Portchullin Tatty

NanoCAD is well worth a look at; it is an AutoCAD clone and other than a few commands being titled differently is almost indistinguishable. There is a totally free version - NanoCAD 5 - or the upto date version is free for an initial trial period and then as long as you promise you are not making money out of using it you can carry on using if for evaluation. Cracking model; as ever! Mark

A toy train video starting with a bit of Everlong - whats not to like!! I too enjoyed that Jessie.

I had (until I moved house recently) a Dunster House log cabin and I know a number of others that also have. They do a variety of grades; you want to go for the one with the greatest level of insulation to it and double glazing throughout. They are relatively easy to build if you have a moderate amount of DIY nouse but there are stages that need two people and even then it will take a number of days. I built mine on old railway sleepers that I supported on concrete pads excavated about 300mm into the ground. The first year the interior was fairly moist as the timber needs to dry out and season. So you need to bear this in mind. After this it was always really comfortable with nothing more than a greenhouse heater bar for comfort. I was very pleased with it. A view of the inside can be seen here: https://highlandmiscellany.com/2013/01/20/glenmutchkins-part-1-have-summer-house-will-build/

Some photos to wet your appetite; taken at the Tonbridge show.

Looking grand! Something that is catching my eye is the free-standing gables. They almost certainly would have a roof enclosing on them both because the window head otherwise looks as if it might be at the gutter line but really because they would be very slender otherwise and prone to collapse. I am a building surveyor and we had to do some emergency works to a building next to Harrods a while back where the roof was found not to be tied into a gable a bit like this. It would have been exciting if we had not found it before it went!

And maybe a few £bn cheaper.......... Quite a few £bn!

Fabulous stuff!

Hi Jol, In truth, I merely thought it was M&L as it is a nearly finished kit in a blank box with a set of bogie sides. I would be interested in seeing the article you refer to if you recall where it was. Do like your completed diner; they are beasts. Looking forward to seeing Citadels version.............

I had guessed what the beast was intended to be by its overall dimension! Something like this.................... An M&L etched kit built thus far by my father and now passed to me to finish at some point. The challenge is the roof which has been built up with plasticard. Solvent has clearly been trapped in this and is "bubbling up." I need to find a solution to this at some point (the London Road roof for the picnic saloon is a different profile!). As a beware, you will be as much interested in WCJS coaches as LNWR. Many of the former are 6 inches wider although I would need to check if this is over the body only or also the underframe and hence potentially the footsteps.

Regarding the beast, be mindful that the problem with platforms will be the footboards not the actual body itself. So you might want to put the footboards onto it? Whilst you are doing that you might was well line it too?

Stephen, An amendment of your technique for forming tumblehomes to consider is to secure the lower edge of the carriage side to the rolling pin with masking tape so that as you roll it forward it pulls the lower edge up. Otherwise, it is challenging to get the curve of the tumblehome to go all the way down to the bottom of the side. Mark

Stephen, If these have footboards, (which I presume they will), then the swing will be a lot less as they get constricted. Having said this, buffer lock can still be a problem. An alternative approach for six wheelers is to use sliding axles. Details here: https://highlandmiscellany.com/2018/02/20/sliding-axles/ and in action here https://highlandmiscellany.com/2018/03/01/sliding-axles-a-reprise/ Mark

