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Fen End Pit

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  1. Fen End Pit
    Progress since Christmas has been good with the final section of track laying over the bridge completed allowing trains to once more go all around the room. The vertical fiddle yard is still functioning having been dismantled off the wall and then 're-hung' and the old portable sections over the door and the 'crew lounge' (spare bed!) could be re-used with only minor adaption to fit the new position of the rails coming off the main scenic section.
     
    A view from the door gives a reasonable impression of progress.
     

     
    The lighting will get a fascia panel and there will also be a proper fascia along the front of the layout contoured to the land level. I also intend to rebuild the lever frame box so that it sits lower, with the top of the frame level with the top of the baseboard and just the levers themselves above the level of the baseboard front. To the left of the photograph will be the scenic break (over-bridge) and the station building with the platforms disappearing under this bridge. The land behind the water tower will probably be a slope with trees and there will be a small coal yard next to the tower. The area at the front of the layout has two sidings and a cattle dock still waiting to be laid. In the corner, by the window, you can see the mill buildings in roughly their intended positions.
     
    On the opposite wall the vertical fiddleyard now has four of the six levels completed and working. The top level in intended to have a cross-over so that I can reverse trains between the Up and Down lines off-scene.
     

     
    The river and bridge needed to be in place to a point where I could lay track on them before I could complete the circuit. The water is a sheet of 6mm acrylic, cut on the laser cutter. It sits about 6mm clear of the bed of the river and has been sprayed on the underside to make it slightly opaque. The top surface has several layers of acrylic varnish painted on to give some ripples. The river will probably end up considerably narrower when the banks are put in place and the edges are going to be exercise in planting lots of reeds. For now I've just tried making a couple of girders from hacked about Wills Vari-girders just to see what the effect will be. The bridge abutments were lasercut from 3mm MDF but this time I decided to abandon the technique of interlocking the corners and just went for trying to mitre the joint using the bench sander in Makespace. I'm beginning to think this actually gives a better corner finish.
     

     
    Also from Wills, and taken off 'Empire Basin' is the signalbox. This will now sit next to the level crossing for the road the goes past the mill along one bank of the river. We had a discussion on Friday evening as to whether the steps on the box were the wrong way around but I have found several photographs of boxes where the signalman manually opened the gates and the steps still pointed away from the crossing (and not just because they point onto a platform or to some other obvious destination). The nearest example I can find is Littleport.
     

     
    So today has been spent doing a bit of tidying up and running trains around and around, stopping whenever anything falls off and trying to work out why. Things are now 'lapping' well with most issues down to cleanliness and the odd badly adjusted back-to-back on the wheels. Watching the J65 with a coal train pass the Claud with the short rake of Mk1 coaches is rather fun. The 'problem child' in the form of my Hornby Class 31 can now circumnavigate the room at near warp speed if required, this is always a good sign as with the lack of springing on the bogies it is probably my most fussy engine.
     
    Work continues on the track, the double slip in the yard is next. I've soldered up the crossings and I'm trying to pluck up courage to stick them down.
     
    David
  2. Fen End Pit
    This weekend I had a good few hours to do some concentrated work on the layout. The track on the main boards is coming on well and the two points at the right hand end of the loop got finished off. There was nearly a disaster here which took a bit of working around. I had made a small mistake early on with the very first board I built. I had carefully laser cut all the pieces of framing and then assembled them and stuck them to the bottom of the baseboard. Unfortunately I put one piece on the wrong way round resulting in some of the cross framing being 1" further to the right than I had originally intended. You can guess what happened, the frame end up smack bang underneath where the switch blades of one of the points needed to be. No problem I thought. I have the slack to just move the whole formation by 1" to the right and it'll be fine.......
     
    Until I got to the right hand end of the next baseboard and the last point. Aghhhhh! the switch blades end up 5mm from the baseboard edge! A rapid bit of rebuilding of the track by the catch point meant I was able to claw back the missing inch and I've managed to do it without upsetting the geometry too badly. Still I did feel a little stupid. I think the problem really does highlight the major flaw with Templot - you can't print directly onto the baseboards or underlay!
     
    To show it all got back together here is the Class 15 sitting on the mill siding.
     

     
    I also decided that I had better print out the remaining curve and just satisfy myself that it really will fit into the room without needing an extension! This print out then led me to start thinking about the bridge which gives the title to this blog posting. I want to do a plate girder bridge rather like the ones that used to cross various drains in the fens. The lines in East Anglia were built by several companies who weren't exactly rich and G.E.R. inherited lots of timber trestles which were falling apart. Even then they didn't go in for expensive iron work and many of the bridges I have photographs of look decidedly 'skinny'. As I'm not sure I have the life-force left to take to mass riveting of scratch-built bridge sides I thought I'd try and fabricate something using Wills Vari-girders which I had left over from Empire Basin to see how they would look.
     
