Sealion II

I have not been doing much modelling of late - work mostly getting in the road and an impending 1200km move in early December having had me pack quite a bit of stuff in preparation being the chief reasons.

I have managed to get the odd things done around the place and one of the more recent sessions resulted in the Sealion previously shown in brass having been painted and the bogies fitted.  I have had a chance to compare it with the Farish offering and the two are significantly different - and not just because mine is black!  The main fault I have with this one (other than the doubtful build of the chutes but too late really and it is hard to see standing still, much less underway) is the coupling distances.  I will have to do something about that, but at this point in time, it goes around my test track (which required the bogies to have brass washers put between them to give a little more height for the flanges) and, once loaded and weathered, should look pretty good with the allocated 33 that it is getting.  I just have to get one of the new transfer packs from the NGS to finish it off.  And maybe a couple more kits so it isn't lonely!

DCC

I have been having a play with my DCC gear again having received a number of chips from Bromsgrove Models and Hatton's.  So far, I haven't seen much difference between the TCS 6 pin and the Bachmann 6 pin in the Class 24 I have been having a fiddle with.  Now the general consensus from a number of points of advice all said the Bachmann chip was useful for putting in the trailing car of DMUs (which is partly why I got a few from Hatton's - I have two 108s and a 150/1 and 150/2 at present with 3 101s on order (including a 3 car set) along with the 411 EMU) but given that it is the Bachmann chip and the literature says it is tuned for the Graham Farish range I thought I would give it a go.

The only real difference I have been able to see is in the options for lighting - although I can't seem to get the random firebox flicker to work on the TCS chip to make it look like I have oil lights burning instead of the lights behind the discs.  Maybe it is all too subtle.  In any case, having put the conversion TCS drop in board into my Atlas GP-9, I am very pleased to be able to select a variety of lighting options so my cunning plan at present is to put Bachmann chips into Bachmann locos (and given the price is almost 2 to 1 against the TCS) where possible, and put TCS chips where it isn't (so I will be getting some Z2 chips in due course for my 04s and 08).

Now I don't have a big layout for fooling around with DCC - in fact it is merely a length of Kato Unitrack to test and program on - but it is nice to have all the locos sitting there with their lights on (assuming they have them - the Class 45 conversion doesn't) and being able to move the one in the middle without needing a lot of switches!

Reviewing progress

I did some more work on Swallow's End tonight and in the end, decided a number of issues were going to bug me if I kept going.

The first of these - and arguably the most significant - is the fact that doing the "dirt" has resulted in me having to double layer it.  This, I suspect, is partly because I didn't paint the board under the "dirt" brown first and therefore the white showed through the Woodland Scenics scatter too much.  While putting a second layer of dirt on isn't that much of a hassle, it resulted in the dirt being higher than the ballast.  Now previously I have done the dirt first and the ballast last, and I have been using Peco track so the depth of the ballast is significant, compared with the surrounding country side.  This time I did ballast first and dirt second and using PCB sleepers, the depth of the ballast isn't deep enough compared with the double shot dirt.

The second thing which has been irking me, is working in small sections.  Previously I have tended to paint a wide area (mind you in the past the narrowest layout I have had has been 800mm heading upwards to 1000mm and lengths have been in the 2500mm heading to 4100mm so lots of dirt required!) with glue, sprinkling away then flood with more glue and walk away until 48 hours had passed.  Now the 48 hours still holds true but the smaller patches are showing up with boundary marks.  While I know there are boundaries for fences and whatnot there are too many patches with this landscape for my liking.  I have tried hiding them using various methods but I haven't been satisfied with the results.

Consequently I have decided the whole lot has to come up and I will restart.  Because the track has been glued down with PVA or taped down with DS Tape, all this is going to come up as well.  As it happens, the only bit which I will lose is the the concrete slab for one of the coal merchants - I don't think the paper will survive the bath which is coming up!

On one hand it is a bit frustrating that the hours I have spent ballasting and what not around the places which I could do it have come to naught but on the other hand, given that this is a whole new standard of track and rolling stock to what I have done in the past, I feel that I should strive to make all of it better than normal.  My first efforts fell short - and it has cost me time, a packet of scatter material (well most of a packet - there is still some left over) and some glue.  Cheep as learning experiences go.

So tomorrow is shaping up as bath night for Swallow's End.  Then I will see about putting the track down on cork or something similar to get a bit of height on the surrounding country side - not much, 2mm at the most so I get a nice looking track bed - and I will paint the dirt areas brown before I put anything down this time.

And to think I looked at Missy's Highclere and was a bit smug that I hadn't ripped mine up.  He (or she) who laughs last... or pride goeth before the fall.

Return to Swallow's End

After a hiatus of many weeks (months actually) I decided it was about time I did something more on my embryonic 2mm layout.

At last visit, I had made a start on the dirt, and had put down all the track bar the points, having also ballasted the track which was put down.  I am still not convinced, having put soil around the place, that ballasting first, rather than my usual last, is a good idea.  There is more cleaning up to do on the edges than I usually have to do - my logic for ballast last is that is what happens in the real world although, to be fair, in the real world the track comes after the landscape!

I hadn't put the points down because I hadn't sorted out how I am going to change them - the TOU.  I still haven't although I have a couple of ideas which is why I thought I should do something.  The first something I had to do, was make sure all the points were "gapped" correctly.  This involves making sure the frog is electrically separate from the side running rails - which are also having to be separate from each other.

Being a little concerned about the issue of short circuits, I thought about if for a while and decided the simplest thing would be to wire a light bulb into a circuit with the points.  The photo below probably explains it better than I can with words:





Simply power from a 12v source to the light, then to the RH rail.  The other rail connected to the other terminal on the power source.  If the light is on, then the point isn't gapped.  Find all the bits I missed (which turns out to be more than I thought or hoped) and clean up the various over solders and missing gaps - usually where I hadn't cut all the copper away cleanly - until the light goes out.  Move one wire to the frog and see if it goes on with a feed to either outside rail.  If not, then success.

Tonight I have, in between watching TV, checked two of the 6.  At this rate, I will have them all done by the weekend, at which point I will trial fit them on the layout and make sure the frog rails aren't touching anything they shouldn't.  Then the TOU saga begins in earnest!  

LNWR Horse Box - Paint update

Sorry about the poor photo - you should have seen the others! - but it shows where I am at with this kit.  The roof is bowed - I seem to have managed to muck it up after fitting and it has flattened out where the square vents are.  It is more noticeable in the photo than normal but given how long it has been gestating and how much my skill level has improved since then, I figure it will serve.

Paint is the Precision version of LNWR Plum.  Sources vary as to what colour this vehicle should be so I have pleased my self with this.  The couple of photos I took with a flash actually showed it is quite thin in parts so I suspect it may need redoing with an airbrush in due course.  There is still the matter of lining and so forth but this will have to wait for another day.  Once all is complete, I will add the brake cylinder which will be a left over one from an NGS kit.

Comments, as always, are welcome either on the blog (which is a hassle I know) or via email.

Organising

One of the advantages of coming to Brisbane is it has given me the opportunity to organise most of my collection and make some plans for the next couple of months.

I brought down the majority of the stuff I had in Longreach - some which is now, a few days later, heading back - so I could put it all together and get some sense of where I was at with providing for the various interests I have.  As it turns out, I needed both more time and more room to do this!

The first thing I learnt is, I don't have enough stock boxes to make a coherent plan.  My ideal situation is to have things organised by region and era - particularly with coaching stock as this has a greater impact on setting the scene than goods stock does - but I found I was about 4 storage trays short of doing this effectively.  On one hand, this is annoying as it means I will have to get the materials and make some more, but on the other hand it is useful to know before the big move so I can budget for this stuff in advance.

The second thing I learnt is trying to organise goods vehicles is a bit of a mugs game.  In the end I am putting them in three categories - fitted, unfitted and shunting.  The last is those wagons which are fitted for hands off shunting.  My present system is to use the Peco couplings, the lifting arms and electromagnets, but having tried DGs I am a bit of a convert so I can see a mass re-fitting program taking shape which will probably see all the Peco wagons progressively be replaced with Farish ones.  This has its benefits as the Farish ones are better looking and more accurate.  The down side is replacing 60 wagons!  There will be a time when both are being used I am sure.

Lastly I was able to gather up all my BR Blue era locos (along with the 04 Trams) with a view to fitting them all with chips for DCC operation.  There are quite a few to do - some, like the 37, are plug and play.  Others, like the Poole Farish and most of my 73s are not so this will be an adventure.  First thing is to work out which chips to use.  So research coming up.

AMMC - 2011

The 8th Annual British Railway Modellers of Australia (Queensland) Modelling Competition took place on Thursday 22nd of September this year and I made the 1200km journey (with wife and kids) the day before - partly to enter and partly to return the 3 trophies I won in 2010.  I was in-eligible for these 3 categories this year and, while I was keen to enter the remaining 4, in the end I was only able to get organised for 2 - the Diorama and the Scratch Built Line Side Structure.

As you can see from the photo, my cattle dock was judged the winner in the Line Side Structure and the diorama which I made for the N Gauge Forum was successful in the Diorama section.  Both of these categories were well represented this year after both failing to have enough entries last year. 

I was unsuccessful in the main prize - the Martin Astle Memorial Trophy for Best Model which was awarded to a 7mm model of 4472 in A1 condition.  There is, however, next year!