Once the basic structure of the gantry is in place, the real task of making the signals signally commences. First up were the smoke deflectors and the brackets for the balance weights. Also fitted are the main portions of the fan route indicator, but that will be explained further once I get it going! For the arm bearing point and lamps I am using some 3D prints produced by Steve Hewitt and available from Shapeways. They can be found here https://www.shapeways.com/product/JJRSB … arketplace. They are fairly expensive but they are neat and save a lot of manufacture. There is, however, a but – they are very delicate and I am very fearful of thier long term durability. I am highly likely to draw some of my own up and get them cast in lost wax. It will make them even more expensive but I have about a 50% casualty rate at the moment, so maybe in the long term it will be cheaper! The arms are Masokits, these are definitely the best available arms for LMS/LNER/BR semaphores. This is especially true of the minature shunt arms as the MSE ones are simply too delicate to bother with (imagine how do I know that………….!). So this is where we are now at with the arms mounted temporarly on the bearings. There are five movements in the down direction (three of which operate via the route indicator) and then a pair in the up direction – hence the back to front arms. The plates at the top of the dolls are mounting points for ladders. It transpires they are wrong and have already gone! So the intensity level has dialled up a notch with these portions (especially breaking the bearing/lamp fittings) but it really gets interesting when you try and make these things work. I don’t know myself yet (although I know for the couple of arms I have finished, so I have an inkling), but i think it might be fun to have a little sweepstake on how many moving parts there will be in the finished gantry. Five arms, three fan route indicators and each is operated by way of angle cranks in order to get the movement down to the servos under the baseplates. Each arm, crank and intermediate wire counts as a moving part, as do the servos………………..guesses please?

After a long pause, caused by that irratating thing called life getting in the way and me seeming to neglect RMweb a bit, I am looking to deliver on some long made modelling promises over the holiday season. The major task is a rather full on gantry signal with no less than eight movements on it (which is an improvement, when initially designed it had nine!), including a rather natty fan route indicator. This is for a friend’s layout and is in return for some signal cabins that he built no less than 15 years ago – I told you the promises were long made! Mind you, he hasn’t got the layout fully running yet, so I am still ahead of him! The gantry spans only two lines so it can be formed with channel section. There are good drawings and pictures in LMS Journal no 5 of this. I have made mine from milled brass section and then the landing was a custom etch I designed as it takes a surprisingly large amount of material and effort to construct this from scratch. These etches included the doll base plates although the dolls have a thickened tube at the lower level which of course I forgot and had to undo later work to put on!! The signal is to be located on an embankment which meant that I could not simply put flat base plates on the foot of the gantry columns. Instead I have constructed a housing that matches the slope of the embankment and then the baseplates are partially sloped to match this with square sections representing the foundations of the prototype columns. Below these baseplates I have then formed housings to take the servos which will eventually operate the arm actions. So far, this is pretty easy modelling (although I lost a number of drill bits opening up the stanchion positions on the landing – grrrrrr!). The tough bit comes next……………

Other than with the following phrase: The intention is that towing is not within the rules.

With explicit permission given to all of the entrants by the organisor.

Penrhos, I am sorry i missed your message so i did not reply. The intention is that towing is not within the rules. IanLMS, I look forward to as many LMS entries as possible! Mark

Can I extol the virtues of a proxxon (or similar) drill press. See here: https://highlandmiscellany.com/2017/02/ it will eventually pay for itself in reduced numbers of broken drills but it will also treble the speed you do something like this.

Your sign-writer had best be finished quick because if the station manager gets back and finds the appliance entrance to his station blocked by this van, he'll be for the high jump!

Yes, it is a patterned glass rather than painted out white. The idea was to retain privacy whilst also allowing light in. An image of something similar is here: https://www.svrwiki.com/LMS_24617_Corridor_Composite Abrading the rear surface is a technique or you can get spray frosting that is intended to obscure bathroom windows. Mind you, one can will do you a life time even in 7mm!

Andy It is a diagram 1938 composite dining car built between 1936 - 37. A very nice one too! Ends were black post 1936 on LMS coaches. On the kitchen side, the store to the right hand side (opposite the toilet) will also have been frosted. On the corridor side, I don't think any of the windows were frosted.

You shouldn't have difficulty sourcing an adapter. Either ebay or somewhere like https://www.everythingairbrush.com/

With the absence of a line serving the turntable, i suggest you have no choice!

Look forward to seeing you squeeze it into a car too..............

As Jeremy has noted, this weekend's Scaleforum saw the launch of the Scalefour Society's Jubilee Challenge. There is now a section on RMweb dedicated to the challenge which can be found here with the the rules in particular are here and how to enter here. There are also similar threads on the Scalefour forum We would welcome entries from both society members and non-members.