Fen End Pit

It has been done in an HO prototype by Marklin https://www.maerklin.de/en/products/details/article/39005/ "A mechanism is built into the tender to lower the coal load in order to represent visually the consumption of coal in the tender in the World of Operation mode. For digital central controllers without mfx+ the lowering and raising of the coal load can be activated by means of special function F8." David

Over the last week I managed to make up a number of tiny pieces of nickel silver into lots of rods with complicated names. The radius rods and expansion links comprised of about 24 little bits of metal. These fitted into the motion brackets ok and didn't foul any of the other parts I'd made up already. Next up were the return crank and the eccentric rod. The return crank needed to be tapped to fit over the crank pin on the centre axle which was fun. I had to chop up an Alan Gibson crank pin boss to make an extra bit to cope with the extra thickness of all the rods. I thought there was an 'extra long' boss in the packets but there were only small ones 1.4mm and medium ones 2.4mm long. Much to my surprise after a bit of fiddling the rods all went round smoothly and nothing clobbers anything else. Next up is the combination levers.... these bits don't get any bigger. Wish me luck David

At this stage I'm just using a bit of wire insulation to hold the coupling rods onto the rear pair of crank pins. It saves putting crank pin nuts on at this stage, obviously the centre crank pin also gets return crank for the valve gear. David

I've made a fair amount of progress on the B1 chassis since getting a replacement soldering iron from Eileen. Getting the Antex with the slightly more flexible cable option is definitely worth the extra £3. I was finally able to fasten all the bits of the slide bars together and get them fixed into the cylinders. This finally locks the clearance between the back of the cross-head and the coupling rods which is tight given the accurate track gauge. I had to thin down the crank pin nut on the leading axle a bit but it all turned ok in the end. The drop link off the cross-head consists of 3 pieces of etch none of them larger than a few millimetres in any direction. It took most of an afternoon, no-one can say this chassis kit isn't value for money in terms of hours of 'play value'! The piston castings soldered on surprisingly easily and then I couldn't avoid the cylinder wrappers any longer. I had expected these to be trouble but to my surprise they bent up and soldered on remarkably easily. At the moment the but I should be able to sort that out. I still have to fit the cylinder covers on the front. I've started reading the instructions for the rest of the valve gear and can foresee a bulk order for .55mm drill bits to Eileen soon. I just know I'm going to break lots! This bit of etch is 30mm from top to bottom so, as you can see, these bits are not big! Wish me luck! David

Over the weekend I managed to get some filler wiped into the mortar courses and a couple of coats of Vallejo grey wash wiped in and wiped off. I was trying to achieve the look of worn old work-a-day goods shed and not the sand-blasted cleanliness of the preserved building in the country park. I still need to weather the roof, obviously make the windows and fasten on the stone capping stones. The office isn't actually stuck on at the moment, hence the slight difference in angle and the gap in the wall. Lots more to do but it is coming on nicely. David

While waiting for Eileen's to delivery a replacement soldering so I could continue on the Dave Bradwell B1 I made some more progress on the goods shed. This morning I cut a load of post labels for slates and then this afternoon I painted the basic brick and slate colours on the building. I need to wait for this paint to really dry and harden before going to the next stage with Wilco fine filler. I also need to paint the various engineering bricks and stone quions which are colours other than brick red. I think the result looks pretty good. I'm wondering about the inside because, while the current interior is all white painted, I don't know if it was plain brickwork or white washed. There is an interesting white washed panel on the end without the office which I don't know the purpose of. The only reason I could think of would have been for sighting purposes but I can't see a situation where a signal would be visible with the good shed behind it. One of those mysteries... David

That is quite something, very nice work. Really like the BEL too. David

Some kind of Sentinel loco? or a water tanker? or a very clear riveted tin for sardines. David

Superb photos, thanks for posting. David

Good luck Richard. Just build something, enjoy it, learn from it, and then move on to building something better. Then repeat.... David

