workbench update

Not trains

A bit quiet on the blogging front, but not for lack of progress...

Yes after a brief jaunt down to Christchurch for a quick holiday, I am back and the coffee table has once again succumbed to glue bottles and paint tins and little bits of cardboard. Mrs A is very tolerant!

Wildcat

The Wildcat that I have been quietly working away on has now been completed. I gave it a good spray of silver Tamiya paint, then left it alone for a month. The other day I decided to test out Indian Ink for weathering and reached for the Wildcat. I mixed up a weak mix of ink and isopropyl alcohol and washed it on the model. This nicely brought out the panel lines. Then I used the dregs to loosen up some dried up paint on the bottom of my paint tray and washed that on too. Finally I did a third wash of Indian Ink and IPA, but this time something interesting happened. The IPA loosed up the acrylic paint mix from before, and when rubbed with a finger tip, it went a...

Experimenting with laser cut bricks

A slight diversion today as I experiment with making laser cut bricks.

Laser cutters are great at cutting things out. Especially square things, and things with sharp edges. I've tried making bricks and other textures on the laser cutter before, however the width of the beam is so incredibly fine that the mortar lines are impossible to paint.

So today I experimented instead with the "raster 3d" setting on my laser cutter, which takes in an image, and everything black is cut at 100%, and white is cut at 0%, and greys are cut at varying power levels.

By loading in a brick pattern like so:

... and choosing the raster 3d setting in Visicut, I managed to cut some nicely textured bricks.

I tried many different techniques to detail them, but this one works the be...

Paper mache time

Mt Adams lurches back into high gear again...

Trackwork

Believe it or not but the double crossover is now complete!

I've cut the electrical gaps in the right (I hope) places, and it passes the multimeter tests. All that is left is to solder on the the throw bars and glue it down!

Fascia

After deciding to make the fascias after doing the scenery, I proceeded to change my mind and make them first. With so many tunnels though, I needed a way of getting inside them to clean track, rescue trains, etc. So I needed some little access panels. Now I could painstakingly cut them out by hand, however with a high power laser sitting in town, it was obvious which way I would go! So last Friday I popped down w...

Double crossover progress

Mt Adams continues...

Progress may have slowed, but I'm still moving forward. My double scissor crossover has had a few more rails soldered in place. It is slow fiddly work, but as long as I measure everything five times and cut very carefully... well so far no mistakes.

That said, I have had to desolder a few rails and file off a bit more to make point blades sit nicely, but that is ok. So to sum up...

Point blades: 4/8 made. Check rails: 3/8 made. Diamond rails: 1/4 made. Diamond check rails: 0/4 made.

More trackwork

Progress in Utrainia has shuddered to a virtual standstill, as the work/life balance takes a beating...

A major new contract this last week with some very tight deadlines has seen Utrainia take a backseat this week. In fact for most of the week Mt Adams has sat forlorn on the table waiting for me to give it some attention. Finally the last couple of nights I've managed to dedicate a few hours. This week (month?) the focus is on the last remaining trackwork, which involves making a double crossover. This:

Yikes. First step as ever is to print out the track plan and stick sleepers on to it. Then I spent about 3 weeks staring at it trying to work out the courage. And finally earlier this week I started cutting rail. I've started with the outside rails first, then...

Making tunnels

Tunnel building time here at Mount Adams this weekend...

Took a little bit of a breather this weekend while I pondered the next steps on my mini railway. I decided that tunnels were fairly high up on the list, as once scenery is in, it is too late to think about tunnels. So... I designed a tunnel mouth on Inkscape to laser cut, and thought a bit about the inside of the tunnel. Normally I just leave them plain, but since the tunnels are quite short and visible on this railway, it might be nice to have the insides looking like a proper tunnel.

So I laser cut some templates out of more old cereal boxes and started cutting out polystyrene. After a few false starts, here is my technique:

1) Rip some dimensional polystyene

Using Mr Hotwire 4000 and a guide rail, I "ripped" a sheet of polystyrene foam down to 40x70mm lengths.

...