    The bridge is double track and has 4 spans, the two central spans across the main river are just over 50' and the two at the sides about 25'. For the short spans I've tried cutting the vari-girders in half and then reinstating the rivets in plasticard on the bottom edge. For the larger spans I thought I'd also try to curve the end of the girder (I've only done one end for now) because that seemed to match the photographs I have.
     

     
    I've sat the J65 and its train at the correct rail height.
     
     
    So I'd appreciate your views on whether you think this will work. The actual water level in the river will probably be about 10mm off the base board level (cut in clear perspex. I want to try and at least get the base of the bridge cut before Christmas so I complete the circuit again and drive trains round and round!
     
    David
  3. Fen End Pit
    Being a private siding the line to the mill needs protecting by a catch point. At least this didn't need another 'V' making! However as you can see from the picture getting the sleepers of the crossing space so as not to foul the line for the loop exit was a pain and more glue was smeared around on the underlay than should have been. The intention is to have a gate across the siding just beyond the catch point.
     

     
    This leaves me with one last turnout to build and then lots of plain track - oh and the double-slip in the yard - gulp!
     
    David
  4. Fen End Pit
    Most railway companies would recycle components from use on a main line down into sidings and track of lesser importance. Following this practice (and because at £20 for 500 chairs they aren't cheap) I decided to try and remove some of the components off the old Empire Basin for reuse. Fortunately the chairs were willing to separate from the sleepers with a little persuasion and with not too much cleaning up some lengths of rail were made available to the track gang for reuse in the goods yard.
     

     
    All I need to do now is sell the redundant 4mm scale sleepers to a 4mm scale garden centre!
     
    Overall the progress is coming on nicely, I could actually go mad and lay the complete up line round the room now but I think I'll try and finish the rest of the point work first. The point trailing towards the viewer is the main goods yard entrance and leads into a double slip. The large hole was intended to be for the lever frame but I'm having a slight change of plan there. What I'm going to do now is build the lever frame in a box which will slide into position in front of that hole but also be removable so it can be put elsewhere (on my desk for example). The use of CBUS means that it only needs a single CAT5 network cable to connect it to the layout.
     

     
    I beginning to look forward to thinking about scenery! I wondering if the long goods siding at the back should be just a lay-by or if I should fit a small roadway down to the track level so it could be used for loading (coal yard maybe?).
     
    David
  5. Fen End Pit
    Inspired by an excellent day out at the Peterborough Festival of Model Railways I launched into more track building. The turnout from the down mainline into the yard got finished as well as the rest of the down line on this first baseboard. Much pushing of wagons and coaches around has followed. I'm generally quite please with the way it looks.
     

     

     
    The mirror is not because i have suddenly got particularly vain about my appearance but because it is an excellent tool to look along the track and spot any kinks.
     
    I also had a go at fitting the first Servos to the Turnout-operating-units under the board, Both these parts have been cut in 3mm Acrylic on the laser cutter which has saved time over making them by hand. They have proved very easy to fit and I was able to put on 4 and get them adjusted over the course of this evening.
     

     
    Control for the servos is from a MERG Servo4 board. Please ignore the rest of the wiring, this is all just temporary so I could drive a loco around. The dropper wires (blue and red) will be connected to some copper foil tape for the DCC power later on.
     
    David
  6. Fen End Pit
    First up, here is a picture of what I've done with the top of the water tank. in the absence of pictures or drawings I'm hoping I've got something which is plausible. I stuck some plastruct angle inside the tank and then tried to model some tie-bars to hold it all together. The water is clear acrylic with the bottom painted black.
     

     
    Next is a little experiment on one of those things which is just so much easier to make when you have something that cuts accurately! I drew up this wagon turntable and cut it as 2 layers of 1.5mm MDF stuck onto a base of 3mm MDF. The rails are just short lengths of phosphor bronze rail stuck in place. The fact that the slots are accurate means that it is easy just to get the gauge and alignment right.
     

     
    A wagon rolls on it and it turns very easily.
     

     
    I'm half wondering about cutting a few of these and seeing if anyone would like to buy them off me. I'd have to modify the drawing to go from 18.83 to EM or OO but that should be straight-forward. I'm thinking it will be quite easy to drive with a servo to make it turn, I've not made any attempt to power the rails as I don't think locos would have past over it.
     
    David
  8. Fen End Pit
    Since the last blog entry I've been pretty busy. The entire layout was dismantled, all the shelves and even the shelving track removed from the room and the whole place redecorated. The result means that the plethora of holes drilled in the wall previously got filled up and everything looks much cleaner!
     
    When everything went back into the room and fitted together again I was well pleased. The backscene is held up by industrial strength Velcro and is sitting about 5mm above the top of the baseboard. This gap will obviously get hidden once the ground form goes in but it means I can pull the baseboards out without disrupting the backscene.
     

     
    The room is actually tidier too (honest!) and I had a purge of old magazines and bought another 'trofast' unit (with the plastic buckets) from Ikea.
     

