2mmMark

I came across this video this morning which is very instructive on the basic principles. Obviously it's from a US presenter and the tools & materials are not whay I would choose for 2mm but the basic principles are well explained.

The answer to the gravity shunt question is that I'm not going there. The physics in 2mm scale don't really permit anything realistic. It's all done by loco haulage. I slipped an extra siding into the plan to make it easy to shuffle the wagons around. It's not a layout with immense operational interest, more a demonstration piece for 2mm finescale.

Look for "d-limonene turpene" or "d-linomene citrus". It's relatively innocuous stuff so is easily posted. Mark

I've just noticed that Pendon are doing a couple of soldering tuition workshops on 21st & 22nd March, led by Mick Simpson. I don't know if it's our 2mm Mick Simpson or not but there's no better way to learn soldering than with some hands-on tuition. https://pendonmuseum.com/events/event.php?s=basic-soldering-for-modellers Many years ago, I was taught PCB assembly soldering during work lunch hours by our maintenance technician (who looked after the electro-mechanical equipment we used to analyse aircraft flight recorders). It was then easy to translate the techniques to PCB trackwork and then to metal assembly soldering. Since then, I've passed on the techniques to others from time to time as the opportunity has arisen. There's a very definite "eureka" moment when it all comes together when the knack of making solder joints is found. Like others, I use 60/40 tin/lead 188 degree solder (still readily available) of the thinnest gauge I can find, a Maplin temperature controlled soldering station with a 2mm chisel tip, phosphoric acid flux and brass "scouring pad" tip cleaner. There is a specific tip cleaner compound which you can use to bring a tip back to good condition. I have other tips which rarely get used but sometimes there's a need to get a lot of heat in, which is where the bigger tips come in handy. In my hands, tips smaller than 2mm don't seem to work as well but others like them. Other weapons in my soldering arsenal are Nealetin lead solder paste/paint, Frys powerflow gel flux and a range of tin/lead solder balls source from eBay. Mark

Two recommendations from me: 1 - try using solder balls as per Keith Armes article in the 2mm magazine. I find they make very neat solder joints on PCB trackwork 2 - use Brian Harrap's method of making crossing vees, which makes the job very easy

I enjoyed both programmes. It was a bold decision of Quest to screen without adverts in the whole two hours and I applaud their decision. Hope it paid off in terms of viewing figures. The Channel 5 programme was also very good, slightly different in style but most watchable. Our Toshiba PVR has an edit function which allowed me to remove the adverts. The 2 hour elapsed broadcast has come down to 1 hour 34 minutes.

For future exhibitions, I've decided that my layout will go via a British Railways container, using their door to door service. I shall follow the Scammel mechanical horse & container on my trusty Raleigh gentleman's safety bicycle.

About this time in 1983, I had almost exactly the same train, except my Class 24 was a Langley body kit on a Mike Bryant chassis and the wagons were Peco conversions.

Thank you for the pompous and patronising lecture, considering you know zilch about how I manage my own transport needs. FYI, I'm in a fortunate position where I have a range of transport options. Others less so and I was trying to provide some information which people may have found helpful. Still, at least you were able to take your hobby horse out for a nice new year's day canter. You're welcome.

There's a proposal to charge for all parking at Ally Pally and the consultation finishes today! Here's the link: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ALLYPALLYPARKING Also, from October 2021, Ally Pally will be inside the expanded London ULEZ so visiting using a non-compliant vehicle will result in a fine.

You could give him an extra leg. Then he'd able to run on three foot gauge.

At a fairly recent meeting up at the MRC in London, there was one of Norman Eagle's O gauge clockwork locos circulating the test track. It was a very nice model of an L&Y class 22 saddle tank. I don't know what the actual mechanism is but it 's a beautifully engineered piece of work with a proper speed governer. Smooth running and pretty powerful. Edit - found a photo of the loco.

That should go like clockwork...

That looks like a fairly useful list of traders to me. And yes, Southampton is a pretty car-unfriendly place when it comes to on-street parking. It's not alone though. Many councils are looking at ways to gain revenue from parking charges.

