The Crossing Hut

Well, after much delay, the replacement parts for my laser cutter have finally arrived. It seems the driver board took three return trips between Moscow and NZ before finally landing in the right place. How frustrating! Once it arrived though I wasted no time in getting it all set up and recalibrated – if anything, I think it cuts better now.

Here it is cutting out the parts for an HO loco:

Unfortunately my laptop went flat halfway through, hence the large charred spot!

Having proven it worked, I wasted no time in building something. I decided a fun little project would be a Soviet style crossing hut. At least I assume that is what it is. Here is the inspiration:

Introducing the Snake Train

My LRV is coming to a close, so I decided to tackle something different. In my stash I had a couple of B-Train Shorty Izukyu Series 8000 kits, which are a fairly generic looking fictitious commuter train, used as a backdrop for some kind of Japanese teenage drama. Anyway, they're pretty cheap to get hold of, and ripe for modifying.

I figured that with a little work, I could turn these into an interesting commuter train. I thought perhaps some flexible gangway connections, and changing it to use Jacob's bogies would make it interesting.

I started off by assembling a body, but leaving the floor off.  A replacement chassis/floor was easily made up from some 1mm styrene. The end-most bogies I mounted using the existing lugs on the bogie. The pivoting Jacob's ...

Breda LRV - couplings

Work continues on my Breda LRV project ...

My LRV is very nearly finished. One thing I felt it was missing were some couplings. I had some Kato 11-704 couplers which are just the right style for a light rail vehicle. I very carefully built up some supports for them out of styrene, only to discover the they needed to be lower. So I made them lower to clear the body, only to find they now fouled the rail..!! So I did some more tweaking, in the end I just drilled a small hole and used an M1.4 self tapping screw to hold it in place. Works really well! Those 1.4mm screws are very handy, I bought a 200 of them off eBay for a fiver.

And the finished result:

A toolbox

Mrs A is very generous. She happily lets me spread my tools and projects out all over the coffee table with nary a complaint. On two conditions: as long as there is a space for her tea cup, and whenever we are having guests over, I release the coffee table from it's workshop duties.

It occurred to me during one of these tidying jobs that I spend a lot of time gathering up my tools and carrying them back to the train room. What I needed was a toolbox.

So I tried out a few ideas, asked google for some inspiration, thought about laser cutting something, etc etc, but in the end I just put all my tools on a piece of paper and rearranged them till they were nicely grouped. Then I took the measurements, drew up a quick plan and headed out to the garage.

I chopped up a few bits of pine, ply, and MDF and after a bit of planing, and a bit of sanding, I came up with this:

Fun with lasers - pallets

Something lasers are very good at is cutting out fine details. I've been trying a few little experiments to see what I can and can't do. One fun little project was to make up some pallets:

These are straight off the laser with no paint, though the singed look is remarkably realistic, and the dark edges give them good depth. These are made as a lamination of two pieces of cardboard; thicker card for the base, and thinner card for the top. Simply take the two squares, glue them at right angles, then once dry use a sharp knife to cut along half-etched cutting guides. Four cuts later and you a perfect shipping pallet.

Breda LRV - Decals

Work continues on my Breda LRV project ...

One of the final things to do on my LRV is to decal it. This meant printing some custom decals. Luckily Luap had given me a sheet of clear decal paper to try out.

First step was to get my printer working. That involved a lot of cleaning, replacement ink cartridges, aligning print heads, etc etc. Quite a palaver! It took a while to find the right settings to print on the decal paper, in fact I'm still not sure I worked it out. Perhaps it's just the printer, but I ended up with some very slight smudging/streaking, meaning my nice crisp black lines weren't that crisp. You can see how the black is kind of "balling", and vertical lines are quite fuzzy. Also note all the little black specs of ink over the page! Quite a dirty printer!