     
    The box files containing all the magazines had always been a tasteful Great Eastern blue, but had the big problem that I could never remember what was in each folder. Labeling was clearly needed but I wanted something better than tatty paper labels. On the grounds that 'if you have it use it' I opted to laser cut some labels out of 1.5mm MDF, paint them in Humbrol dark blue enamel and then pick out the lettering in white. I will acknowledge that this will be viewed as a little over-the-top but I was rather pleased with the result.
     

     
    Boy does it make things easier to find.
     
    I still however have 6 folders just full of odd photocopies I don't want to throw away for various reasons. These include a 'handbook' for the operation of the never completed Cambridge Area Group 'Saffron Walden' layout by Allan Sibley and a rather nice plan for a Burton-on-Trent brewery railway.
     
    I also found my original 'Modeller's License' which allows me to build and operate a model railway with complete disregard to prototype fidelity. Signed by the late, great Mr O O Whyte-MettelKit.
     
    Now I've found that again I can continue modelling!
     
    David
  9. Fen End Pit
    The last few weeks have shown a good deal of progress on the layout. The remaining framework for the baseboards have been completed and the infrastructure is coming together. It is good to see a nice smooth and level surface covered with the templot drawing. Today I trimmed the old MDF backscene from Empire Basin, reducing the height slightly as the baseboard is now higher than it was. I've also purchased some timber to frame the backscene so that it can be held firmly against the wall. The intention is to fasten it to the wall and ensure that the baseboards themselves can be pulled out away from the backscene.
     

     
    Apologies for the state of the rest of the railway room. There is a large pile of stuff that needs to go back in the loft and my Ikea storage is full to overflowing.
     

     
    The mill begins to look the part in the corner, and I think I will have the space for the extra 'Silo' section on the right hand side. I'm rather excited by the release of the Bachmann 'Covhop'. I think my mill might also take deliveries of fertilizer for the local farming community. Is it too much to hope that they might be followed by a decent grain hopper?
     
    I was also very taken by the pictures of the bridge at Chatteris dock in last month's Bylines. I had originally thought about the bridge being a wooden trestle bridge in the style of those around St Ives, but I'm now thinking the skinny girders of a plate girder bridge might look better. The problem is that the Will's Vari-Girders are much too deep in section so the only option would be lots of lots of rivets being pressed out. hmm - a project for another day.
     
    David
  10. Fen End Pit
    Progress on the baseboards continues at a pace with the ply framing now constructed for two boards and mostly complete for the third. So far I'm rather pleased with how it looks.
     

     
    from the railway room door things begin to take shape. The templot plan is laid down and the two large mill buildings fit nicely.
     

     
    Underneath the layout the ply frame is nice and stiff and fitted with lots of useful holes to feed wires through.
     

     
    Looking across the workbench and you see the area planned for the river and bridge.
     
    So, what is all this about signaling and why ask questions now?
     
    Well the plan is to sit the lever frame in the front of the layout but I want to recess it into the baseboard so it doesn't sit too high and also make it removable so that the whole frame can be removed from view when I want a clear shot for photographs of passing trains. The original frame from the Scalefour Society has 20 levers but with the change in track plan for the new layout I suspect I'm going to need to extend it. This impacts the baseboards because I need to work out just what size hole to cut!
     

     
    Thanks to advice from the signaling experts on the MERG site I've been pointed at similar examples of yard exits from the GE at places like Wimblington and Halesworth on signalbox.org. It appears that I should probably not have the lever 15 on the frame and instead have it as a yard point but this leaves me with the aesthetic problem of having a lever frame and then a separate 'odd' lever on the layout. Any ideas?
     
    I like layouts at this stage, there is no track work for the trains to fall of.
     
    David
  11. Fen End Pit
    A lot of brain work and a few hours in TurboCad resulted in a design for a baseboard frame cut from 6mm ply on the laser cutter. I've had to make the longest lengths by jointing two bits together but with a suitable joint and a glued plate I don't see it is going to move. Lots of clever joints should make it nice and strong and lots of holes in the cross braces should mean I can feed wires around.
     
    I have some hardware, alignment dowels and bits coming from Station Road baseboards.
     
    Plan is for the whole lot to get topped with the 15mm MDF which was the original shelf for Empire Basin. This time I will be able to lift it up and work underneath.
     

     
    David
  12. Fen End Pit
    Well the time came and I finally took the plunge.
     
    Sometimes you just get to the point where you need a fresh start so last week I carefully removed and dismantled all of the 'jigsaw' boards, stripped off all the under baseboard electrics and got back to a clean slate. I would like to state for the record that this was not purely because the editor of Scalefour news had asked for some words! In fact, as I took things apart I realised just how amazing it was that anything ran on the layout at all.
     
    If I've learned one thing from all this it is do not ever, ever scrimp on baseboards ever.
     
