows. These need some assembly because there' a surround and a representation of window opening. The large windows are scratch built from various sizes of Evergreen strip. A tedious job requiring patience. At the bottom, is one of the jigs I made to aid in building the windows. Note that the arch radius differs from the Scalescenes arch and is the same as Lcut. John

Wow, a long time since I posted. I haven't been entirely idle, the layout has been effectively rewired. Delays came about because of newbie mistakes that had to be chased down. That's all done now so things should operate well. I have decided on a couple or three side projects. These will be low and ultra low relief buildings from Scalescenes. I completed the first one: This based on Scalescenes T002b, Low Relief Warehouse ( https://scalescenes.com/product/t002b-low-relief-warehouse/). My original intent was to build it as shown, with sliding doors. I plan a wall to separate the industry from the railway. However, I got shouted at because there wouldn't be room. Instead, I imagined that this is the back of the warehouse with the sliding doors at the front. Windows are Lcut, downspouts are ModelU hoppers and brass tube. Brackets from 0.9mm wire were soldered on and inserted. (Walls are 3.5mm foam core so very easy to work with). I am in the planning/preparation phase of the large warehouse T026a (https://scalescenes.com/product/t026a-factory-warehouse/). A huge building but don't panic, I plan to do the ultra low relief version. I got myself some Lcut windows to replace those in the kit. Not exact but I think I can work with them. I did have to scratch build the ground floor large windows so we'll see how those look. John

Surprised no-one has thought of this: John

LOL, I was just thinking that. I used Gaugemaster photograpic backscenes on my layout after enduring months of griping from my mates. They do look impressive despite not being specifically for 0 gauge. John

I'm curious how the age distribution looks. In our club of 10, we have just 1 teenager (and his dad joined for support even though he doesn't do trains - cracking carpenter though). The rest all have grey hair and progressive specs. John

I upgraded the Palethropes sausage vans (LMS & GWR) in a similar manner to the Insul Milk. IIRC they all have the same van body, not so bad for the LMS sausage van but the GWR van body is incorrect. In both cases I left the lettering alone. John

It shouldn't matter. Assuming the download is PDF, you can do all your scaling via that software. I'm building Scalescenes kits in 0 gauge so I need to do a lot of scaling. John As a clarification, since I'm in Canada, I use 8.5 x 11 paper (sometimes 8.5 x 14) so some care is needed that the print doesn't exceed the paper boundary. If the US kits are designed for 8.5 x 11, printing on A4 shouldn't present any problems.

I did that: I didn't mess about with the body apart from the major differences (ladder, ice hatch). The body should be made 4mm longer since most Hornby stock of the era was 4mm too short. John

Just reviewing the thread, I don't see a pic of the finished van: John

Took a quick look. As you say, there appear to be a number of buildings that would not look out of place on a UK layout. The pictures look impressive and I may just try one if I ever get the time. Bookmarked. John

Excellent that you taken the plunge. I did that in 2016 after nearly 30 years doing 00. Best decision I made. As for a layout, 8' long is pushing it I think. Does this include fiddle yard/sector plate. Depending on trains this will need to be about 3' or maybe more. Have a look at Trebudoc. This is an end to end BLT and just 9' long incl. sector plate. It is GWR steam but perhaps the track plan will inspire. There are other small layouts and no doubt others will point you there. John

Yes, I'm the same. The club I belong to does have a young 'un but the rest of us are old crocks, and even so, for all of Quebec, there are only about a dozen people into British rail. I was pretty young when the family left UK, but I remember seeing working steam on, I think, the L&Y line from Blackburn, through Accrington to Burnley. When I was doing 00 (30 odd years) I did LMS. Now I'm doing 0, it is BR in the 60's. Mostly because there is more choice in RTR. 7mm does tend to be expensive for shipping. Hattons like to use couriers for locos which I hate. I have preordered some locos from Antics so we'll see if they are more reasonable. Lol, I think I found you in the BRMNA directory. John

Demographics are changing I think. There are fewer and fewer people who are willing to actually build things. Look at the memberships of most clubs - grey hair and bifocals. One thing I have learned is to avoid buying stuff from over the border. USPS is slow, expensive and shipments take a long time, at least it was the last time I tried, which was years ago. I have no problem buying from the UK, shipping is usually quick, about a week, and reasonably priced. Funny how that works. Shipping within Canada is remarkably fast, usually within 2 days and in the case of one shop, free if you buy enough. John

You are blessed to have a "local hobbyshop". The last one in Montreal closed a couple of years ago. I can get most of what I need from online stores (which are great I must say) but not British colours. Happily I have several "tinlets" of various Humbrol British railway colours so things are not desperate. Fortunately, I can get paints and glues etc. via Canada Post. Good luck John

I sent them an email asking if they shipped to Canada, this was months ago - crickets. I have a policy that any supplier that ignores me gets ignored back. British Model Trains is showing Humbrol acrylics available: https://britishmodeltrains.ca/collections/paint John

I did open a kit (I won't name the company) that I had bought new and found there were no body parts. I decided to scratch build them, a nice project that came out nicely. This was a simple wagon. I think a brake van is too complex for that. Point is that mistakes do happen. John