workbench update

Colouring Ranuska

Ranuska hasn't received a whole lot of attention lately, packing up the house has instead taken most of my weekend time. However I've managed to find a few hours here and there to keep advancing Ranuska.

Ballasting

With the faulty point repaired, I decided it was time to do some ballasting. I used my trusty chinchilla dust and tinted it grey. Then I sieved it through a tea strainer and applied it in the usual manner. It's nice and seems to look pretty good.

Retaining wall

Around the back of Ranuska there is a sea wall next to the track. I used some Tomix plastic retaining wall sheets that I joined into one long sheet and then painted concrete colour. A wash with some dilute dirty grey helped bring out some of the relief, though I think a heavier wash is sti...

Weekend progress on Ranuska

First on the workbench this weekend was to get one of the points operating correctly. It turns out that building very tight radius points that operate well is quite a difficult task.

One of my points is located right at the mouth of the tunnel, making it fiddly to work on. It's also quite a tight radius and I was having trouble with the wheels jumping off the track, so the engineering department was called in to take a look.

The foreman first decided to take off one of the point blades and grind it down to a sharper point. This went well until some of the grinding equipment (a piece of sandpaper) snagged the point and bent it into a U shape! Panel beating efforts were unsuccessful. So a new point blade was duly fabricated.

The foreman then noticed that the rebate in the outer track was too big and the point blade wasn't lining up correctly. The maintenance window was extended and the workers set about correcting this. First the rail was built up using solder and...

Ranuska tunnel taking shape

Ranuska has been slowly ticking along. The tunnel has been the focus of my attention lately.

First port of call was to get the track into place. Thanks to my chopper I quickly made up the sleepers. A few test fits later and I glued the track down for good with 24 hour Araldite – 24 hours so that I had some time to get everything lined up before the glue went off. Once that was set I attacked the track with dark gray undercoat.

Now I had the track sorted, it was time to get the tunnel into place.

Before I put the tunnel walls in place, I need to line the inside of the tunnel. I did this with some well-expired Scultamold, that it turns out never set. I also added some small wood brackets to mount the tunnel to.

A tidy workbench

I very nearly forgot to post the most exciting part of yesterday's progress: a clean workbench!

Now everything is in its place. Even the floor is clean, and some of the secondary tables are looking pretty organised too. I've even found a cubbyhole for my project trays.

As for the meths, that is for the shellac. Rachel was curious how I, a mere guy, had managed to get shellac, supposedly the greatest thing in fingernail technology ever seen and therefore far too cool for me. I explained that I made it, from female lac beetle secretion, mixed with meths. That is the last time Rachel ever wears shellac nail polish!

The tube contraption on the desk is a slice of mailing tube with a base stuck on, ready to become my paintbrush holder. I dipped both ends in shellac to stop...

Ranuska trackwork finished?

After yesterday's amazing effort, I was pretty sure I could knock off the rest of the trackwork today. And indeed I did.

First up was laying the regular track between points; this wasn't too complicated, just a bit fiddly making the outer and inner loops an even gauge. Once that was done I set about laying the inner rails around the beach area:

These are slightly smaller rails that sit inside the regular track. I will fill between the tracks with DAS and scribe in cobblestones. By having the smaller rails on the inside I won't have to worry about keeping the DAS out of the flangeways, and it'll look more like tram track too.

Once that was done, I did an electrical test. This showed up numerous shorts. Each one had to be tracked down and fixed. After half an hour of f...

Ranuska trackwork

Work continues on Ranuska, albeit rather slowly. Somehow the entire week just disappeared in a cloud of work. Yesterday however I managed to squeeze in half an hour to battle once again with Templot; against all odds however I managed to achieve the right combinations of hot keys to get my reverse transition curves all lined up, the spacing between sidings consistent, and the forth turnout into the right place.

Then I printed out the track plan on 9 sheets of paper, stuck them together, and started filing point blades.

Today I got well stuck into it, and by the end of the day I had soldered up four turnouts, and a good deal of the track in between too! I've not run out of blank PCB to mill into sleepers, so that will complicate things somewhat. Perhaps it's an omen, a subtle suggestion that I should instead clean the garage tomorrow, since I spent half an hour searching high and low for my track gauge in there today.

Anyway, here is the current state of the trac...