I've got one of those set up to fit onto the table of my Clarke bench drill press and very useful it is too.

As has already been mentioned. I still have the first few issues which showed a great deal of promise, then it all seemed to unravel.

There are some various pictures available of 47445, here's one. Tanks & bunker are orange, footplate valance & coupling rods are red, although the rods look mostly black in photos. The Bachmann model is a standard Jinty repainted. 47445 has a few subtle differences. Some boiler fittings, coal rails and handrails have been removed and a sandbox (painted blue) added. The sandbox looks like a Peckett type. I should think the coal rails were removed to aid hand coaling as the loco was only doing short trips in industrial service. I'm building 47445 in 2mm scale for my British Oak mini-layout. There's a short but interesting film on Youtube Mark

It would be worth looking at the various PWM speed controllers on eBay. I've been trying out the low amperage ones, in the region of 3A, for 2mm scale mechanisms. All I do is feed them the required DC supply of a voltage and amperage which suits the 2mm motors, using a plug in transformer. They can also be fed with a battery pack, which could be an advantage on a garden railway. The level of control is very good and the PWM is high-frequency so is kind to coreless motors. Putting "pwm motor speed controller" should throw up many choices. Some come with reversing switches, some not and most will need a case. Easy jobs to do. Look for 0 to 100% duty cycle. Some don't go down to 0% which means there's always some voltage present which might cause very efficient mechs to creep. The prices are very keen! Mark

What would be nice is a modelling section following the theme of each magazine. I quite fancy a Model Railway Bylines. Always wanted an eclectic train set for Christmas.

The older 2-551 2mm RCH kit is capable of being made up into a decent looking model. I scribe the missing interior detail using an Olfa P-Cutter and add a representation of internal ironwork with microstrip. The assembled body does have a tendency to bow inwards but using a less aggressive solvent like Di-Limonene reduces this to almost nil. The ones in these pictures are, I think, on the old Association "H-50" etched underframes, predating those designed by Bill Blackburn. Buffer beams are plastic strip and I use turned brass buffers, finding these a lot less fragile than castings. I have a feeling that the 2-551 RCH kit was sponsored by Mark Austin back in the early 1980s. It wasn't the first venture into plastic moulding. The Groves and Denys Brownlee made their own plastic moulded wagons but it was the first commercial volume moulding.

I've just done an update to my blog, detailing some further progress on my Peckett saddle tank. Mark

The previous instalment finished with the motor about to undergo some surgery to shorten the shaft. Motor shafts are almost always hardened steel so regular wire cutters will make very little impression on them but the shaft will certainly leave an impression on the cutters. The best way to trim the shaft is with a cutting disc in a minidrill. This is a little risky so sensible safety precautions are strongly recommended. Eye protection just in case the disc breaks up is required and definitely think about a safe way to hold the motor during the process. In this case, the photo below shows how I did it, by holding the other end of the shaft in a pin chuck, which has the benefit of allowing the cut end of the shaft to be give a slight bevel to tidy up the cut. The cut end is simply rotated while gently touching the cutting disk at an angle. Fingers are safely out of the way of the disc. Note that the disc isn't spnning when I took the picture. Even I'm not mad enough to try that! In this case, I'm using a carborundum disc as I beleive they give a neater cut. Diamond discs are an alternative but they seem to "bounce" a little bit and in my hands at least, don't cut so nicely. In the previous instalment, I mentioned a flywheel, which I turned up on the lathe. It's just a piece of brass rod, nothing fancy. Alternatively, nicely made flywheels are available off the shelf from Tramfabriek or N-Brass. The other end of the motor had the work affixed. For this I used Granville thread-locking fluid from Halfords, as recommended to me by Sven van der Hart of Tramfabriek. The bond is good but can be broken if required for dismantling. Some of the Loctite compounds I've used in the past are quite permanent. At this point, the power unit comprising motor, bracket, worm and flywheel is ready to use. The next thing is to arrange an electrical connection between the frames and the motor contact tags. A very simple solution was to trap some springy phosphor-bronze wires between the frames and spacer. As the spacer is plastic, all that was needed was to cut a groove in which the wires are trapped by the frames. Underneath the spacer, in the axle aperture, the wires are just bent over to trap them in place. The following set of photos should make things clear. The feed wires are easy to simply spring apart if it's necessary to remove the motor. In this case, the motor was in the right orientation to give forward movement with the right hand rail positive. If it wasn't correct, all that's needed would be to rotate the motor 180 degrees. The body has had some attention. It's gained a set of large headed industrial buffers and foot steps. The buffers are regular loco buffers with an extra etched head soldered on. Looking at photos of various industrial locos, the real thing also extended buffers in this way. Probably not with 60/40 tin-lead solder though. The footsteps are lost wax brass castings from the N-Brass range. Putting the steps and buffers on required a bit of shaping to be done to the PCB underplate (mentioned in the earlier "Bodywork" section). Some 14BA nuts were soldered to the copper side to accept the fixing screws of the chassis A couple of brass pins were fitted into the space to provide some alignment for the chassis. In this view they can be seen just ahead of the worm & gear. In due course the PCB plate will be glued in place rather than soldered to avoid any risk of the copper delaminating. A glue joint here will be amply strong enough. As mentioned previously the edge of the PCB represents the footplate valance. Some satisfying progress made, I feel. What has become apparent now is the emptiness of the cab. It looks like some representation of the backhead and a brake standard will be required. I've also found some photos online of a similar loco to mine, not identical but they certainly give some idea of how it could be finished. From Flickr, this image was taken in 1967 by John Wiltshire at the Millom Ironworks in Cumbria. An inspirational image. It gives a good idea of what additional detail remains to be added. Also on Flickr from Gordon Edgar are these images of the same loco, showing some detail differences. Mark