Mastering an inside cylinder 0-6-0 is a good first step. I've been building P4 locos for almost 30 years and I'm now only just attempting Walschaerts valve gear for the first time! Don't dismiss some of the conversion sets from the Alan Gibson, they can be a quick conversion. If you can put up with the period then getting a small Bo-Bo diesel can also be a really easy way to get something moving. If you do go down the route with Gibson wheels then invest in a GW Wheel press and quartering tool, boy does it make that job easier. One thing I did find with rewheeling stock to P4 (and I guess the same is true of EM) is that quite often the proprietary pin-point axles are often a different length to the ones you get for EM and P4. I found I got much better running swapping the wheels onto the original Hornby/Bachmann/Oxford axles, even though you obviously need to put the wheels on with a back-to-back gauge. Good luck! David

The failure of my old soldering iron means a brief hiatus on the B1 until I get a replacement. As a result I headed back to do some more work on the goods shed which I've been doing the artwork for and laser cutting. Having sorted out the issues I was having with consistent cutting on the side walls I had got to the point of having a set of parts I was happy to assemble. The assembly went fairly well and I was pleased with way the buttresses on the corners ended up. Having a test run prior to this point certainly helped. I found the best way to get the corners sorted was to cut them over length by about .5mm and flood the brickwork with thin superglue to make the interlaced bricks strong enough to cope with filing. A home made sanding stick covered in 320 grit made good tool to sand down the corners. I cut some 1mm MDF pieces to make the internal face of the brick walls so that there could be some detail inside the building which would be visible through the open doors. I drew up and cut the roof jousts to give some internal structure and to hold the 1mm MDF roof in place. With the roof in position and the goods office at the end assembled things are progressing well. The road side of the building looks ok too, but I need to add some extra material to make the ground surface up to the right height. The steps (which obviously will end up at ground level rather than a few feet above it!) are made from 3mm MDF and These have been lightly sanded to match the worn appearance of the prototype. So I guess next steps are priming and painting, prior to my usual treatment with Wilco fine filler and Valejo grey wash unless that gets interrupted by the delivery of a soldering iron! David

Glad you like the content. I'm not sure my results count as outstanding, I just get pleasure from trying to build stuff. When it works it is a bonus! Particularly in weird times like these having some modeling to get on with is a tonic. The important thing is to pick something you enjoy. RMWeb has a pretty good community spirit and hopefully the ability to give and receive encouragement and constructing criticism. Sharing our experiences, good and bad with each other can make us all better modellers. All the best David

I've made some good progress on the Dave Bradwell B1 chassis. I fitted some pickups, made up the brakes and then refitted the pickups as they conflicted with the brakes! This got me a chassis which could move under its own power from the track. I then spent a good few hours fettling the slide bars to get the crosshead casting running smoothly. This was quite entertaining and the result was pretty good, the lower part of the slidebar is just pinned together by the 4 lengths of .45mm wire at this stage. Then I moved on to looking at the clearance between the slidebar, crosshead and the coupling rods. It is rather tight! At this point I had to consider the crank pin on the front axle, the nut it is designed to be recessed into the coupling rod to increase the clearance available. I still need to file some of the meat off the crank pin nut. I was almost there and had just decided to assemble the piston rod so I could check the fit when, with more of a whimper than a bang my 25W Antex soldering iron stopped generating any heat. While I have another iron a 40Watt Weller with a bit the size of a spade isn't really suitable for P4 valve gear. So, for the moment, the B1 is stalled waiting on a delivery from Eileen... In the meantime I'm back on the goods shed, but that is probably another blog entry. David