    So, now I've printed out the new layout design full size and laid it onto the old 'shelf' onto which the previous jigsaw boards sat. This means that I can satisfy myself about the clearances and get some idea of the overall look. New baseboards will then be designed and the plan is to do a proper job this time.
     
    In some ways I feel a bit sad to have got to this point but that is balanced by the hope that something good will come out of it.
     

     
    David
  13. Fen End Pit
    Over the last week or so I've made some good progress on my model of Ebridge Mill. The lower building is almost complete now, the roof got covered with Wills sheet and I'm reasonably happy with the colour. It probably needs some Woodland Scenics putting into some of the troughs as lichen. The rain water goods have had quite a large effect on the look too with the guttering made from shaped 40thou plasticard and the down pipes from 1mm plastic rod.
     

     
    When you zoom in you can really see the brick texture, you can also see the tie-bar plates which I cut and engraved on the laser cutter. The slightly bumpy finish of the engraved section actually looks alright on the plates as it looks like the plate has some surface rust on it. The crack that I tried to enhance which goes between the two horizontal white concrete beams is not as visible as I'd like and I think that I should have made the mortar joint even wider when I cut it, still we live and learn.
     

     
    I had a couple of hours in Makespace this morning as I had a day off and was able to cut the shell for the extension on the second part of the mill. This looks a bit weird at the moment as there is meant to be another silo next to it. I had to do rather too much brain work to design tabs and slots to fit this together and I made a couple of errors but nothing too serious. The odd raised section won't look quite so out of place once the main building gets its lucam.
     

     
    Obviously the window holes in the shell are oversize as the whole building gets covered in 1.5mm MDF with the bricks cut on it. The building is English bond not Flemish bond and it will be interesting to see just how noticeable the difference is.
     
    There was a comment on my last entry asking about the plans for Empire Basin, which is my current P4 round the spare room layout. The current plan is that, once the exams and over and the family can all relax again, the layout room is going to get gutted, redecorated, probably have the ceiling recovered (it never looked right since I took out the airing cupboard and immersion heater) and then work starts on a new layout. The vertical fiddleyard will stay and that dictates the height of the running lines. The plan is still pretty much as per my entry
    http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/186/entry-10751-starting-to-plan-the-replacement-to-empire-basin/
     
    I'm not sure if I may get a chance to do some cutting on the mill walls tomorrow, I did a 'calculate' on the drawing and it claimed 1 hour 35 minutes. I bit more than I can do at a lunch hour!
     
    <edit 01/07/2013>
     
    As Portchullin Tatty pointed out the tiebars really do look to be in the wrong place. Just a problem that nobody told the builder!
     

     
     
     
    David
  14. Fen End Pit
    I've joined an organisation in Cambridge called 'Makespace' who are setting up a public access 'hackspace' in Cambridge. These organisation seem to be springing up in quite a few large cities (see http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/United_Kingdom ) and are intended for people who want to build things to share the cost of owning and running tools. So for the price of a gym membership (and anyone who tells me that would do me more good is probably on the wrong forum) I can have access to tools which I would never have been able to justify buying myself.
     
    Well today Makespace took delivery of a seriously good tool - a 60W laser cutter with a bed size of 600x900mm. I went along to see it commissioned and receive some training on how to use it. As a test I took along a small drawing of a wall in TurboCAD and we downloaded it and cut it on an odd bit of luminous acrylic left over from something else.
     
    In its natural state it hasn't photographed very well but I am seriously impressed by it as a first attempt. The wall took just over 5 minutes to print and the software allows me to draw the different levels in different colours and then control the laser power and speed so that one colour ends up as engraving and another as cuts.
     

     
    When I got home I thought I'd have an experiment and see how it might look painted. The first attempt was done by painting the wall with an matt enamel mortar colour and then trying to dry brush on a brick colour once it was dry.
     

     
    The second attempt was painting a brick colour in enamel and then washing over with an acrylic mortar colour and washing it off.
     

     
    So now I have to order some suitable material to cut and workout the best method to draw things up. I'd like advice from anyone who has experience on producing artwork for buildings. Specifically, what is the best way to deal with the corner joins? I have demonstrated that I can put a tiny cut which 'takes the mortar course around the corner' but am I just best to do this and us a butt joint? I can see some people have actually cut around the individual bricks at the end of the wall to produce a kind of dove-tail joint, does this really work?
     
    Also how do people find using thin MDF versus using one of the laser cutable plastics? I know I can't use plasticard as it gives off chlorine gas when it is burned.
     
    I'm must confess I'm rather excited about the possibilities of this bit of equipment.
     
