eldavo

Managed to finish off the first B8 turnout. There is something really satisfying about building trackwork. I chose this point as it is one of the most straightforward and I haven't built track in O gauge before. It can't installed yet as it's position will be determined by the position of some more complex bits, a tandem and a double slip. I've spent several hours on the tandem this weekend but there's a fair bit more to do on it. Cheers Dave

Although I used Trax to map out the overall trackplan for this layout I've been using Templot to create templates for the individual turnouts. When you start printing these out you start to realise how big they are. I've been fairly generous with the radius of most of the turnouts with the tightest being something like 1 in 6 and most being at least 1 in 8. In the picture above the turnout under construction is B8 and almost 2 feet long. The template alongside is for a 1 in 8 double slip and is loooonnnngggggg. I have two of these to build! Cheers Dave

Out of interest Gordon for the mimic panels on the Winchester club's layout I used 3mm flat top LEDs simply pushed into holes in the panel and secured with a tiny dab of glue from a hot glue gun. They are plenty bright enough to be visible from a reasonable distance. Cheers Dave

While I was fiddling about testing a couple of locos on some track plonked down on the baseboards I noticed that there is a tendency for boards to resonate sounds. To try and reduce this I've added a 3mm layer of closed cell foam underlay glued down with latex based adhesive. This stuff is actually designed for use under hard flooring. Spreading the adhesive is a messy business... With the foam down I then transferred a rough approximation of the trackplan on to it. This only needs to be a guide as I will build the turnouts based on Templot templates. I've also built a number of scale 30ft track panels using 1.5mm ply sleepers and plastic chairs from C&L. A fairly tedious process but doable. I decided to experiment with laying the panels in a one shot process. I slathered yet more latex glue down and whacked down the track panels and some 00 gauge ballast. I added 3D printed fishplates and slopped on a bit of paint. Results are encouraging but I need to improve my skills. Just another 120 panels and lots of turnouts to build! Cheers Dave

Bit of a clear out and reorganization in the workshop and I've managed to get 5 1/2 baseboards assembled and installed along the back wall. Fortunately there is a fair bit of space underneath the baseboards so I've managed to heave a load of things out of sight including most of the baseboards for both Cramdin Yard and Waton. Track components arrive today so the next challenge is figuring out how to transfer the trackplan to the boards and install a 3mm layer of sound deadening foam underlay. Cheers Dave

All 6 baseboards for the scenic area now assembled along with their transport/support frames. Now all I need is some track components... As an experiment I have built some track already with some bits and pieces I had in stock but I fear a single 30 ft track panel is not going to go far. Cheers Dave

More progress with baseboards etc. I now have 5 boards assembled plus both transport/support frames. The final scenic board to be built will be made to split in two so I can assemble a slightly shorter layout at home. Yet more tweaks and simplifications have been made to the trackplan. Time to print it up and play Brio trains to make sure it all works. Also a good opportunity to take a look at viewing lines and see just how squashed in things are. Below is the view from the righthand end of the layout. The compound and clerestory coaches are sitting in platform 1 which actually will be 750mm longer so there is scope for a longer train. The autotrain on the left is in platform 3. Looking from the other end a single is running in from the fiddle yard passing the goods facilities to its left. At the extreme left end of the layout are the loco facilities. The 2P is sat on the 55ft turntable while in the centre is the 2 road engine shed. The tank loco in the foreground is sat on the ash pit road. Standing more towards the centre of the layout and looking right the single and coaches are snaking their way into platform 2. On the left in the distance a goods train sits in the goods yard headshunt waiting to depart. I think it all works but I'll spend a bit more time peering at it before committing it to track. Cheers Dave

Despite temperatures in the 30s I've been mad enough to spend time down in the workshop pushing on with the heavy engineering on this project. I've managed to build one of the transport frames/crates/supports to check I've got the measurements right and that the idea works. Apart from sorting some way of locating/clamping the boards in, sanding and varnishing it's done. Thankfully it's not too heavy and moves on the castors very nicely. Shouldn't be a big deal to roll up the garden and load into a van. It also works quite nicely as one of the end supports for staging the layout. There are a couple of slots that one end of the 8'6" support beams locate into. The other end of the beams are supported by the exotic brackets I made earlier slung on a steel trestle. As the beams simply sit in the slots of the frame I can adjust the length of the set-up so that it is shorter when in my workshop and extended to full length when out and about. The basic structure works fine and is easy to assemble but I need to figure a way of positively locating the baseboards. At the moment they just sit on top which is a bit vulnerable to the odd unintended shove. Here's half the scenic section assembled. There's quite a lot of it! Cheers Dave