watch the swarf on that lathe, looks sharp. lovely models David

Which resin are you using and how brittle is it? David

I was contacted last week by Keith Barker of the Ely MRC, he had been occupying himself during lock-down sorting out old media files on his PC. He had located some video of a model narrow gauge cement works railway taken at the Stowmarket in 2001 and thought it might be my layout. He was happy for me to post it up on Youtube, so I added a bit of a commentary and it is now there for all to see. I built 'The Works' in the 1990's and exhibited it for a few years prior to selling it sometime around 2005. I remember driving it down to a man in Romford. I was approached a few years back while exhibiting Fen End Pit by a couple of his friends who told me that he had sadly died not long after buying the layout so I have no idea what happened to it in the end. It was rather fun but a bit impractical for a home setting being nearly 3'6" deep with a fiddle yard hidden under the chalk cliffs at the back, you couldn't put it against a wall and still operate it really. At the time of sale I had almost finished Fen End Pit and needed the room. Still the video brought back some good memories for me and I hope others enjoy it too. Thanks to Keith for digging it out. David

Anyone who has worked with a laser-cutter will probably have story about just how dire the software for them tends to be. HPC Laser cutters are very nice machines but they still come with LaserCut 5.3 which has had no updates to my knowledge in 4-5 years. It is the only piece of dongle protected software I have and it is frankly awful. The interface looks like something produced in the mid-90s and the English language options look like Google translate was used. I have learnt my way around the interface but there are somethings which are really hard to control. The path planning algorithm is completely inscrutable and appears to have no logic I can understand. Usually this doesn't matter too much as the only impact is inefficient print times but I got caught up with a completely different issue with my goods shed rear wall. It doesn't show up too well in the photographs but you can see that while the brickwork at the top and bottom looks ok the area in the middle, apart for one band of about 6 courses , looks rather weak. I thought it was a fault on the cutter and cut the part again but it came out with the same effect. The drawing was fine, it was just the way the LaserCut software had arranged the cut path. Watching the cutter it appeared that the 'good' parts of the brickwork had each vertical mortar line cut as an individual movement. Where the cut looked good the cutter tended to cut a single mortar line and then move diagonally and cut the next one. Where the brickwork looked bad the planning algorithm had cut an entire vertical line of mortar in on pass, pulsing the laser on and off as it went. While the later approach is more efficient in terms of print time the way the head runs continuously rather than starting and stopping on each line makes the cut not as deep. It really doesn't seem that there is anyway to control this so I simply had to take part of the drawing that printed ok and use it to replace the mortar lines on a 'broken' bit. The result then looks identical it just has the lines drawn in a different order in the DXF file. I kept importing the file from TurboCAD into LaserCut and running the preview option. I was watching for, and then trying to loose, the continuous vertical movements. The result looks so much better. Comparing the entire walls side by side and you can really see the difference. This was all a bit of an unnecessary PITA. Typically I had no problem with the opposite wall or the end walls, or indeed with the station building. I think it must just have been the order in which I copied mortar lines vertically as I produced the drawing. At least I now know what to look for in future. I can now move on to assembling the main buildings and have fun with the corner buttresses. David

More progress with the Dave Bradwell B1 chassis kit over the weekend. The cosmetic and functional springs were fitted. The cosmetic springs hold the driving wheels from falling out and also hold the functional sprung steel wire spring. These springs are held at one end by a hole in the etch and at the other end in a 10 BA grub screw. These grub screws can then be used to adjust the individual amount of springing on each drive wheel. This picture shows off the P4 wheel profile rather nicely, Next I moved onto the bogie, which folded up nicely and then had additional overlays added. The wheels still require a washer on the front to simulate the large boss of the LNER wheels. Please excuse the wire insulation crankpin nuts but it is much easier to work with them at this stage. I know I still have to add the wheel balance weights. The motor was refitted to the gearbox and a 'bridge' made up to restrain the top of the gearbox, this allows it to go up and down with the axle but not rotate with the torque applied to the wheels. It looks large but I think it will fit in the boiler! So I was able to try and run the loco up and down a piece of track on some fly leads from the controller. I was very pleased with how smooth it was and at the complete absence of binding on the quartering. There are some pretty hefty lumps of lead on the chassis because it is so light without them. The springing still needs some adjustment, I think there is too much bias on the centre axle. So the next step is to make some pickups so I can try running on the layout. If I'd chosen to build a B12 I'd be almost done but I mustn't get scared by the whirly, nashy, grindy valve gear to come! It is somewhat concerning that I have used up about 75% of the etch by area but less then 25% by number of parts. i.e the parts get a lot smaller from here on in. Wish me luck! David

