Etched Pixels

I doubt a month especially if it keeps raining. It's taken local government in Wales 2-3 months to stabilize small colliery slips (or even potential ones). On the other hand I suspect it wasn't costing their insurers £100/minute or whatever Network Rail will show is their costing for the event (including loss of traffic over the long term, reputational damage and everything else lawyers are paid to add to the bill)

Can't see moving it 50 yards right helping either. Thats an awful lot of unstable material that has to be stabilized or removed. If it all goes then being 50 yards away isn't going to be safe, 500 maybe 8)

If it was a sweepstake I think I'd put my pound nearer 12 months than one for a proper fix.

Enamel onto FUD can be problematic. Seems to be the wax - it can also make enamel take forever to set. White spirit seems to do the job for cleaning it up, but would be nice to find something less brutal.

The smaller N decoders like the Zimo or CT with cube speakers have been fitted into stuff like a Dapol N scale pannier and a Bachmann Farish 03, the well tank is really quite large on the sound scale of things 8)

I'd second using the new Farish motor bogies. If you check Hattons you'll find the Parcels DMU pair is available on the bargain pile and handily contains two motorised vehicles.

For the curved domed bits which are lots of small bits of brass I'd be tempted to bin them and use filler. Life is too short to solder together zillions of little segments of brass in 2mm scale for what in finish terms is unlilkely to be any different from carefully filled/polished joins. For that cab however it looks ok and it ought to just shape nicely and then solder up from behind. Still need filler but will be a fair bit stronger.

Never install signals in quicksand

Thats similar to what I found with wagons but some were ok - it's why my MGR wagons are Minitrix - they went round it

Tanks Alan,

 

Just to clarify - the brass goes under the bogie and the phosphor goes from the brass to brush against the wheels?

 

David

Yes. The brass is basically there so you've got something to glue.

You can also fashion the entire thing out of phosphor bronze and fasten it to a tiny screw tapped most of the way into the bogie frame (take a look at pictures of old Tri-ang Hornby motor bogie to see how to fashion it for that style - but basically its two long arms to the wheels with a 'U' in the centre with the open end facing inwards. The pickups spring against the wheels and push the closed end of the U against the screw thread with the head stopping it springing off.

Phosphor bronze wire (not brass) and two tiny bits of scrap brass. Solder the wire to the brass, solder a fine wire from the brass to take the power into the vehicle, glue the brass to the bogie under side.

You'll get almost no friction from phosphor bronze wire and unlike brass it won't gradually keep losing the springiness.

Shapeways at least don't object to sprues, in fact for small stuff they positively encourage it.

You could print the buffers on a thin stalk on the inside of the body shell and hope i-materialise don't know about trains ;-)

I'm surprised you get bowing unless that is frosted ultra detail. WSF should not be bowed and if it is I'd raise it with Shapeways, they may reprint it.

If it is FUD then you can often unwarp any warped fud by putting it in hot (70C or so) water where it becomes softer and sorts itself out usually. It's a resin so its basically the same trick as unbending Ian Stoate "banana Peak" castings and the like.

Its another reason not to use FUD for anything large (along with the price!)

Take a look at Bernard's TPM chassis for 20 and 23m lengths. It's designed motorising Mark 1 and Mark 3 coaches and is clear below floor level.

Particularly if using polished WSF (so its a decent strength/price) I'd actually be inclined to make the entire black window area a single cut out and then cut a tinted glazing strip to fit (remembering the black goes beyond the windows a bit all around so you don't have to aim quite straight and then vinyl over it.

That I suspect will also make it a *lot* easier to paint. Also as you can get black vinyl you can cut it without printing and thus without white edges.

For the full piece body remember that you've got to be able to paint inside and assemble it so there has to be a join somewhere. Pendolino 'hide the join' looks less simple than most.

Re tilt - tilt wedges are completely configurable, they don't have to be a flat wedge but an arbitrary profile which means you can set the vehicle to hit maximum tilt at say 15" and continue the same tilt level as it nips around the 9" curves into the fiddle yard. APT would be easier to model this way because if one coach sticks the wrong way now and then it'll at least be prototypical 8-)

Hunstanton is known as Hunston locally, no; and Fakenham as Feknam?

