eldavo

Join the grumpy club Gordon. Some of us have been there a while. I must admit I am baffled by the difference between layout and workbench blogs and the normal forum threads. Can't for the life of me see why you would want a distinction. Maybe Andy has a grand plan in his head that he hasn't shared with us. Cheers Dave (off to find other things to maon about)

Morning All, Few oktas and a definite chill. Supposed to spend the working day strategising then I am summoned to dinner with a customer this evening. Not much time for modelling or the important things by the looks of it. It's clear from the pictures that Phil really didn't enjoy the DB9 experience. :icon_biggrin: Cheers Dave

In the second link the wombat isn't even using the crossing but has jumped down from the platform to cross the lines!!! Proof positive that Darwin's theory also allows regressive behaviour genes to emerge. Cheers Dave

Come on then, where's the progress? :icon_yawn: Cheers Dave

Morning All, No oktas in evidence. Finally found the ERs thread this morning. Anyone know where the "your posts" function is on this 'ere new forum? Haven't found my way round half of the place yet so it's all a bit inconvenient at the moment. I'm sure all will be fine when the dust settles. Cheers Dave

Yo SAGgy folks. Nuver Suverna reporting for duty. :icon_wave: Cheers Dave

Afternoon All, Late on parade finding my round the new environs. I'm sure it is entirely coincidental that when I uploaded my avatar the new forum crashed and burned! Cheers Dave

Had a bit of a change in focus for the last week or so and been tinkering with a building. Actually it's just another excuse for not getting on and sorting out the traverser on Cramdin really! This is a building for the Winchester club OO layout to fill in a rather large gap along the rear of the baseboard. It's on a slightly larger scale than the buildings I've created for Cramdin being about 3 feet long. The thing is a pretty crude construction of bits of MDF and card with the roof clad in corrugated plastic. Here's an overall shot. Can ya see what it is yet? It's supposed to look like a fairly seedy and run down stadium at a dog track. It's a freelance design but location is inspired by Catford (I think) being next to the railway but I've lifted design elements from Walthamstow and the dark recesses of my head. It has a sort of art deco ish sort of frontage planted in the middle of a cheapo corrugated iron main structure. Signs and things to add here. Originally the idea was for it to be brick below the cladding but I couldn't be bothered to faff with brick paper and stuff so I thought I would modify a Jim S-W idea of using Plasticote textured paint to give a concrete render finish. This is actually suede effect! To give it a more run down appearance I did use some brick paper on some parts, masked of ragged random areas then after spraying it all peeled off the masking. The idea is to give the effect of bits of the rendering falling off. Doesn't look too clever close up but when the 3 foot rule is in play... The cladding has been painted with a gunmetal/silver enamel then roughly sort of dry brushed with my favourite Tamiya Nato brown to give a rust effect. This was then liberally dusted with Carr's rust weathering powder. Also there's a bit of Mig Russian Earth weathering powder applied in places on the rendering to make it look generally dirty. Must be the effect of passing steam trains. More to do to it yet and also it has to be fitted in to the layout somehow. Cheers Dave

You know how it happens, sometimes things on Ebay are just too tempting. Well they are to me anyhow! This is another item that was listed to end at an odd time and with probably too high a starting bid so I put in the minimum bid on a snipe and here it is. It's a rather nicely built O guage M7. No idea what kit it was built from but it is very solidly made and quite nicely finished. It's had a knock or two and someone has done an awfully crude repair to the cab roof which has resulted in some rather unsightly glue runs. It has had a basic look over and runs beautifully. You can see the jauntily angled cab roof and glue blobs in the following shots... I couldn't live with that repair so off came the cab roof and a craft knife removed the unsightly glue. The body was then given a good wash to get rid of accumulated dust, affected areas rubbed down and primed. While I was at it I also applied gun blue to the sharp edges that were already showing signs of paint wear/chipping. As the roof was off I also dropped in some crude plastic glazing held with Klear. The primer was then rubbed down a little and some Halfords satin black applied by brush where necessary. Of course this has resulted in some missing lining so this has been roughed in this evening using acrylics and a cocktail stick. It's far from perfect and needs a little adjustment but with some weathering should be good enough. Finally this evening the whole loco has been given a thin coat of Klear to even things out. Next up will be some repairs to odd details like the bufferbeam pipework and brake gear then some weathering. I need to get my finger out with this one as the loco is already rosetered to run on the club layout at Woking show in 3 weeks time! Cheers Dave

Oh no what have I done? Having had great succes in picking up the little 02 kit I placed a bid on another kit on Ebay. All the experienced folks tell you never buy a part built brass kit without inspecting it closely. What did I do? There is certainly no fool like an old fool! So what I bought at a bargain(?) price was potentially a nice kit. It's a Jinty from Connossieur and a kit that was recommended to me and I was thinking of buying new. On receiving it I opened the box and things looked pretty good. There's a complete set of wheels, albeit a little rusty, a motor, gears, plunger pickups and even some spare glass fibre pen refills. The chassis looks to be fairly square and the wheel offered up to it OK... Then there was the seperately packaged body... This looked largely complete and was primed but I was suspicious of a few joints and there were definitely things that didn't look right. Never mind, the body is only cosmetic so I'll strip the paint adjust a few things and all will be well. With the paint off things took a definite turn for the worse. A few bits fell off which was not a good sign but then I looked in detail at how things had been put together. The cab floor didn't fit so clearly the cab wasn't assembled square so I started to check other things for squareness and the true horrors started to emerge. The smokebox apart from being soldered on with an awful lot of solder is clearly not square. The chimney came off easily though as it appears to have been glued on with something like UHU! Looking at the side you can see that it isn't even in the right place and should be further back. Arghh look at the way the smokebox wrapper has been fixed! What's going on with those bars across the cab windows? It gets worse! The boiler is not at the right height, it's not level, the firebox hasn't been shaped to have the right curvature and the cab front is not square! There's nothing for it I'm going to have to take large parts of it apart and re-build so out with the soldering iron(s). I managed to get a few minor bits off cleanly but there is so much solder of indeterminate melting point that neither of my irons (25w and 48w) can make any impression. So after pondering the situation for a while I decided drastic action was required... It's disassembled. Yes that is a blowtorch in the background! A few of the bits may be damaged beyond repair and I'll have to make replacements but at least I have a kit of parts to work with. As one of my fellow club members would say, "a kit is just an aid to scratch building". In this case it may not be much of an aid. At least all the parts fit in the box now. :roll: I'm just off to the garage to build a Jinty, I may be gone some time! :? Cheers Dave

As ever I can't help looking for a bargain. Something in me just won't let me buy something at full price. Fortunately I have managed to pick up a little gem of an O gauge kit from Ebay in the last month or so. For some reason hardly anyone placed a bid on it and it went for a song despite retailing for something like ?‚??199! The seller advertised it as a part built kit with one or two items missing and even provided a list of the bits missing. Always up for a challenge I figured I could source a few missing screws and scratchbuild some brakegear so put a silly low bid in on spec. It arrived on my doorstep shortly after. The kit is a Tower models Class 02 diesel which is mostly whitemetal, in fact pewter, with some brass chassis bits and all wheels, gears and motor. An ideal starter kit in O gauge for a bodger like me. As it happens when I inspected the kit I couldn't find any bits missing! The previous owner had started the assembly of the chassis and also cleaning up the castings. Sophisticated chassis? NOT! On arrival I gave it 12 volts to see if all was well and with a couple of minor adjustments to get the gears meshed nicely the wheels fairly whizzed round. Most of the castings are actually very clean with the exception of the cab which is a single piece and has required hours of filing to get it close to good enough. The hood and cab are mounted as a unit onto the footplate with screws and here they are roughly offered up. I assembled some pickups as per the instructions and took it up to my local model railway club for a little amble round on the O gauge layout. It worked fine and will even run quite slowly despite not having been run in. The pickups though were less than wonderful. The phosphorbronze strip provided seemed a little too thin for the job and so after consulting some experts I decided to scratchbuild something better. Several of the O guagers at the club use scratchbuilt plunger pickups made from 1/8 inch brass tube and rod with either wire or phosphorbronze springing. I opted to try some guitar spring and having sourced some brass rod and tube from a local model shop and dug out some copperclad sleepers knocked, something up. Here's the result as yet untested on the layout so will probably require some adjustment, certainly works if you whack a couple of wires on the tyre treads. I'm waiting on delivery of some low melt solder via the postie so I can get on and start sticking the castings together. Cheers Dave

