building

First track down on Mt Adams

Exciting news tonight on Mt Adams...

Yesterday I soldiered on with the cork and soon had a good covering of cork. I also started building the upper station base, using some nice chunky plywood. Heavy, relatively speaking, but very flat and strong.

While I was at it, I cut out an inspection hatch to make getting to the station point-work easier. Nothing worse than having a complicated track arrangement that I can't get to if anything needs tweaking.

I even lined it with some MDF. It will also help support the plywood base, so ...

Mt Adams marches on

Progress continues on Mt Adams...

Gluing on the inclines continued over the weekend and before long I had everything fixed down. Here it is part way through:

Tape measures, rolls of solder, stepper motors and scuba weights all lending a hand to keep things flat!

I did a test fit with the lower station and noticed that the east end of the loop had quite a sharp kink in it, whereas the west end flowed much more smoothly.

The more I looked at it, the more it bugged me. So tonight I printed out a new alignment and went abou...

Messy woodwork and the first turnout

With a newly repaired hot wire cutter, progress continues once again on Mt Adams...

Today I finished cutting out the inclines. Mr Hot Wire 4000 did a great job, effortlessly cutting things nice and square. By the time I finished though it looked like a polystyrene bomb had gone off in the garage:

Next on the list was another messy job: routing out the hand grips on the module ends.

The extra bits of wood are my guides, as freehanding a massive router is a recipe for disaster.

After a quick lick with sandpaper, here is t...

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: