eldavo

The DC aspect does look interesting. I might just have to update my own setup and see what it can do. 

Cheers

Dave

I'm guessing you are talking about DCC-EX.  The website for these have pretty detailed instructions for getting up and running.  You don't have to "program" these system as such, just download and install a pre built project.  I've done it myself and although it wasn't simple it wasn't too tricky although I do have a lot of experience with Arduino systems. 

I noticed on the DCC-EX website there is at least one UK supplier of ready configured systems.  Pushes the price up but might be an option.  The websites also have forums where you can ask questions.  Feel free to PM me if I can help. 

As you are aiming to use the DC capabilities I suspect there will be very limited experience as this is a newer feature.

Cheers

Dave

Take a look at the link below.

Cheers

Dave

Well done Nick. The layout was certainly looking good when I stopped by.

Cheers

Dave

The Winchester Railway Modellers are looking forward to attending with Redbridge Wharf.  Having recently lost our permanent clubroom let's hope it all comes out of storage safely and behaves itself!

Cheers

Dave

Another hot glue gun dabber here.  The key is to be organised and don't be afraid to redo joints or trim back overly long wires.  My work isn't pristine but it's neat enough to make problem solving and repairs easy.

Cheers

Dave

The curves into the fiddleyard are back in place and seem to work much better.  It's still a tight turn being under 6ft radius but the Flatiron, which has a longish 6 coupled chassis, and other locos seem to be able to cope.

My favourite compound managed to haul a rake of 54ft corridor coaches in and out of the yard so being my normal inpatient self I started ballasting!  Of course with my mojo in place the house guests arrived and work stopped.

Hopefully the mess of latex glue will set.

On 06/05/2023 at 22:38, lezz01 said:

Nice Dave. Which one are you going to drive on?

Regards Lez.

I've fitted a compact worm and spur MSC box which sits down low and drives the leading pair of drivers.  There's a bunch of lead in the ash pan and space above the motor for more lead.  Hopefully with the compensation the little engine should pull a decent load.

Of course this has developed into another of those almost complete projects.  The tender is pretty much complete but the weather hasn't been good enough to contemplate getting it into primer.  The loco needs the fiddly bits like handrails and details.  It runs but the tender hasn't got pick ups yet and there's no linkage between the loco and tender.

Cheers

Dave

After several months of working on other things I actually got on and started to sort out some of the layout problems.  Some while ago I had to relay the rather tight curves leading to the fiddleyard.  I thought I had nailed it but after a while I realised I had somehow managed to create a distinct kink in both lines leading to problems with some of my locos.  There was nothing for it but to try and lift and relay some of the curves.

A lot of water and scraping allowed me to unseat the track without damage so I should be able to get things relaid.  It's all pretty messy!

The fiddleyard board link tracks will have to be revised but hopefully this time I'll get it right.

Cheers

Dave

I realise this is an old thread but if anyone is still interested here are couple of shots of a stay alive install I've just completed in a Hornby class 08 with a Loksound 3.5.  The basis was the information referenced elsewhere:

https://www.sbs4dcc.com/tutorialstipstricks/esuloksound52400v35keepalive.html

I've used a Kung Fu 2 wire stay alive for the traction. For the decoder I've used a 5.5v 0.47f super cap wired with a 47ohm resistor and a diode.

I couldn't get the traction stay alive to work with with the 2 wires soldered directly to the poles of the big capacitor but when the +ve is soldered to the diode as shown it works fine.  The yellow wire in the pic below is connected to the 5.5v super cap and the blue to the Kung Fu stay alive.

The stay alive unit and the super cap are crammed into the cab.

It should be possible to disguise the gubbins with a bit of paint and maybe a driver.  It will run for a few seconds and there is no interruption to the sound.  More than good enough.

Cheers

Dave

If the DNO believe their infrastructure can't cope with the export levels they may require you to install a G100 compatible export limitation scheme.  When I installed my batteries I was required to do this and fortunately my battery charger/inverter is able to control solar inverters either directly through comms protocols or by messing with the mains frequency.

Cheers

Dave

Having battery storage is continuing to be a bit of an eye opener.  In the last 30 days our solar panels have generated 647kWh of which we have exported 200kWh. We have imported 0.48kWh. Keep the sunshine coming.  ;-)

Cheers

Dave

Looks like a jolly decent start in the 3D printing game to me.  Keep at it.   :-)

Cheers

Dave

3 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

 

I thought you had to get an approved contractor to do the work (unless that happens to be your day job)?