    David
  15. Fen End Pit
    I'd been looking for a suitable industrial building to form a back-drop to my rebuilt scalefour empire and also provide a source of rail traffic. Those with very long memories may remember my attempt to model Mistley maltings (or at least part of it) more years ago than I care to think. I didn't want anything quite that big this time so spent a good few hours on Google searching for 'East Anglia Mill' and similar terms. I end up finding Ebridge Mill near North Walsham. There is an excellent web site at http://www.norfolkmills.co.uk/Watermills/ebridge.html which has some good pictures from the '30s and '40s. The mill buildings had also been visited by several groups of 'Urban Explorers' over the years who had taken many pictures of the mill and some of the derelict details http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/industrial-sites/79782-ebridge-mill-north-walsham-norfolk-feb-2012-a.html. Finally the mill is still standing and had been past by the Google Earth Snoop-mobile. (Search Google maps for 'Ebridge North Walsham').
     

     
    The mill consists of 3 major buildings, a low section of original watermill built in Flemish bond brick with pantiles, a later built taller mill building in English bond and slates and finally a 1950's extension of silos clad asbestos. In the early 50's the tile roof on the earliest section was replaced with more corrugated asbestos. I've decided to model the building in this condition as I thought for my period (1950-60's) the only way the building might still have been rail served was if it was used as a transhipment point for grain from road to rail. I am imagining that local farms would deliver their grain in small lorries and then some of this grain would be loaded into rail wagons for shipment.
     
    Constructions follows the same processes as my previous water tank only this time the 1.5mm MDF I used to engrave the brick on is strengthened by using 3mm MDF to make the structure of the building. I was slightly caught out by just how much engraving there was on the building as I set the laser cutter going during one of my lunchtime visits to Makespace http://makespace.org Unfortunately I then had to mail work to explain I was going to be back 'a few minutes late' as the cutting of the sides took almost exactly an hour!
     
    The roof and end are clad in Wills corrugated iron which was a much better approximation to the size of the corrugations on the prototype than their corrugated asbestos. Taking the time to file the bottom edge of the sheet is worth while if tedious. This still needs to be painted on these photographs and I'm trying to work out the best method. It seems to me that the valleys need to be quite a bit darker than the ridges and also full of moss on at least one side!
     

     
    Windows were cut in 1.5mm MDF but I have been able to thin this down to almost 3/4mm by gently rubbing on some fine sandpaper. At the moment the windows look rather 'white' and need toning down about. Bricks have again been painted using Halford's Red Oxide car primer, followed by ModelMates brick joint filler and finally various washes of water colour paint.
     

     
    By the time period I'm modelling the original lucam had been cut back and trying to get the various angles correct when cutting the Wills sheet caused several hours of amusement.
     

     
    I've took the opportunity of a couple of hours in Cambridge yesterday to cut the carcass for the second mill building. Put together the two begin to make quite an impressive, but thankfully not over-powering sight. The window reveals in the carcass are obviously way over-sized as they are designed to fit a rectangular piece of clear sheet.
     

     
    One thing that is becoming really clear to me is that it is so much easier to make a realistic model if you actually start with a prototype rather than 'making something up'.
     
    The road side view compares quite well with Google Earth.
     

     
    So, next up I've got to work out how to fit the corrugated clear plastic 'sky-lights', paint the roof and then fit and make all the rain water goods.
     
    David
  16. Fen End Pit
    Great to have RMweb back after the Christmas downtime - thanks to Andy for seeing it through.
     
    I decided that I needed to redo the control for the lower section of Empire Basin to use servos. This is partly because I was unhappy with my attempts at wire-in-tube and the rather lashed up linkages I'd made which didn't work very well and partly because I wanted to have a test bed to demonstrate the use of servos for point control.
     
    I needed to make a proper drive mechanism for the point blades which allows for some adjustment in the blades when fitting them to the layout, I also wanted to separate the servo component from the TOU to allow for easier fitting. The use of servos makes for much easier fitting as the adjustment can be made on the servo controller rather than having to fiddle with different lengths of linkages.
     
    In the past I've made TOUs out of brass and paxolin but decided to try using plasticard for this project. The Plastruct square tube is pretty robust stuff and when stuck onto layers of 60 thou plasticard make a component which I think will be strong enough for last.
     
    I cut two lengths of plastruct tube which telescope together, the larger is 5/16th inch and the smaller 1/4 inch. These were cut 50mm and 55mm long respectively.
     

     
    Starting with the larger tube I drilled two pilot holes 16mm apart (for P4, EM or OO would be closer) and then slowly openned the holes up to 6mm in 1mm stages. The larger tube was then stuck on to a base plate made of two pieces of 60thou plasticard which gives a base almost 3mm thick. This base blade was then drilled through the same 6mm holes. At the same time I drilled some 3mm mounting holes in the base plate (only done on the front one in the picture).
     

     
    The unit connects up to the point blades via lengths of 16th inch tube which have a length of .8mm brass wire fed through them. The wire gets soldered to the point blade and the adjustment in height can be managed by moving the wire up and down in the tube. I drilled the holes in the smaller of the two plastruct tubes 1.5mm and then openned them out to be a force fit for the 16th tube. The brass tube is around 40mm long and is pushed through the smaller section plastruct once it is slid inside the larger tube. For my depth of base board and underlay I ended up with 11mm of tube protruding above the base. It is worth remembering at this stage to put a broach into the end of the brass tube to remove the burr from where it has been cut, this makes pushing the wire through later a lot easier.
     

