BG John

I manage to squeeze in and out of my extra wide doors, that won't open very far. And it's only the mirrors that stick out to 8ft!

Good old eBay. So far today, I've received an item ordered and (allegedly) despatched 2 weeks ago, that I was refunded for yesterday. It arrived by Royal Mail 24, so I wonder when it was posted! And a reel of 3mm 3d printer filament, rather than the 1.75mm I ordered. I think I'd be locked in a straitjacket in a padded cell by now, if I'd had to order all the parts to make something like that .

Have you considered a cheap CNC engraving/milling machine? I haven't got mine working yet, but it should be able to handle thick plasticard, acrylic and thin MDF. For £200, I'm hoping it can do a lot of things an expensive laser cutter could do, but at a fraction of the cost of my own laser, or the prices charged by others to do it for me.

There are times when Googling terms I'm not familiar with doesn't do much to enhance my life, or my confidence that I belong to a species that should be let out on its own!

The next step in designing mine is to knock up the proscenium arch out of old cardboard boxes and sticky tape. I'll try the proportions suggested in the book. Perhaps I should make several head height gauges, to help me crouch down to the level of people of various heights! I sort of did it with a tape measure the other day, and found it useful. I have a cunning, and secret, idea for viewers of restricted height, and wheelchair users . It would add interest for all viewers, but needs allowing for right from the start of planning. More practical progress was made last night, when I cut out some Peco O-16.5 turnout templates. What may slow down the planning, is that almost all of the fake Lego I bought for making mock up buildings, is currently in use on other part built layouts! I'm finding this stage of planning to be quite interesting. I'm hoping I can do a fair bit of forced perspective, that wouldn't be possible if I wasn't planning the whole thing to have very controlled viewing areas. I intend to make viewing from conventional angles an excruciatingly horrible experience, which is why my starting point is a baseboard at the final height .

Code 100 ones are curvable!

I wasn't aware that the arctic was covered in mud. Has global warming got that bad?

Mine is still developing in my head. I bought a Scalescenes narrowboat kit the other day, to help with part of one of my ideas, and have printed the parts for making a mock up. Working in 1:43 scale does make it more challenging, which is why I'm aiming to design mine by trial and error as a full size mock up. I can visualise what I want, but can't draw it on the computer. My thoughts on using forced perspective make it harder too. I'm still curious to know how people are getting on with the height of their layouts. Looking at a lot of the layouts under construction, they seem to me to be designed for conventional viewing heights. My first thought when looking at my bare board set at 53", was that this needs some very different thinking.

It's not only about the size of parking spaces though, people seem to have de-evolved the skills to park in them properly. I can get my 16ft long, 8ft wide over mirrors, vehicle into most spaces without too much trouble, but often have to abort my efforts, when I notice the weird angles and crossed white lines, that was the best that some drivers of small vehicles are capable of!

I tried OpenStreetMap, and it may have the advantage of being able to get more accurate dimensions of the surrounding buildings, but I'm not aware of a pre 1940s version that might have some track on it!

I hadn't noticed that maps of the Arctic were marked "Here be dragons"!

I had trouble getting into a proper Mini before I got into my teens, and I wasn't that oversized! My youth was spent in the no man's land of being too big for normal clothes shops, but too small for the outsize ones!

I suppose I could move the date of my K&ESR layout forward a few years, and make the baseboard a bit wider. It would be an interesting challenge in using forced perspective, to have a 4mm scale SECR line in the background of my 7mm scale Colonel Stephens station!

That's probably preferable to the fertile nutcases we have nowadays!

So I could CNC mill acrylic parts, then carefully set the home position of the printer, to add printed detail .

This sort of stuff https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/262928351041?chn=ps&adgroupid=46622246639&rlsatarget=pla-380277463811&abcId=1128946&adtype=pla&merchantid=113268121&poi=&googleloc=1007440&device=c&campaignid=857250873&crdt=0 Kapton tape is another that's suggested. I haven't even built my printer yet, and I'm discovering that 3D printing is a world of trial, error and conflicting advice! Trying to make sense of what adhesives to use for sticking PLA, and reading about things that work for one person, but are useless for another, I came across a comment that acetone works for some brands of PLA, but not others. Although I'd also read that it doesn't work with PLA at all, but is ideal for ABS! I think the same applies to just about everything to do with 3D printing. My brain is hurting already!

As I understand it, it's best to apply certain kinds of tape to the bed, or give it a coat of Pritt stick or hairspray, to help the work stick to it.

It's not in Britain, and my incompetence at foreign languages means that I haven't yet managed to discover if there is an equivalent of the OS, or suitable online maps .

I realised that, but if the buildings and scenery are still there, you can draw the track to fit. I've got ideas for a model based on a real location, where the track was removed about 70 years ago. The buildings are still there, and the landscape hasn't changed much, so I'll import the satellite view from Google Maps, and draw the plan on that. The only significant difference is that we'd be working from different scale aerial photos.

I'd advise either seeing a doctor, or installing Adblock Plus.

This is an interesting post by the makers of my printer. Some different ideas for sticking that might be useful. They also say that acetone works with some PLA filaments, which may explain why there is so much conflicting information around, if that also applies to other adhesives and makes of filament.

So there are some good things about the way eBay and Paypal work after all! They may be hard on private sellers, but they don't seem to take any brown smelly stuff from business sellers. I've had dealings with a couple of Chinese sellers shipping from UK warehouses recently, and any procrastination in sorting problems seems to rapidly disappear when the time for eBay to intervene draws near, as they know the money will be repaid anyway!

I know it's verging on breaking the no politics rule, but as Tim mentioned unicorns

Thanks Bill. The fake Lego was a good buy, as I can make up, and adapt, mock up buildings very quickly. Yellow might be a bit in yer face in colour photos, and real life, but it comes out well in black & white. It's easy to put scenes together to photograph, so I can test views from different angles before I put the time and effort into building things for real. An idea is forming in my weird and perverse mind, about installing video cameras in positions that wouldn't normally be accessible, and having a screen to show a variety of different live views. This needs to be thought about when planning the layout though, to make sure the view actually works. I haven't made any progress on the radio control for a while. Life, and buying and building a mini CNC milling machine and 3D printer, is causing some temporary distractions. Everything I'm doing that involves electronics is Arduino based, so it's all adding to my knowledge, and will hopefully produce better end results.

A bit late now, but could you have taken square on photos of the baseboards, stitched them together, and imported the result into Templot, scaled to the right size?