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Mr Hot Wire 4000

A slight detour from the regular program today as I make a new hot wire cutter...

After the untimely demise of my hot wire cutter yesterday, I decided that making a replacement was a fairly high priority. So while waiting for slow running test scripts to finish I scribbled up a quick plan on Inkscape for my new cutter:

Then once work was over I took a trip down to the Masterton Maker Crate where we proceeded to cut out my design from a sheet 3mm MDF on their 80W laser cutter (versus my 3W one). Cutting MDF sure is smokey work, perhaps it is just as well mine can't cut MDF as the sticky tar-like smoke goes everywhere.

Snap goes the hot wire!

A little bit more progress on Mt Adams...

I cut out another length and a bit of incline today. The incline is now more than 120mm high, and has exceeded the height of my rather rough & ready hot wire machine.

Added to that, I was part way through cutting out the zig zags when with a ping, the hot wire itself snapped! So before I can incline any more polystyrene, I am going to have to repair it.

Meanwhile, in the aero dept...

Seems some of the undercarriage has gone missing, so I patched up the openings with some sty...

Making inclines

A small but useful bit of progress on my latest module...

The Mt Adams Railway is, surprisingly enough, a mountain railway. That means there are grades. In the past I have used Woodland Scenics incline sets, which are very good for quickly building up gently inclining railway grades. The problem is, they aren't sold in Masterton. I also have a lot of spare polystyrene, and a hot wire cutter. So why not make my own?

So I clamped my hot wire cutter in my WorkMate portable workbench, and marked out a 1 in 22 grade on a piece of polystyrene with a piece of masking tape. Then I carefully cut along the line on my cutter, making sure it was all nice and square. The masking tape makes it easy to cut straight as it acts like a ruler, stopping the wire from wandering too much.

Then I cut out a zig zag template on my laser cutter:

Mt Adams Railway benchwork progress

Progress continues on my latest module...

Today I did a little more on my new module. The polystyrene foam had glued up nicely overnight, so I cut out some 7mm ply for the station base. I cut some beading to size to hold it in place along the front edges, and for the sides against the foam I cut some thin MDF to size.

This nicely finishes off the polystyrene, so there are no rough edges to catch and start spreading little staticky white beads everywhere!

While I was at it, I glued some thick LVL to the insid...

New module!

Exciting news from the Utraina Dept of Interior Development: at long last, a new module is being built!

It seems like forever since I last built a module for Utriania; in fact, I started Ranuska back in Janurary, 2014! Ranuska took a long time to get built, and since then I have suffered a bit from analysis paralysis, as I wondered what my next module should look like, how it would fit in to my mix of large scale railroading (earlier modules) and light rail & trams (Ranuska), what the track plan should be, etc etc. Basically I wanted my next module to be perfect, especially if it was going to take 2 years to make again!

But then I was browsing JNS forum one night and came across an amazing Hakone Tozan themed micro railway:

Model Railway Laboratory

Lately I've been beavering away on a project to add wireless remote control to some of my trains. It is a fairly complex project, the hope though is that by having wireless controllers in each loco, with a battery on board, I can alleviate a few pet modelling peeves of mine:

Unreliable running on dirty track, uneven track, dusty track, track that hasn't been cleaned in the last 30 seconds... in short, anything that Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself hasn't laid! Costly DCC decoders; DCC decoders that I can't reprogram or tweak to suit my needs; DCC decoders that only have 1 way communication; Inability to mix DC and DCC on the same track; Poor slow speed running, on both DCC and DC.

So nothing too complex!! We'll see how far I get.

As part of this, I need a way of testing my code. My day job involves writing a lot of code, and writing a lot of code to test my code. Luckily for that we ha...