     
    To make sure the tube doesn't move I mixed up some aruldite and pushed it into the smaller of the two plastruct tubes and around the brass tube. This should secure things but also avoids the risk of sticking the whole thing up solid which I thought might happen if I tried applying superglue from the outside.
     

     
    Finally I stuck and shaped an operating wire connection by laminating three little bits of 60thou together and sticking them into the inside of the sliding section of tube. This is drilled with a .8mm hole which will have the operating wire threaded through it. A little bit of tidying up with some sandpaper and we have a pair of complete TOUs ready for installation.
     

     
    The holder for the servo is even simpler, base plate of two 40mm square pieces of 60thou and then 'walls' of 60thou 12mm high cut to go around the servo. I drilled these walls with a pair of 2mm holes which allow the servo to be securely fastened by simply threading a short length of 2mm rod through the mounting holes on the servo case.
     

     
    The result is a unit which I can screw to the baseboard but from which the servo can be removed without too much problem. These servos are TowerPro SG-50s which cost about 3 pounds each depending on where you buy them. I got mine from 'Giantcod.co.uk'.
     

     
    So with these components ready to mount it is time to fasten them to the base board.
     
    David
  17. Fen End Pit
    My model of Thaxted water tower is coming on nicely. As I commented in my last blog I cut a base for the tank from 3mm acrylic (an alarming orange colour) and a pair of formers from transparent acrylic. A piece of brass the right height was then folded around the formers and stuck on with epoxy.
     
    I think the painting was much more successful than previous attempts. I had sealed the MDF with an MDF sealing paint and then sprayed on two coats of red oxide primer, leaving a good bit of drying time between the two coats. The first coat was still absorbed into the MDF in spite of the sealer but then the second actually dried to a decent surface. When really dry I used ModelMates Brick Joint Filler, leaving this to dry as per the instructions before wiping it off with a damp kitchen towel. The resulting mortar is way too white so I toned the whole thing down with some black water colour washes. I have since experimented and you can add a touch of water colour to the ModelMates paint prior to painting it on which takes the bright white look off quite well.
     

     
    I improved the corners slightly after this photograph by using some filler to fill some of the slight gabs which were present where the sides mated. This improved the fit of the corners and makes them look better. Again a wash of black/brown water colour paint was applied. The tank was primed, then sanded and filled before a second coat of primer and finally a grey enamel sprayed on. I also primed and sprayed the windows and door in what I hope is a suitable colour.
     
    The photo shows the tank placed on the base, the two long pieces of wire will get chopped off once I have fitted a piece of of transparent acrylic as the water. I think I going to paint the underside of this a dark colour rather than have you being able to see the bottom of the tank. I've also bought some plastruct angle and T section (the tiny ones ~1mm in section) which I plane to use to make some kind of internal supports around the top of the tank. If nothing else it need some kind of tie structure to stop the sides from bowing out with the weight of the water.
     

     
    To be honest I'm really rather pleased with the way this is looking, All I need now is the spare room to recover from the smell of the bottle of thinners I knocked over while painting!
     
    David
  18. Fen End Pit
    I finally got around to doing a bit of modelling, inspired by a thoroughly enjoyable day on Saturday exhibiting at the 16mm show in Peterborough.
     
    I've been working on drawing up the water tower from Thaxted based on the drawing available from the GERS. Having had lots of goes with the little goods hut I had worked out most of the gotchas with the cutter and so the parts which were cut were pretty much right first time. OK, I'll admit I drew the windows frames too far apart by .5mm so I needed to cut them into two parts and take a bit out of the middle but hey, who's counting. The resulting 'kit of parts' looks rather good. I was amazed by how thin I could cut the glazing bars in the windows and I am carefully sanding them to reduce the thickness of the material a bit more.
     

     
    I also tried the 'engrave' option to put a slope on the plinth. The successive passes of the laser reducing the area being engraved each time can make a half reasonable slope. I did the engraving first followed by the half cutting of the bricks so the mortar joint wasn't lost by the engraving process. I painted the MDF with a sealer before I put it together.
     

     
    Assembly was quite straight forward, I've found that taking a fraction off the back of the 1.5mm MDF at the corners and making the last stretcher a little over long means that you can stick the corners up and then lightly sand any brick ends which are sticking out. I reduced the depth of the string courses too, the MDF sliced easily with a scalpel leaving a section about 1mm to stick to the wall.
     
    This tower had a very simple tank that was curved around the bottom and at the corners. I think I've worked out how I'm going to try and make it. Current plan is to cut a base in 3mm acrylic and curve the corners to make the bottom of the tank. I'll then cut two more pieces just a fraction smaller which will act as formers for some thin brass sheet. - well it is a working theory until I find it doesn't work.
     