I found a lovely photograph of a B1 shunting at Clare on the Transport Treasury website. https://www.transporttreasury.com/p968962872/h9A4C364E#h9fccc231 This got me thinking that I really needed to have one for my model. I started investigating the options and found that Hattons had a second hand one available with a slightly damaged box and a wobbly drive wheel for an attractive price. I'd spotted that Dave Bradwell produces a chassis kit which, having built his J39 chassis this was rather appealing. The Bachmann model, Bradwell chassis and Gibson wheels were all ordered and delivered and the fun commenced. The frames went together well though there was quite a bit of cusp to file off and opening up the slots in the frames needed a bit of work with some scrap etch to get them clear. Next up was the cylinders and these went together quite easily. The test was that a piece of wire should line through the cylinder with the centre driving axle. I had a High Level RoadRunner+ in my stash which assembled easily and fits nicely in the chassis. The '+' bit finds between the hornguides with just a little side play. Following another couple of good modeling sessions I got the wheels prepared and fitted with the GW wheel press. The coupling rods had already been made up so putting the whole lot together was the moment of truth. To say I was pleased when the chassis rolled and didn't bind would be an understatement. I only opened the coupling rod holes up to fit the crank pin bushes. I would have expected to add a bit more clearance (ok, slop) to make it work smoothly but I didn't need to. Next up in the front bogie... David

I'd been using a Ls6090 from HPLaser in Cambridge Makespace for a few years and was one of the trainers on the machine. I was able to buy one for myself when I was unable to get into Cambridge anymore and so now have my own. It is a 40Watt machine with a 2' x 3' bed and it can cut nicely through 6mm laser grade ply for baseboards but will also happily cut 1mm MDF and thin card. Don't be too jealous, it was paid for by a payout from critical illness cover and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. David

I've not made any laser cut kits as I have been able to produce my own artwork and cutter. I find a few things help with corners. First, avoid interlacing brickwork if you can, a butt joint hidden by a drain pipe is a good solution. Second, if you have to interlace brickwork, cut the bricks over length and sand back. Third, use thin CA glue wicked into the MDF to give added strength to the vulnerable ends before sanding. The corner of the cattle dock was extra tricky as the walls actually slant inwards by about 2mm over the height, I realised that I have a couple of mistakes on the cattle dock so I think I need one more go before I'm happy. David

I thought for a horrible moment you were talking about the '80 Jazz-Funk band Shakatak! I was watching a Youtube video about Shackletons the South African air force had, apparently there is still one that crash landed in the Sahara desert on its way to an air show in Europe. David

Over the last week I've been doing some work drawing up the cattle dock and the goods shed. The good shed was sparked off by wanting a project for the Scalefour societies 'Socially-distanced Challenge' and by the fact it was the next building I needed to work on. The process of studying photographs, counting bricks, comparing with drawings from the GERS has been a fascinating one. The goods shed particularly is interesting because it was substantially rebuilt during its lifetime. No two corners are the same with different buttresses and different styles of door at each end! All of this is stuff you couldn't make up, which is why building a prototype is fun! The cattle dock is also underway, this has slightly angled walls and a concrete top. By the period I'm modelling the cattle pens were out of use but there was a grain elevator built on the dock. So, lots to do. David

I too thought it was surprisingly good. The first time you saw the spaceship 'catflap' was just the kind of excellent visual gag that you wanted from Red Dwarf. David