Hopefully a simple Q - what format are the digital BRMs? Mark

I've got a couple of sprues of those figures. They good enough to pass muster even nowadays plus they have the advantage of being a variety of body shapes and sizes. It's quite possible they were moulded in house. In style, they're more like the Airfix 4mm scale figures from the same era as they have the traditional massive circular paving slab moulded to their feet. That might be why more people travelled by train in those days. Driving a car with that attached to your feet would be.... ambitious!

Following on from the previous entry, I made a mount for the 6mm by 15mm motor using various bits of brass tube. A length of ¼" bore tube was sliced lengthways and closed up slightly so as to grip the motor body. Then two layers of brass cut from successive size tubes were soldered on to match the curve of the original motor top frame. Finally the top of the motor mounting tube was tapped 14BA for a fixing screw. There were enough layers of brass to provide a usable thread without the screw biting into the body of the motor. The worm was pushed onto the 0.8mm to 1.5mm converter shaft and the shaft fixed to the motor using thread-locking liquid, as recommended by Sven at Tramfabriek. A piece of cigarette paper was used to provide clearance and stop the liquid seeping in the motor bearing. The motor frame was assembled ready for refitting to the chassis. A quick test run show that everything ran smoothly. Unfortunately, when the motor frame was refitted to the chassis, I found the chassis ran superbly in one direction but was very rough in the other. I had several tries to fix this, moving the worm slightly in either direction, tweaking the mesh slightly and so on. Frustratingly nothing I tried worked. I then replaced the worm with a longer one and removed the white front bearing. I don't quite know why but this solved the problem and a sweet running chassis was the result. I made up some phosphor-bronze contact strips to connect the motor and frames, then tested the chassis on a rolling road which showed that it all worked OK. Losing the front bearing doesn't seem to have caused any problems. These coreless motors from Tramfabriek have a lot of potential for us in 2mm scale. The 6mm size may be a little small for a mainline loco but in this case the Jinty will spend its life shuttling up and down 30" of track with a few coal hoppers, so it won't be over-exerting itself. The small size of the motor makes for a compact mechanism which will be helpful to those who use the Devil's Control Circuitry and need somewhere to keep their chips warm. The question remains as to whether the whole conversion was easier than building a chassis from scratch. With what I've ended up with, I'd say probably not. Looking back, I think I started this conversion sometime in 2004. It is a classic example of the railway modeller delusion, that a "simple & quick" conversion will save time...! Mark