Pete the Elaner

I find it harder to solder to a rail joiner. The wheels do not contact the rail joiner either, so you are still relying on the joiner/rail connection to carry current instead of a nice, solid connection directly to the rail (& like some others, I solder a connection to every rail). Soldering is definitely a skill which is improved with practice. The best advice I was ever given was to not remove the iron when you think it has just about melted. Wait until it has flowed properly into/around the joint you want to make.

That is unlikely to have been planned that way. All teams push the rules to the limit. When they are suspected of going too far, they stop. When this occurs is irrelevant. It could be after a GP win or a double DNF. It looks like this time it may have been after testing. It is not just Ferrari. Many teams have tried new things. Williams got active suspension working better than anyone else, Lotus developed a twin chassis car & led the way in ground effects. Tyrrel developed the fan-assisted aero car. Mercedes gained an advantage for a few races last year with a new way of cooling brakes which was later deemed to be illegal. It is a sport of small margins & complicated rules. Any loophole is fair game to the team who finds it first.

I don't think that is rotten. I just think it is the nature of F1. Interesting that Ferrari's pre-season advantage has gone completely. I was told by an insider that they were suspected of using 'fuel tricks' again.

I would not have put it back. As a statement, I would have put it on the floor & walked out. If I had a full basket then that would be even better. I am completely against putting unwanted items back on the wrong shelf & it annoys me to see others do it, especially when I see chilled or frozen goods on a normal shelf. But if the company wants to dick customers around by not accepting normal payment, then they can pay their staff to put the items back again.

What track & gauge are you using? I assumed a DOGA finescale gauge (14.8mm) would be correct for code 75 track, but this seems to be wrong. Their universal gauge seems to give better running. I noticed with my Black 5 that the inside wheel lifts on a curve. A little more downward force on the bogie (extra weight may be the easiest) may help.

I believe the recommendation of permanently powering tracks is good. DCC allows you to control all locos at all times. If they are in live sidings, then they are under still under your control. It sounds like you are considering relying on point blades for electrical contact. I recommend not doing this. Point blades can become blocked with paint & glue from weathering/ballasting & over time suffer tarnishing too. Cleaning rail tops is easy enough but having to clean the point blades is more of an effort & can easily be avoided. The latest generation of electrofrog points allow stock & switch rails to be electrically bonded. The frog then needs to be isolated & fed via a switch. This gets mentioned on here frequently so a quick search will find something. Some modellers 'get away' without doing this & claim they have no trouble. My own experience has led me to disbelieve them....unless of course they include a session of point blade cleaning in their routine track cleaning. I certainly don't. I used to hide behind my friend's old layout in embarrassment while he did this in front of viewers at an exhibition.

It looks like you are indeed missing a wire. There should be rubber traction tyres n 1 side of the power bogie. The locos cannot collect or return current through these so it has to get it from the non-power bogie, hence the wire. Some 91s will have been able to use the pantograph for electrical contact but if yours had a plastic pan, you may be better off searching for a standard wire from a class 37 or 47, straight from the trailing bogie to the brush retainer.

There has often been domination by 1 team. Lotus won the championship for several seasons in the early 70s with a virtually unchanged car, so that must have been way ahead of the rest when it was introduced. McLaren had both Lauda & Prost competing for the title in 1984 for a year of domination before Senna & Prost later in the decade. Williams were virtually unbeatable with the last active suspension designs in the early 90s. When Mansell drove for them, they scored plenty of 1-2's with Piquet then Patrese driving the other car. It was McLaren's turn again in the late 90s when Hakkinen & Coulthard were there. The one constant throughout these times is Ferrari being 2nd best. I do not like the reliability though. Pushing to the limit and beyond should mean more failures. I f you do not suffer a failure once in a while, have you really been pushing hard enough?

That is not flat. The fact that it is still an arch makes a huge difference to its strength.

We hear that every year, but we are only 4 races in so far too early to judge. Vettel's remark was that Mercedes dominance was making it boring..but why? LeClerc was quickest in Bahrain & Baku. He was unlucky in Bahrain & pushed too hard in Baku. Vettel was in an identical car on both occasions so it is hardly Mercedes fault that he could not beat them.

There are also some models which could see new life as dummys for double heading. I have a few which fall into this category.

& the Bachmann 90 has a speaker fitted too. As Andy remarked earlier, years ago we heard calls for better models. Now we have better models but at higher prices. You cannot have it both ways.

I saw it mentioned earlier that Andi Dell (Dagworth) modified a pan to operate with a DCC function. I remember speaking to him about it at DEMU Showcase in Bretby, so that would have been quite a few years ago. He used memory wire but found that only 1 brand of decoder was suitable (Lenz I think) because there was something different about the way they controlled functions. I cannot remember exactly why, possibly the ability to use a pulsed function output. What was not mentioned was whether some CV settings had to be changed to enable the function to work properly for this. Other, newer decoders may now be able to provide the required output. That may go some way to explaining why Bachmann feel it necessary to recommend a dedicated decoder.

While I agree with the bit I highlighted, unfortunately they got the blame time after time & this forced them to react by forcing updates out. Remember we live in a world where McDonalds got sued for not marking a hot cup of tea with a warning of 'hot liquid' after someone scalded themselves. You couldn't make it up.

Losing data is not bad luck. It is poor planning. A hard drive can fail at any time & if it is not backed up, you could lose it. Backup devices are cheap & come in different forms, some of which are easy to use. If you don't trust cloud (I didn't until I started learning about it), then backup drives are available. I set one up for someone & was impressed with how easy it is to do. Their hard drive failed a few months later & no data was lost. Was this lucky or good planning?

It looks like you have used ply for the board tops. It seems to be much less prone to warping than chipboard or MDF. Suggestions: Getting something running is a major milestone for most modellers. It looks like you have done that. Don't be tempted to get too complicated too quickly. By keeping things simple, you can understand how it works & will be able to fix it when it goes wrong.

& to confirm the news article, I saw one in service last night.

That is common attitude but ill-informed. There is a very good reason they force the updates. They have developers employed to find security issues before customers do. Hopefully they do actually find these first. Security fixes are then published. There are unscrupulous people out there who reverse engineer the new security fixes as soon as they can to create viruses. This is where the forcing comes in... If Microsoft published the update & let users install them in their own time, there would be a period when many machines would be vulnerable to the new viruses. This is what used to happen & they got criticised for it. Their reaction was to push updates out as soon as they were happy with them. Occasionally one gets through which causes an issue on a combination of things they have not tested but, as remarked earlier, they have made the system so widely compatible that it would not be possible to try it with every possible hardware/software combination. It is partly this compatibility which makes Windows such a resource-hungry system. The biggest example I can remember was around 2005-2006 when I was in desktop & server support. The media reported it as being the 'So big' virus which I found amusing because it was actually Welchia! The latest update was available for a few days before the virus became an issue & guess what...it would have secured the vulnerability that the virus exploited. The problem was that it had not been applied to most machines. So how about looking at this from the opposite angle? How many major virus issues have been prevented because updates are now forced out more quickly?

Are Hattons decoders really only £8? After trying out a Zimo MX600 & seeing how much better it is than the basic Hornby or Bachmann decoders, I was happy to pay the extra. The price gap has since got to less than the price of a beer, which works in even more favour of the Zimo. These are all 8 pin decoders but if the speaker is going to be pre-wired, the 90 will have a 21 pin fitting. The cheapest 21 pin decoders usually cost a little more. After bad experiences with all previous Bachmann decoders I have bought, I would not trust Bachmann's special 90 decoder to drive the loco nicely.

Is there any reason you chose to avoid Phoenix & Railmatch?

I did not know an R8213 was a Select. Reading CVs will not be possible so you can't query it for manufacturer/model code. It is definitely worth paying attention to your pickups. These would have been more of a challenge when designing a single than an 0-6-0 & a good electrical contact will always produce better running.

Zimos have a good reputation for smooth running & my experiences with Bachmann & Hornby "DCC Fitted" locos are bad because the decoders they have used have been cheap rubbish. Do you know what chip is actually fitted to the Single? I suspect Rapido are a bit more choosy about which decoders they use but it would be nice to find out what is inside. If you can read the manufacturer & model codes then that would be useful.

But we are led to believe that it is 'the most famous steam loco'? Surely everyone would have been taking & publishing photos of it. Or could the most famous bit be recent marketing nonsense from the NRM, with Rocket & Mallard probably being the most famous 2 British steam locomotives?

I used to use a fairly small standard garage compressor. I had to fit my own oil/water separator but it was still relatively cheap compared to the usual brands of airbrush compressor mentioned earlier. Smooth, powerful, reliable, clean air delivery so it ticked all the right boxes except one: it was very noisy... So noisy that I would not use it at home in the evening. For this reason, I would also recommend something marketed as an airbrush compressor.

Somebody posted an oscilloscope trace of the output of a Clipper or Duette somewhere on this forum a few weeks ago. The voltage was all over the place, regularly dipping slightly into the negative when providing a net positive output. There were a couple of comments speculating that components had failed...but had they? Nobody who replied had ever seen a trace from an H&M controller before, so how would any of them know this was a fault & not simply how it had always been? I have never seen good slow running with any H&M controller. They always seem to jump to about 1/3 speed from zero without anything between.