workbench update

Raparapa trackwork completed

Last time I talked about the Raparapa trackwork was back in November, when I posted a nice photo of the crossover I was building. Well since then much has been going on.

Soon after the trackwork had been constructed, the maintenance teams moved into Raparapa and quickly ripped out the old track.

It then sat like that for some time, as wedding planning took priority. However Rachel was a little dismayed that her beloved town of Raparapa no longer had a functioning railway station, and so time was found late in November to install the new trackwork.

First I cleaned out all the old ballast and carefully cut the rails to the right lengths:

Adding lights to buildings

Three weeks since my last update, however all is not quiet in Utrainia. Over Christmas lots of new items were acquired, among them a pair of rail-busses, a land rover, many dozens of people, and some buildings and building supplies. I look forward to adding these to the railway.

Before Christmas however, I spent some time adding lights to Raparapa. I wanted the buildings to be illuminated, but I wanted the buildings to still be removable. To achieve this I came up with a cunning scheme using little L brackets made from metal, and tiny wee disc magnets that attach onto plates. The brackets and plates look like this:

The L brackets attach onto the walls of the buildings a small distance off the floor level. The plates are on the ground, and the magnets go in between, making ...

NS1100 Del Prado gains some couplings

A quick update on my Del Prado loco from the Netherlands (not Norway as I originally thought... they both start with N!)

We have couplings!

I differed from the original model here a little by attaching the buffer beams and couplings to the bogies, but apparently this is how the real locos did it too, so really, I'm making things more realistic! I did it this way as there just wasn't room to have them mounted to the body and still have the bogies rotate.

Fitting the couplings was easy enough, I just used my trusty razor saw to cut out a box, filed it to size, and fitted a coupling. A lump of styrene on the top helps secure things. Everything was glued together with Polyzap, since the coupler boxes are some kind of slipper engineering plastic and are hard to g...

Rachel's Building gets a proper sign

When I was building "Rachel's Building" for Raparapa, I didn't have time to make a proper sign for the building front and instead just stuck on a sheet of paper!

Of course a girl like Rachel deserves a far better sign, so today I did something about it.

I started by making up a sign in Inkscape and then exporting it as a DXF file. I imported this into Meshcam and turned it into a 3d shape. I then converted it into some GCODE, a process that took about 10 minutes of pure number crunching.

Then I made up a small mold from some styrene and filled it with resin. I let this set, cleaned it up, and loaded it into my CNC machine. I set the origin to the corner, loaded in a 0.1mm engraving bit, and clicked GO.

...

Del Prado NS1100 nearly finished

Progress continues on my Del Prado motorization project. It's nearly finished!

Adding Weight

I was a bit worried that the poor thing, with only one motor bogie, wouldn't be able to pull much. So I decided to add some weight. First step was to make up a sacrificial master out of polystyrene. With some careful trimming and cutting, I soon had a weight that fitted nice and snugly over the gearbox and universal.

Polystyrene isn't known for its weighty properties, so I needed to convert it into something a little heavier. My old stand by, white metal, sounded like just the trick. So I made up a mold from some scraps and mixed up some clay and water to make a mold. Here is my fairly crude mold, with the sacrificial po...

Del Prado NS1100 progress

Progress continues on my Del Prado motorisation project. Today I made up two bogies.

Unpowered bogie

Having settled on only one powered bogie, I decided to tackle the unpowered first. Here is the original del Prado bogie. The wheels were interesting, they sort of rotate, and by that I mean the axles are jammed up solid, but the wheels are such a loose fit on the axles that they still rotate. Not ideal!

So out came the chompers and I stripped the bogies down to just their side frames, which seem quite reasonable. A quick brush with the file to clean them up and we're left with: