Oops - how did a year go by so quickly?

No the decorating didn't take a year. It did take longer than expected. I discovered the hard way that painting over blue with magnolia requires a LOT of coats unless you undercoat... Anyway, it is all finished and the room can be worked in again.

Enthusiasm waned because that $£#% chassis wouldn't work reliably. Whenever I thought it was quartered,a wheel would slip. Needless to say it ended up in a box in disgust.


Last year I did build some baseboards aimed at a new layout and then a eureka moment happened. A very clever man in the 3mm Society developed a method to punch the Society finescale wheels with a square hole so that quartering problems go away. It took me all of 5 minutes to find my wheels, pack them up, and send them off.

As soon as they were back, they were onto the engine and it still ran poorly. Very depressing and back in the box in more disgust.

New year, new resolution and I'm going to fix it. The bench was cleared tonight and the engine dismantled, various alignments checked, decisions made where washers should go to space the wheels, pick-ups adjusted and.... it just staggered along.

I've been doing all this work on the Bachrus Saddles as I don't have a layout but I popped the engine directly onto the track and it just ran straight off the end.

Out with the vernier and a closer examination of the saddles showed there's a difference between the top and bottom measurements. I had assumed the dimensions would be the same so when it was tight on the track it would be spot on for the wheels. No, the gap is wider at the top so when I set them tight on the track they were so wide there was very little contact with the loco wheels. Set them in by 0.5mm and it just works...

Maybe now we will see some proper progress.

Temporary Pause in Modeling

I know I haven't posted for a while. I should have because there has been progress. I have made the quartering work on the Webb Coal Tank and I did spend a great day at Narrow Gauge South operating Richard Holder's new exhibition layout - Clydach Railway.

However, the time has finally come. I am going to redecorate the railway room. I have given myself a week to do it but the idea of removing all the tools, kits, books, paints, building materials is actually quite daunting.

My wife reminded me that the curtains in the room were acquired with our first house 25 years ago and we don't know how old they were then. I painted the room not that long after moving in 22 years ago. It's long overdue for some TLC.

Normal operations will resume later.

Progress on quartering

Yesterday was Abingdon Show. I'm not sure how they did. There were plenty of people queuing to get in right at the beginning but it never got to being heaving, which is actually a good thing.

I was pleased with Mospick Halt which ran well all day. One nice lady described as lovely and clean. That just makes me want to make it dirtier :-)

Now the show is over and there are no more exhibition bookings it is time to make some real progress on 3mm locos. As I mentioned before it looked like the quartering was out on the Watford Tank. I broke the superglue holding the wheels on and fiddled until I got it right. I've also made a piece of test track for the rolling road and it works! Just having a flat piece of track for the rolling road to sit on makes a huge difference.

All I have to do now is cure why it waddles like a duck.

Abingdon Show and Mospick Halt

It's March so it must be Abingdon show. It's at the White Horse Leisure Centre and I can see it from my lab at Sophos. I'm taking Mospick Halt and a friend from Oxford Club is coming to help operate. Well actually he will probably operate whilst I wander round trying not to spend money.

I've finished 'Joan'. I need to find some etched nameplates for both locos and then they will be done, though maybe a coat of varnish won't go amiss.

If you come to the show then do come and say hello. I'd tell you the stand number but I seem to have mislaid the paperwork...

Chassis Building Part 37465

I was determined that I would build an engine in 3mm. Surely it can't be that hard! I've talked before about building a chassis and I thought I had it cracked when I got to adding the wire pickups. I put in on the stretch of track that is supposed to be a layout and it stuttered along so I thought it would bed in. It didn't.

I decided it was time to invest in a rolling road. Gave the nice people at Finney and Smith some dosh and I have the rolling road (told her indoors it was a Valentines present from her to me....).

The rolling road is great but all it confirmed is that the chassis runs well in one direction but doesn't go at all in the other and if it does go, it uses twice as much current and the motor gets hot.

I think you can see the problem in the picture. The other side of the engine has the cranks perfectly horizontally in line. This side is definitely not 90 degrees, more like 85 degrees or less.

Now I have to break all the superglue that holds it together and see if I can correct it.

BTW I didn't have any track to hand so I held the rolling road together with brass tube and Royal Mail elastic bands - simplicity itself.

Test Track on Chertonwell

Yesterday was Risex 2010 and we were exhibiting Chertonwell. It's a nice show with good mix of layouts, traders and demonstrations. Phil Parker popped in and commented on the test track we have on Chertonwell so I thought I would say how we did it. He has beaten me to an actual blog on the subject here.

On Chertonwell we run a lot of trains. Normally there will be 10 at any one time. Over a day that amounts to some 70 train hours of continuous running. As a result they can get dirty and need a good clean.

We decided that somewhere to clean engines would be good. What I did was take a piece of chipboard which was cut in two and had the corners cut off. I edged it so that items couldn't roll off - didn't stop us losing a spring yesteday which escaped whilst dismantling a loco. The board is hinged down the middle, In the picture you can see the timber in the centre of the board with hinges on top so it folds flat.

I glued settrack to it so I didn't have to fight the springing of flexitrack and the wires go to two banana sockets. Just over on the right you can see the flexible wiring to allow the board to close. The board bolts to the layout when in use by the coach bolt whose wing nut can be seen at the rear. The layout has a separate controller built in, the controls being to the left of the photo.

We literally bolt in on and plug in two banana connectors and it's ready to go. The only addition since first use is a resisitor that allow the current flow to the loco to be measured. Very useful for seeing whether any current is actually flowing.

It's a really useful feature of the layout and we would be lost without it.

Wiring Woes

After the last (and first) outing of Mospick Halt I decided I should put a power LED visible somewhere along with the short LED. The controller has a short LED on it so all I needed to do was unsolder it and run wires up to the control panel area.

The power LED was equally easy, find an LED, use good old Ohms Law to determine a suitable resistor, wire them to the power feed, a quick test and put the layout away.

The completion of the next engine meant a quick run was in order. Unfortunately what I discovered was the power LED flashes when the engine is running in one direction and is completely off when the engine runs in the other direction. Not only does the LED flash but the engine slows down gently instead of suddenly when the controller was turned off. I had done something seriously wrong.

In the end it was quite simple. I had wired one side of the LED to the power bus on the layout but the other side got wired to one of the track output wires. I had used confusing terminology under the layout. All the wires go to tag strips that are labeled but my choice of names was not good!

I took the opportunity to separate out the lights on the layout onto their own switch. Previously they were on all the time but they will be hardly noticed at exhibitions so it made sense to be able to turn them off and save carbon emissions somewhere.