    The base in now hanging in the garage having received a coat of primer. I've also painted another 'spare' section of wall to practice on before I move onto the main event.
     
    I've been looking at the pictures of Thaxted and there are no signs of any ladders or other fittings, I can just make out what appears to be the top of a pipe in one photograph. If anyone knows what it would have looked like from above that would be great! My proposed layout will probably have the tower situated quite near to a bank of trees, would that have meant a roof was likely?
     
    You can see a picture of the tower in service at http://img.geocaching.com/cache/62f0ae62-8978-4dab-8ef4-0aede5cbdcc7.jpg
     
    Your comments, as always, are most welcome.
     
    David
  19. Fen End Pit
    Friday night saw the ends of the Wickham trolley assembled and then Saturday saw the roof bent to shape and the parts soldered together. At the moment everything is just resting together but you get the general idea. The wires sticking out the front are to the motor.
     

     
    The plan is to stick a DCC chip under the roof and run the four wires up the each of the corner posts, the power from the track up the rear posts and the drive back to the motor down the front ones. The seats were mighty fiddly but the effect of not having the trolley filled with mechanism is rather nice.
     
    I also did a bit of drawing, followed by some laser cutting this lunchtime. The result is a prototype under baseboard turnout operating unit. The idea of the design is that the brass tubes stick up through the baseboard and have a wire attached to the switch blade threaded through them. The drawing needs a bit of fine tuning to get the holes a nice tight fit but the basic principle seems good and very easy to put together.
     

     
    Let me know what you think..
     
    David
  20. Fen End Pit
    Taking up macrame has been deferred for another day. Thanks to everyone for their words of help and encouragement.
     
    I went into Makespace this afternoon and cut three new buildings to try painting. I now have two complete buildings, one in grey primer and the other in red oxide. I've also got the bits for a third and a couple of spare walls.
     

     
    I tried a couple of paint finishes on a spare wall, The middle section is just Halford's red oxide. The top section has had a wash of water colour (not acrylic) as the mortar colour. The bottom section is even weirder. I added a touch of water colour to a dollop of ready-mix filler. The paste then gets wiped across the surface of the bricks into the mortar and rubbed off. I quite like the effect.
     

     
    Rebuilding the sheds also gave me a chance to try my chimney design. These interlocked together really nicely.
     

     
    I also had a go at cutting some doors and windows. The door isn't bad and I hope the windows will be ok once I have thinned down the thickness of the MDF.
     

     
    Finally I also had a go at cutting some slate strips from 160g card. This works better on the laser cutter than the knife based robo-cutter as you get a suitable 'gap' between the slates.
     
    Let me know which paint finish you think I should try on the whole 'red' building.
     
    thanks
    David
     
    addition 11/02/2013
     
    I decided to have a go and try the filer method on my completed 'Red Oxide' building. I did a little bit of work on the corners, using a broken razer saw blade in a pin vice I made some cuts where the mortar joints had been filled up with PVA when I stuck them together. These are very difficult to spot until the model is painted. I've also added a bit of colour washed over the top giving a 'rising damp' look.
     

     
    I'm quite pleased with how the chimney works out when painted, the filler hides the larger gaps in the mortar rather nicely.
     

     
    Now onto getting the doors and windows in and sorting out the roof!
     
    thanks again for your kind comments.
     
    David
  21. Fen End Pit
    *This is the standing joke in my house when model railways become just too difficult.
     
    I'm in the dumps as no matter what I try I just can't get a brick finish I'm happy with, I can see now why I stuck to using Scalescenes for so long, I just can't paint brickwork.
     
    The desk is covered with dozens of little laser cut test sheds which are going to end up in the bin very soon at this rate.
     

     
    I've tried painting a brick colour in Enamel and using an Acrylic to run the mortar into the cracks. I've tried painting the whole building in a mortar colour and then painting the bricks using a sponge pad. I'm incapable of picking out individual bricks i just end up with painty blobs and I don't seem to be able to get enough of the 'mortar wash' off the surface of the bricks (using water or IPA) to bring it back to a decent colour.
     

     

     
    I'll admit to feeling right royally hacked off with it.
     
    HELP!
     
    David
     
    edit :- feeling better already
     

  22. Fen End Pit
    I managed to find 4 bearing in Brian's 'box of useful bits' which allowed me to make some progress on the paxolin 'chassis'. In order to be able to remove the wheels I have found some bearings which fit into some U channel. The Polish motor has a 1mm shaft which I sleeved with a 1.5mm brass tube.
     

     
    The little runner wagon has wheels shorted out on one side so while I've fitted pick-ups on both sides with pickups I may well just try and short out the wheels on the opposite side on the main trolley.
     

     
    At the moment the motor is just wired to the wheels, ultimately there will be a DCC chip involved which I suspect I'll have to mount under the roof. In order to test things out I've wired a DCC chip to power the track as this allows me to limit the voltage to the 4 volts or so the motor is designed for.
     