GER Mac K - Part I

My efforts for this evening.  Not the traction engine - it has been on blogs before.  No, the Masterclass Models GE/LNER Mac K on which it is sat.  Unfortunately, I don't have any buffers or these would have been included.  As you can see, one of the DG's is fitted - the latch end.  I haven't put the bar end on yet.

I purchased this kit from Shop 2 simply because it is a GE kit.  When I got it, I had a look at the etch and thought gloat box for a bit.  Tonight however I got it out because my original plan for the evening, building a chassis to go under an NGS MR van kit, wasn't going to happen because I have a 9' chassis and I need a 10' Peco replacement.  So I had an evening with modelling mojo present and nothing to do...

A bit of a rummage round presented either the above or the pair of LNER Toad E's I have, also for the W&U collection.  I have a quick look at the destructions for the Mac K and decided it wasn't all that bad and so sallied forth.  The picture above is the accumulation of 2 hours solid work - only one cup of tea was harmed in the making of the model.

The destructions suggest fitting DGs is interesting.  Certainly you can see how I have bent it upwards but it couples and uncouples from the test wagon so it can stay that way.  I folded up the mounting plate behind the buffer beam and then filed a bit off the buffer beam down to the mounting plate before putting the DG on, having cut the mounting bit on the DG quite thin. 

The traction engine is the Fleetline/Skytrek one, minus the roof (Trevor the Traction Engine doesn't have a roof - he also maybe a different model but Rule 1 and all that!).

All quite - well kind of

Work has gotten in the way of hobbies of late - it being the time of the year that my Yr 12 stuff has to be sorted out and sent away for verification.  Coupled with kids who aren't sleeping well, there isn't a lot of modelling mojo going around.

In an effort to try and do something, I tidied my work bench (Amity suggested I should take a before and after picture and blog that but I don't think there is much difference between the two - it is more organised chaos rather than merely chaos when it is tidy!) and did some pottering.  Nothing worth photographing but this is what has happened:

DGs have started to be fitted to the Fruit Van train which is destined to be hauled by either a BR J70 or a Cl 04 when Elm Road is finally built, early next year.

The treads on the Cartic 4 are half done.  Not a fan of stainless steel, no matter how much nicer it might look compared with n/s.  I think the n/s would have been better as it would have been soldered into place rather than glued - and with less bubbles.  Definately need cars for this first one!

A perliminary coat of paint has been applied to the LNWR Horsebox.

So not much for the best part of a week.  I must really get stuck in and get a couple of things finished prior to next week - we are going to Brisbane for the BRMA(Q) AMMC.  Hopefully I can manage to snare a couple of prizes - Scratch built lineside structure (the Cattle Dock) and Diorama (the Cattle Dock again - but this time with art around it as previously shown!).

LNWR Horse Box - Update

Way back in August 2010 I blogged about building the PC Models shoot down of the D436 LNWR Horsebox as sold by Ultima.  Some of you may have found this blog because Alan linked to it from the relevant page in the catalogue.

Well, progress didn't get beyond what I showed back then, because I was trying to figure out a roof (and what the roof should look like) and the detail on the chassis.  I was also wondering how to fix the errors I had made in folding the chassis as it didn't run square.

Having learnt a lot in the last 12 months, the box with the model in it, made it back to the top of the UFO pile and, given that I have been on a bit of a Pre-Grouping build kick recently, I took another look.  I had managed to pick up David Jenkinson's LNWR Carriages (Pendragon) which had a picture of 'box number 337 in it and a diagram number so Google was more useful with this information, showing me a couple of other kits from different manufactures in different scales.  As the roofs on all of these were the same they were either a) correct or b) working off the same incorrect drawings.  I figured since it is almost 90 years since the LNWR became part of the LMS and over 60 years since these were running in LMS livery, I feel that the chances of anyone "knowing" it is wrong assuming b) above are slim so I went for it.

As it happens, having seen the pictures of the completed models, I learnt the vents were square.  I was wondering how I was going to model these (having assumed the etch supplied only flat bits and the vents would be castings - not supplied) I had another look at the etch and found they were fold ups needing me to only find a scrap bit of etch to put a lid on.

Further fettling of the chassis resulted in it getting worse, not better.  I was still no closer to working out how to do the axle boxes and springs but discovered I could get these via Ultima - I don't think Alan had them 14 months ago when I ordered the kit.  I decided in the end to cut my loses and used a 2mm SA etched bogie, cut in half and fiddled around to the point where the thing runs square rather than crabbing - it isn't spot on when you look at photos but given that it wasn't going to look spot on anyway, I think practicality trumps look in this case.

So an updated photo of the first one - armed with my learning on this, I am going to organise a second which, hopefully, I will do a much better job on.    I have yet to work out a paint job - LNWR plum, "quick brown" or LMS crimson.