That is not the case though a lot of the documentation would have you believe that.  For the old FIT stuff you needed an MCS certified contractor in order to get your generation certificate etc.  At first glance the current paperwork would lead you to believe this is still the case.  The relevant permissions are now G98 and G99 which cover all sorts of small generator installations (batteries are classified as a generator) and G100 for export limitation.  You can submit the relevant paperwork yourself if you are prepared to do the work to figure out what it all means.

The installation has to be certified by a "competent" person but just what this is is not defined.  In my case I designed the system and submitted the paperwork (G98 fasttrack) and the DNO (SSE in my case) required impedance measurements which I had taken by an electrician (a mate).  I then had to provide an updated application with an export limitation arrangement (G100) which was approved.

I acquired all the gear and wired it up then had my electrician mate cast an eye over the setup to ensure it met the wiring standard for building regs.  All good so my electrician then made the final connections into the meter tails and away it all went.  I had to submit a commissioning report certifying that the G100 stuff was tested and working as required and also providing the equipment manufacturer's G98/99 compliance certificates and the job was done.

Fiddly and takes some effort but in my case I had purchased the major components at a competitive price and none of the "certified" or "approved" installers would take on the job as they wanted to sell me the gear.

Cheers

Dave

All this lovely sunshine is doing wonders. I'm one of those who invested in solar panels in the first tranche of FIT about 11odd years ago.  The income has been great and I finally invested in batteries this year.  I installed it myself and it all went live in February. What an eye opener!

With the feed in tariff my panels paid for themselves years ago so I figured the extra expense of the battery system has also already been paid for so I wasn't really looking at the payback time.  If I had known just how much power I was putting back into the grid and not utilising I would have pushed harder for an export meter.  SSE wouldn't fit one and claimed the "assumed" export of 50% would be fine.  Yeah right!  Fine for them maybe.

We have 11.8kWh of battery capacity and in the last 7 days we have imported 200Wh i.e. next to nothing.  We have used only 28kWh in the last 30 days which is not bad for a house that uses between 15 and 19kWh on a normal day.  In addition I have a home built gizmo that diverts excess power to heat the household water so we have used pretty much no gas either. Do the numbers stack up? Oh yes.

Cheers

Dace

Well that plan went well.  I sort of nearly finished off all the partly complete wagons.  Just some of them still need painting and lettering. Maybe one day.

So now we are into second level distraction activities.  Actually I did do one session of track fettling but then got distracted.  This time I really should have known better.

This little project is another of my dubious eBay purchases, a Shedmaster kit for a Midland 1400 class 2-4-0.  It came complete with wheels (except one pair is missing).  Instruction no. 1 in the kit is to sweat together the loco mainframes and ream out the holes for the axle bearings.  Spot the problem.

Ah yes, I remember now, the last Shedmaster kit had the same problem.  A kit with bearing holes 20% too big. Top quality NOT!

Good job I intended to fit compensation.  Cut out a couple of blanks for compensation beams out of scrap nickel silver and sweated them together.  Drew up a paper template and stuck it to the blanks then set about drilling pilot holes for the axle holes and the fulcrum.

Of course when I came to open out the bearing holes I wrecked the lot as the metal was too thin.  Start again with some thicker material then.  Worked out a bit better this time so on to marking out the mainframes to drill the fulcrum hole for the beams.

The instructions then say to fit the 2 chassis cross members which "create a reasonably rigid chassis".  My mum made custard with more rigidity!  As you can see fitting the beams and trying to use my alignment axles and springs turned the thing into a banana.

To be fair the instructions do say you might wish to add a base to the ashpan and extra cross members.  I think this should be "must".  I did add a base to the ashpan and then fitted the upper brake hanger support wires across the chassis.  This made the thing rigid enough to allow me to fit the compensation beams and align the bearings.

Time to fit the wheels.  Oh look they've come with Slater's optional extra heavy rust pitting!  These have been sitting in my workshop for a year or two and of course I have no idea where they've been since they left Slater's and before they arrived with me.  It does seem to be a shame that the manufacturer can't pack their product adequately or at least provide some sort of protection.

