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Skinnylinny

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  1. It would, although I lack the required woodworking skills, and no longer have access to the laser cutter since moving to Glasgow-ish. GrandOrgue at the moment, as I don't have the cash to drop on a copy of GrandOrgue, and I'm sort of cautiously dipping my toe back in for as little spend as possible. The 61-key MIDI keyboard cost me £60, while the pedalboard has cost me the grand total of £1.04 on eBay and the price of a decent takeout dinner for a friend to drive it up to me! It will require a bank of microswitches, and the use of an Arduino which I already have, to MIDI-ify it.
  2. Bells-wise, I'm leaning towards a speaker and recordings, to be honest, rather than physical bells. I love the idea of operating with them, but I daresay my neighbours would appreciate the idea of a volume control. They've enough to deal with now that I'm getting back into organ practice too (well, as best I can with a MIDI keyboard, and an old church organ pedalboard that I've managed to acquire and am planning to MIDI-ify...) but at least that I can do on headphones!
  3. So i was sitting playing with the lever frame, and got to thinking. It's all very well having a frame, but what use is it if the next box down the line can't communicate to send me trains? Now, I could just rely on talking to the fiddle yard operator, but where's the fun in that? So, I've been playing about a bit more in CAD. I've not yet decided how to drive the arms, but I'm leaning towards servos unless I can find a way to hook this up to some solenoids in such a way that I can drive it on 5V or so. It's to a larger scale than the levers in order to be visible to a 1:1 operator, and I've yet to decide how to sort out a pegging handle. The outer finish, however, I've decided on. I have some rather nice self-adhesive veneer, which should look rather good over a 3D printed case, perhaps with some suitable decorative wooden mouldings.
  4. It lives! Well, all the levers, microswitches and locking are printed, assembled and working. Unfortunately, the 2mm threaded rod I ordered for attaching the microswitches is... subpar... The M2 nuts just slide along it rather than "biting" the thread! I may have to look for another source. There are still a couple of minor bits that need tidying (like painting the handles on some of the levers) or that may get changed - the strengtheners to the catch rod guides, for example. There's also a very slight occasional issue with the tappets binding slightly between the quadrants - this may settle down as bits bed in, or I may have to adjust the tappets slightly and reprint, but all in all I'm very very pleased with how the project has turned out! In the meantime, I've been working on something more modern - the ScotRail class 334 for the club's forthcoming Haymarket layout. Awaiting varnishing before I grubby up the roof and add the cant rail stripe, then do the glazing.
  5. Just wanted to say thank you to @m0rris - I bought a class 334 a few months back, and have finally got to the point of painting. I'm delighted with the model, and very impressed - it's well detailed, weighty and the resin used is nicely flexible, rather than brittle. Just enough to get the wheels into the bogies (although I did find them a little snug, but easy enough to ream - always better that way than too loose!). I'm really enjoying this build. Next thing on the to-do list is figuring out where to get a suitable pantograph, and sorting couplings between the cars.
  6. Once everything is in place and tested, I intend to have a clear piece of acrylic over the top.
  7. Getting there... 4 more quadrants, 6 more levers and one more locking bar... and hopefully that should be all the bits I need to assemble the whole thing!
  8. Hi Michael, So the pivots on the catch handles are M2 bolts, which pass through one side of the catch handle, and self-tap into the other side of the catch handle. The catch rods do have springs attached to the bottom where they pass through the quadrant. The springs hook over the hooked "leg" to the left of the lever in the picture above. They're fairly softly sprung, but enough that the catch falls reliably. I am not expecting many guest operators, and the long-term plan is to have a mimic panel as an alternative method of control, that can be plugged into the same electrical connector that will attach the levers to the layout - the levers are mainly for my own enjoyment. That said, there's a *little* flex in the catch rods, but only enough to allow maybe 1mm of movement at the very tip of the lever handle.
  9. Well, the printer's been on the blink for a little while now - it suddenly started producing plastic spaghetti instead of lever frame parts. About 8 hours of tinkering later (spread over about a week!) I've managed to get it working, and I now have an idea of what to look for if it fails again. My first successful print was the locking bars, and there are now the first ten tappets on the print bed. I've also been playing around with how to mount microswitches, and I think I've got a nice neat system which should do the trick, having stolen the basic concept from @Lacathedrale's suggestion a few pages back. Every third quadrant will have this tab with two holes in, to fit more threaded rods (M2 this time, rather than M3) to support microswitches. It *should* be possible, with care, to route the wires neatly downwards, although I may draw up some kind of cable trough for them. While the interlocking may be mechanical, the levers themselves will operate the microswitches and thus, indirectly, the signals and points through servos. I'm also hoping to add coloured strengtheners to the lever catch rod guides at some point, but for the foreseeable future I'll be printing lots and lots of black parts (interlocking and more quadrants!)
  10. Well, a fair bit of finagling later, and now things are stretched such that the tappets' throw is approximately 1.5 rows, thus stopping the problem. Whew! Now to try printing the bloomin' thing!
  11. Oh, I think I see what you mean - there wouldn't be any movements from the down platform across 3 unless it were reversed, so the FPL on 4 only needs to lock 3 in the reverse position. Very smart! I am a little worried that one port in tappet 5 (that's on row B when normal) will be rather too close to the dog on the green bar - this could allow the following sequence of lever movements (that I don't want!) Starting all N 3R 5R 3N (while 5R!) I must say, I'm glad I'm not doing this for a living!
  12. Hmmmmm, I was *hoping* to allow simultaneous arrivals and departures, but I would definitely rather avoid conditional locking! So something like this? (I realise I've done the lilac bar in sort-of the opposite way to usual, but that's to avoid clashes with other ports in the same tappets). The only niggling thought in the back of my head now is "Should 5 be locked normal unless 3 is reversed?" Thank you so much for your help, @Nick C!
  13. Now there's some lateral (quite literally!) thinking! Thank you! It would still fit in with the general layout of the diagram too - I shall do that. Thank you so much!
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