Just in case anyone is under the illusion that I have changed my modelling ways and gone all organised and engineer like with these CAD drawings etc. here is a shot of my latest creations... These are the "hangers" that support the ends of the four 8ft long beams on the central steel trestle. The easy way of making these would have been to order up some mild steel strip, heat it with my brazing torch, carefully bend it to shape and possibly braze on some stiffening ribs. What sort of challenge would that be? These are a pair of T hinges attacked with a hack saw and bashed with a hammer. You can see how carefully the metal was prepared as evidenced by the pink paint still attached! Cheers Dave

You certainly sneaked this one in under the radar mate. The Southern Water skip contents loco shed still looks good. Cheers Dave

Progress has been made. Two more baseboards have been assembled and all three have had a coat of acrylic varnish to seal things. Experience has shown that if you don't give the insulating foam some sort of sealing coat it's a devil of a job to glue anything to it with any of our normal modelling adhesives. In addition other pieces of innocent timber have been tortured into submission mainly in trying to figure a way of supporting the baseboards. As ever solving one problem causes another. In this case it's down to the width of the baseboards again. Having 3ft wide boards seemed a really good idea when looking at trackplans. Having solved the weight (5.5Kg) and thus handling issues I then had to decide on the height to display at. Many O gauge layouts seem to do away with a backscene to allow easy access for coupling etc. but to me it makes the layout seem like a picture without a frame. I intend to have some form of backscene so to be able to reach across, to encourage the inevitable recalcitrant loco, the boards need to be slightly lower than I would normally set them at. For my current layouts I use steel trestles for support but they are too narrow to easily support the boards at the joins and with 6 scenic boards, plus several boards for the fiddleyard, I would need an awful lot to hold this one up. I figured some form of support beams would allow me to use less trestles. Easy but... If I use a support beam of a reasonable size then the trestles won't go down low enough to get the boards to the right height. Some innovation required. I'm also thinking about how this lot will get transported. The common way is to use end boards and pair up baseboards and lug them around with or without a trolley. Must be an easier way. How about having some sort of transport frame for the baseboards that double as one or more of the supports? Current thinking is shown below. There will be two skeletal transport frames each accomodating 3 baseboards and mounted on 100mm castors. These frames provide support for 4ft or so of baseboard at each end of the scenic section plus supporting one end of two 8ft support beams. One central steel trestle with a couple of steel brackets supports the other ends of the 8ft beams. The beams are 100x18 mm softwood cut from 3m long tongue and groove floorboards which should be rigid enough to support the boards. I had originally thought I would use the floorboards as they came but then it occurred to me that if the tongue or groove bits got damaged when chucked in the back of a van I would be stuffed so I ran the boards through the table saw. The castors arrived today courtesy of the large South American ladies so I better crack on and figure out how to build the transport frames. Cheers Dave

Did I miss anything by having the sound off? I found this one very useful after 3 months of lockdown... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fJ1JvSKq4I Cheers Dave

You look and you appreciate. Oh sorry, wrong things. Cheers Dave

Come on Gordon surely you can understand instructions translated from German by the car park attendant! Don't you just love modern instruction manuals. Reading it it sounds as though once you have set up your route you can go into the extended settings and associate an S88 input with the route. Given that, a simple pushbutton connected to the S88 input would cause the ECoS to set the route when the button is pushed. No idea how you clear the route when you are done. On the JMRI front, I don't think you need any block detection wizardry to use it with your ECoS. A PC running JMRI can connect via WiFi to your ECoS and pick up all your turnout and loco definitions. You could then define routes in JMRI or switch turnouts etc. My experience is though that it is not simple! Cheers Dave

Herons, pictures of Sam and fishing brings back mamories. How's Shergar? Cheers Dave

One down five to go. This may take a while! If I had some appropriate scales I would measure the weight. I would estimate it is less than 6Kg. Cheers Dave