First up let me say I am a sceptic when it comes to sound fitted models. Having said that I did purchase a Baccy 66 from my main supplier, Ebay, sometime last year. Well at 90 notes it would have been rude to let somebody else buy it! Here she is on the kitchen table which I have been known to refer to as my "workbench". When I first got the thing I found it very interesting though none too spectacular. I had a bunch of issues with the sound resetting and it generally did not sound very good. The resets and general running were tracked down to over enthusiastic oiling on the part of the previous owner. A good clean up and things improved considerably. Also I took it to my local club and gave it an hours running on our roundy roundy layout which further improved it and all seemed to be working well. Having done all this I was still not that enamoured with it and it went back in the box apart from demonstrating it to a couple of folks. I even refrained from detailing it, fitting my favourite couplers and weathering it as I may well sell it on. Over the last few weeks I've read a bunch of posts on these forums and other places about sound locos and the poor fitting of the systems in various Bachmann models. Being too idle to tackle anything significant yesterday evening I decided to open up my one and only sound loco and see what made it tick. Surprise surprise the speaker fitting in this loco is lousy! There is a single oval speaker clipped into a very small plastic enclosure underneath the cooling array grills. Contrary to all the advice of acoustic engineers and others the fitting is not air tight, in fact there are gaping holes everywhere! So then what to do. Being a cheapskate my first thought was to find some blue tac and seal the speaker into the enclosure and block the holes. So that's exactly what I did. I popped out the speaker, rolled a really thin sausage of blue tac and set it around the edge of the enclosure and blocked the 4 sets of holes in the sides of the enclosure that allow the mounting spring clips to move. Here's the result. You can also see from this picture that there is a whopping great hole where the cables to the speaker enter. The speaker was refitted and the cable hole bunged up with more blue tac. Taking a look at the result there were then 4 more holes where the speaker can be screw mounted! These were duly plugged giving this elegant(!) result. At this point I reassembled the loco and powered it up. My sceptical mind told me I would hear no improvement. After all my ears are over 50 years old, I spent my youth working with speakers the size of telephone boxes trying to get Hi Fi sound and I played for 35 years in brass bands, how could a bit of blue tac improve the sound from a speaker the size of a large postage stamp mounted in a bit of plastic? Well it did and I could hear the difference especially in the horn sounds! Sound is rather subjective so I was still prepared to believe I was deluding myself. Having worked for 8 or 9 years on Fourier transform software and analysing data many years ago I thought a touch of careful measurement might be in order. Before making the modifications I shot a short video clip of the loco sat idling. I framed the shot carefully so the camera would be at a known distance from the sound source. I did the same after the modification, ripped the video from each into a copy of CoolEdit and took a look at the waveforms and frequency analysis. Bear in mind this is using a crappy microphone in a mobile phone so you wouldn't expect great results. I should have used a high quality mic but, as I said before, I'm a cheapskate. The upper traces in this screenshot are the original and the lower the modified. The green trace is the audio waveform, the blue the frequency analysis. They are, very surprisingly, significantly different. The volume level in the modified appears to be greater, and more significantly, there is a distinct shift in the frequencies from high to lower. Some of the "tinny" higher frequencies have been removed and the peaks have become more distinct. I'm now wondering whether the lower frequencies couldn't be further improved with some judicious damping of the plastic body of the loco... Oh, and a nice teak speaker enclosure the size of a phone box! Cheers Dave