I cleaned them up and chemically blackened them and fitted the crankpins.  These were then fitted to the chassis and seem ok.  The leading axle is carried in a tube which can rock to provide the 3rd weight bearing point of the compensated chassis.  It ain't pretty engineering but hopefully will be good enough.

Lots to do.

Cheers

Dave

Eastleigh will have their work cut out trying to get a decent paint job on 69008.  Look at the state of some of those bodywork welds!

Cheers

Dave

Not had experience of 009 unifrogs but I have seen shorts on the 00 variety.  If the back to backs are not spot on it is possible to get shorts. If I recall the break in the closure rails was too close to the crossing and was sorted by cutting new ones further away and bridging across the old gaps with conductive paint.  A Google search may provide more info.

Cheers

Dave

Good spot Mr Harding.

Cheers

Dave

I'm another one with the problem of Chrome locking up running on Android. Seems to be getting worse and affects most threads I view.

Cheers

Dave

This is pretty impressive stuff.  It doesn't look to have been worked on for 3 years, at least not in this public collaboration.  I've managed to get some quite usable figures out of it even just using the 512x512 low res image test mode.  Being a research project, and 3 years old, installing the software on your own machine is a little challenging and it took me several hours of tinkering to get it working but it was worth the effort.

I'm particularly looking for figures for Edwardian era through to the early 1920s and there really isn't a lot of convincing models available off the shelf.  So to the internet...

This is an image from Shutterstock adjusted to be 512x512 with the extra bits down the side just plain black...

...and here she is printed to 7mm scale with a very crude paint job:

A bit more work on the painting and it's a usable figure.  As you can see the algorithm doesn't recognise a stack of books so her hands are empty!

As to what happens at the back, well here are a selection of models I created yesterday:

and from the rear:

As you can see the algorithms struggle with long skirts but there is nothing that can't be fixed with a dab of filler.  On the other hand the gent in the suit is pretty much spot on.  His face is a bit blurred because he had a beard but overall it's pretty good and certainly good enough for a background figure.

If you try more modern figures then the reverse modelling is very good for both male and female clothing.  I can see myself using this quite a lot and maybe reading the research papers and looking at extending the capabilities (there's nothing on the telly!).

Cheers

Dave

Not that I know anything about Thames barges or indeed anything much marine but how exactly does that rudder mechanism work?  It looks as though there is a horizontal beam like a tiller attached to the rudder but that is enclosed in a structure.  Won't the structure restrict the movement of the rudder?

Interesting bit of modelling as usual.

Cheers

Dave

A few more distraction activities have been found to avoid me having to tackle any of the difficult jobs, or so I thought!

I pulled out a few of my shelf Queens to see if I could finish a few off.  I've acquired a number of cheap wagons on "the bay" over the last few years. Of course they were cheap for a reason.

I seem to have a couple of open wagons where the builder didn't really have much clue. The brake gear was a real mess with the brake handle on upside down and other "peculiarities".  As I had the CAD work for a 9ft 6" underframe I was able print some bits and adapt them. These are now pretty much ready for the paint shop.

This tinkering and seeing some work others, including Simond, have done, led me to look at updating my 3D print underframe to see if I could add some springing.  Here's the first print still on the build plate...

After a bit of cleaning and curing I ended up with a set of parts that seem to fit together ok.

The whole of the underframe is printed as a single piece with the exception of the axle boxes and axlebox retainers.  The buffer housings haven't printed well so these will need to be printed separately.

A small guitar string spring is bent up and fitted between the axlebox and frame.  You can just about see the end pointing through a lug on the back of the axlebox.

From above you can see where the spring is glued into the frame (the white patch).

This gives about a mm of downward travel to the axlebox which looks a bit odd when the wagon is picked up as the box does'nt contact the leaf spring...

This won't be visible normally when the wagon is stationary as the springing will be compressed and all should look ok.

In the picture you can see the axlebox retainers which haven't been painted yet. They are simply glued very carefully to the ends of the W irons.  There's work to do but I think it's workable.

Cheers

Dave

It really is time that Warner's realised that the IT "professionals" they employ are incompetent.  The fact that they roll out test systems on the live site proves the point. Nobody who had an iota of care for their customers would behave in this manner. If I had done this sort of thing during my 40 years in the business I would have been relegated to sweeping the floors!

I really don't know how Andy copes with all this hassle.

Cheers

Dave