Just for change I haven't got distracted (much) and have actually made some progress on the layout. I was still not entirely happy with the trackplan so have moved on to version 4. This one sorts out an operational problem with the loco shed. In the last version the shed area was entered from the runround loop behind the signal box leading to a problem whereby locos could only be moved around the complex using the loop. Didn't seem right. To resolve this I've added a small headshunt for the shed area fed from the main running line. This makes it all a bit cluttered so I may have to have a bit of a clear out. I had originally intended to build each of the 6 baseboards 1220x750mm (4ft by 2ft6" in old money) from plywood in a fairly conventional manner but it occurred to me if I could reduce the weight I could increase the width and still be able to handle them. For the Winchester Railway Modellers Redbridge Wharf layout we created a number of baseboards from high density polystyrene insulation foam and they are very very light. Time to do something similar for my own layout. The basic format is a top surface of 50mm thick high density insulation foam with framing and supporting structure of 6mm birch ply. Inset into the top surface at the ends is a strip of 15x15mm softwood to allow brass screws to be inserted to support rail ends. The foam needs a fair bit of support so the lower 60mm of the ends and sides are doubled skinned with another 6mm of ply, to provide shelf for the foam to sit on, plus there is a grid of cross bracing. Corner joints are reinforced with 15x15mm softwood and screws. It may be worth cutting holes to further reduce weight as my "back of a fag packet" estimate suggests this would save around 400 to 500grams. I have one under construction so when I find out what the final weight is I can make a decision. It's a lot of holes so if it doesn't make a worthwhile difference I can live without the extra work. The insulation foam comes in 1200x600mm sheets so is made up of 1 1/2 sheets with a glued join. Choice of adhesive is fairly important here as any glue that contains solvents melts the polystyrene. On Redbridge we used solvent free grip fill which works but, as it's PVA based and needs one surface to be porous, doesn't ever cure completely in joints between two pieces of foam. Luckily there are a number of construction/grip fill adhesives that are both solvent free and not PVA based. I'm using EvoStick "Sticks likes..." and it does! Timber to timber joins use traditional PVA based woodworking adhesive. Cheers Dave

Hi Phil, I don't recall having any real problems with the Saint other than those of my own making. I bought it years ago as I fancied trying a Slaters kit and the Saint is quite an elegant prototype (for one of those copper capped things). :-) Cheers Dave

After several days of frustration and failed prints due to software problems I've managed to get a few more experimantal prints all rescaled from CAD models designed for 7mm models. First up a rather obscure prototype, a Midland railway bunker coal wagon. Amazingly the printer managed to produce this but due to the thickness of the coal boxes it's almost impossible to handle without breaking. To make this a practical proposition I would have to beef up the walls of the coal boxes significantly and also make some of the detail a bit more prominent. Next up is a Midland D502 Clayton arc roof brake third coach. This is built up from individual partitions and, as the Midland didn't go in for a lot of variation in it's carriages, you can bolt together combinations of partition modules to build up a large selection of stock. The print is not perfect but apart from a couple of holes, probably due to crud in my resin vat, it aint bad. There is an odd dip in the tumblehome of the sides which needs investigating. This has also appeared in my 7mm prints so this may be some kind of aberration in the STL file. Hmm. The model includes the interior. I need to refine the suppport platform as I'm tending to damage the model removing it. I would also need to beef up some of the solebar sections. All interesting stuff but something of a distraction from my 7mm interests. Cheers Dave

There may have been a bit of wire wrap on the backplane of the DG Nova but not a lot as it was quite a small machine. Certainly the one I worked on was anyway. It used large square circuitboards that seemed to need reseating regularly. Only had paper tape on the machine I worked on, no disc and no tape storage. In fact it had no operating system as that was what I was writing! Lots of inputting small programs via toggle switches to get the thing started. Have a good one all. Cheers Dave

I think I've already scratched the Southern/Bulleid itch... I'm in remission but if it reappears I have a West Country kit on the shelf which should sort it. ;-) I really should decide how I'm going to build the baseboards and get some materials ordered. Cheers Dave

Best of luck with that Tom. At least it's a straight line. I'm still practicing with the bow pen and it's a challenge in 7mm let alone 2mm. I know why I don't model pre grouping in 2mm! Very cruel close up. Cheers Dave

I think I'm getting somewhere. Beefed up the thickness of the parts as suggested by TomE and also greatly increased the support structures as he seems to do. Looks a much better print. This is a Midland D379 meat van body the only other bit of NPCS Midland stock I have currently. I have a bunch of Clayton arc roof coaches along with bogeys and some freight stock I might try printing at this scale. Cheers Dave

Having created a number of CAD models of various Midland prototypes primarily for 7mm I thought I ought to see if I can print them at 2mm. The answer is sort of... I'm struggling with eradicating various distortions in the models. I've printed a corpse van on my Wanhao D7 using Elegoo grey ABS like reason at 35 microns. It ain't perfect. Certainly not as good as some of the examples on here. Supports, apart from the strip along the bottom edge, are added using Chitubox but other than that the model is simply scaled from the 7mm version. It's rather small compared to its brother! Cheers Dave

I have a Wanhao D7 which is a very capable machine. Mine is an earlier version that I've had to upgrade and sorting software was something of pain. You can get clear resin which will give pretty good results though you will always see some evidence of the layers in it so will never be truly transparent. Also you need to be aware that some of these clear resins go yellowy over time. Cheers Dave