Much like Llandrindod is Llan'dod

Jack'E McAuley and the Poormouth, I had the delight of seeing the early line up (half the Strawbs + Jack E) playing in London

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWSgERkkZb4

Is it possible to run 2mm fs engines/stock on N gauge track? Looking at starting to build 2mmfs kits up but the only layout would be a nice big N gauge one..

For the stock the 2mmSA does 12.25mm axles with N gauge wheels so you can build stock to run on N scale track. These fit the coach bogies and most of the wagons so you can run a fair bit of the 2mmSA rolling stock on N scale trackwork. There may be some minor compromises needed - eg you can't fit a couple of the detail bits on Chris Higgs shunter's wagon in with the extra thickness of N gauge wheels.

For the locomotive wheels no.

ooh that could be handy. I didn't realise there was any. Just what I need for NN15" to get the traction problem fixed.

(rechecks the shop pages). Amazing what you find when you read the page properly 8)

Yes but he added the the last day - and all those people who didn't read it initially with pre-configured snipe tools will never see that, so it won't end well.

Just received my second J11 from Colin at Union Mills. His next model will be an Adams '395' class 0-6-0 in Southern and BR black liveries,

Oh dear there goes the budget

I doubt the nickel silver expansion matters much compared to the contraction and shifting of any wood its nailed to !

A violent storm this afternoon left everything here covered in balls of ice.

 

This is the Hail 'n' Ride bus

 

 

The black bits are lifted grains (of fine ballast) from the road surface. The driver seems to have hit the wall and gone for help.

Put heads and legs on the white balls and you'd have a perfectly normal Cornish scene 8)

If the bogies have the washers on them then the wheels clear the solebar and they do trainset curves reasonably happily. Gently opening out the middle axle a tiny bit also helps. However if you set them to prototypical clearances you get prototypical curvature 8)

I suspected that some of the Ultima LMS kits had an extruded roof but I could not find this in Alan's catalog as a separately available item. Maybe I missed it or maybe he is conserving his stocks to sell with complete kits.

You are correct on both points. It's basically not commercially viable in the UK to redo the extruded roofs any more and trying to do it via China is a whole barrel of laughs I don't want to get involved in. Actually it's not clear it was *ever* commercially viable given I believe that Cav'n'dish did the original extrusions and went under As it needs a new tool making you would basically have to buy it by the kilometre and a kilometre of aluminium roof profile is a lot of N gauge coaches !

Right now its tricky. 3D print is almost good enough for a lot more things, and that means its simply not commercially sensible to do things like refresh or automate old moulds, instead there's a certain amount of sitting on hands and trying not to run out of stuff involved before we get the next generation of 3D print off Shapeways and friends.

I am doing some 3D roof profiles and the polished ones are acceptable I think. Not quite as nice as moulded plastic but on the other hand you can put all those pesky vent-holes in the roof and save a ton of pain. A few folks will have seen and handled the upcoming Ultima LNER suburban roofs and I think the consensus is they are fine.

The old aluminium siphon roof profile however I have lots of so is listed likewise the old (no longer used in kits) aluminium floor.

Alan

If you know the dimensions you can probably 3D print them these days, depending on the material thicknesses.

Would have been a fitting climax to steam design in this country! Still at least we have the Duchesses!

Steam may not be dead yet!

Even though it sounds like should be an imaginary locomotive Voith are testing a closed loop steam heat recovery add on for diesel units. It's been around for marine use for a while but is now getting tested on the continent for rail use.

Mine seems to be accurate to about 0.2-0.3 of a mm. It's not "accurate" in the sense of giving exactly correct readings and cutting to the stated sizes, but it is accurate once you allow for the small scaling errors in each axis.

I believe its possible to recalibrate it but I've never bothered. All the stuff I cut is aligned with the marks in the same spot and same distance so its just a "magic number" by now.