     
    With the body of the trolley in place you can see that most of the mechanism will be hidden from view. With a little bit of weight it crawls along and is actually quite controllable apart from the usual problems with stalling with the pickups. Once the unit is on DCC and the voltage is higher and constant I think things should be better. I can see I'm also going to have to weight things carefully as the single driven axle has a tendency to slip.
     

     
    All I can add is that it is fa*&ingly small!
     
    David
  23. Fen End Pit
    Today, being a bit milder, I was able to take a bit more time in the garage with an aerosol before having to get back in the house to warm up. The result was that I could get a much better coat of primer on the building and apply it in several thin coats and let it harden off before going any further.
     
    The resulting luminous building showed the joints weren't going to be too bad. I made a bit of a mess when gluing it together last night, I tried to stick the inner walls to the outer walls before I put the four walls together. Of course I didn't get them exactly in the middle so the joints were not quite in line. Next time I'll stick the outer walls together, get the joints perfect and then fit the inner walls into the resulting shell.
     


     
    After 6 hours to dry off I tried to get the mortar on with acrylic and then lift it off the brick surfaces with IPA. Lots of cotton buds and multi-surface wipes later and I'm back to a worn brick colour. I suspect that I should possible have thinned the acrylic wash a little bit more but I feel I am getting there with the technique. I'm just not sure I have the ability to dry brush a brick colour on top of a mortar colour primer or the patience for individual brick painting. The pictures show the mortar lines around the windows and door particularly well and I don't think the corners look too bad. The interlocking bricks look reasonable natural and don't stick out like a sore thumb to my eyes.
     

     

     
    Next up, working out how to do windows, doors and roofs.
     
    An addition....
     
    I wasn't quite happy with the brickwork so decided to try something different. I've never really got on with dry brushing but thought it might be worth a try to 'pad' the paint on with something relatively hard. I attached a bit of exactoscale foam onto the end of a bit of wood to make myself a little paint par and 15mm x 30mm. I then put some Humbrol enamel paint onto a piece of scrap plasticard and used the pad to 'print' the paint onto the brick surfaces only. By only padding the tools a few times before I went for the model I get the same sort of effect as a dry brush with the paint only taking on the brick surface and not sinking into the mortar joints. The technique may need some refining and I probably need to do somethings to get the brick colour a little more varied but I'm mush happier with the result.
     

     
    I know the brick colour is a bit off, I was just deliberately trying a colour that was different to what was underneath so I could see how it worked. I'll probably try again with a better colour later.
     
    David
  24. Fen End Pit
    As suggested by Tim Horn I tried painting the building with Halfords primer once I had stuck it together. This shows my interlocking brickwork nearly worked but the end of the stretcher finishes about .2mm too shallow behind the adjacent wall. To make it work I'd need thin the wall sections down to something like 2.8mm before gluing up the joint. I'll try this next time.
     

     
    Also on Tim's advice I then tried painting with an acrylic mortar colour Citadel Karak Stone from Games workshop and then wiping off with a tissue/cotton bud and IPA. I had more success than my previous attempts but I didn't realize I was actually scrubbing too hard and probably could have done with a better coat (or preferably multiple thinner coats) of primer.
     

     
    Onwards up the learning curve!
     
    David
  25. Fen End Pit
    Inspired by people using the brickwork to interlock the corners of a laser cut building I had a go at drawing out my 'test shed' with the sides designed to interlock. As the material to hand was 3mm MDF (I have some 1.5mm and 1mm on order) I cut out the stretchers on the joint. This screenshot of TurboCAD shows what I mean.
     

     
    The resultant kit of parts was amazingly fine and just demonstrates what the cutter can do.
     

     
    The detail on the 'fingers' of each side shows the closure half brick and the header really well. This picture also shows up the engraved 'air bricks' just under the eaves. I'm almost tempted to try and put a row of tiny dots to represent the holes.
     

     
    The completed building just slid together and I was amazed how it just fitted exactly into the base I had cut for it. Bear in mind that this photograph shows the parts just dry fitted together.
     

     
    Mostly for my own reference later this was cut on our 60W laser cutter with the following settings
     
    mortar cuts:- Cut with speed 60 and power 15%
    engraving (for air bricks) speed 400 and power of 21%
    cutting for walls etc: Cut with speed 35 and power 100%
     
    I suspect that ultimately I'll find the better way to go is to use 1.5mm MDF and then interlock the headers and have a core of 3mm MDF with rebates in for windows etc.
     
    Further to previous entry on putting a 45 degree mitre on the MDF I found I could actually do this more easily with a Dremel tool. The drill press I purchased some years ago is useless as such because it isn't really rigid enough however it works fine for this purpose. With a few bits of scrap to form a gate I was able to cut the angle quite accurately. (Please note the tool was rotating and cutting the material AWAY from the PC keyboard!)
     

     
    Thanks everyone for your advice and encouragement.
     
    David
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