hakone tozan

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...

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: