workbench update

Ranuska gets a beach!

After months of inactivity on Ranuska, I decided to take a break from bathroom renovations and dedicate a bit of time on a rainy weekend afternoon to finishing off Ranuska. The single largest gap in Ranuska? No sea!

So wasting no time I got stuck in. I dug out my black paint and gave all the deep water areas a good coat of black, with just the tiniest hint of dark blue mixed through. Around the beach I painted the same sand colour (Resene Sandcastle) down onto the ocean area, then feathered it into light blue. Looking at photos from tropical paradises, the water is so clear that the transition from beach to sea barely even changes colour.

Around the rocks I mixed up a thin wash of brown (Resene Sambuka) and muddied up the black around the rocks, then washed the bottom inch of so of the rocks with the brown. Later I did the lower half inch or so of the rocks with a dilute black wash. Being plaster the rocks just suck up the colour and look wonderfully worn and...

The birthday garden shed

It was my birthday earlier this month, which meant a trip down to Christchurch to see family. Naturally the thought of spending a week away from my modelling bench terrifies me, so I stuffed a few bare essentials and some styrene strips into the suitcase, hoping to get a few days modelling in while down there.

Fresh on my mind was a great post about scratchbuilding some delightful OO scale garden sheds from cardboard and paper, and while down in Christchurch I bought some assorted 1960s Model Railroader magazines. While the adverts have aged ("Millionaire's house, $2.49"), the actual articles are still gold. The first magazine I opened had a 10 page E.L.Moore article, full of plans and inspiration. Each issue has a "dollar model" article ideal for scratch building.

NS 1100 gets a new motor

My Del Prado plastic magazine-loco kitbashing continues...

A long while ago I bought a bunch of motors on eBay, with the intention of using them for various loco motorisation projects. Most were quite small, however one was big and beefy with good low speed characteristics, and I thought that would be ideal for re-motorising my Del Prado NS 1100 loco.

I had previously used a not-very-amazing Life-Like motor and chassis to power the model, however the Life-Like motor was showing its age. It's bit, open sided, and only 3 pole, so it just didn't give the kind of low-speed performance I wanted from my model. Here is what it looked like:

Now for some reason I decided to replace the motor yesterday. First problem is that the repl...

Breda LRV - Painting and weights

Work continues on my Breda LRV project...

With the sides made and the chassis mostly done, attention turned to detailing the bodies. I needed some rooftop detail, and since the roofs are what you normally see of model trains, I wanted something reasonably detailed. Knowing I couldn't make anything that detailed from scratch, I turned to my parts box to see what I could scrounge:

The grey bit on the rear shell is a small air conditioning spare part from a US loco. The black bit is a winterisation hatch from another American loco. The smaller cream part is a chopped down casting of a roof top air conditioner from a series 24 Japanese coach, while the two large cream parts are duplicated A/C units from a Japanese Yamanote line train...

Breda LRV - Body, bogies and chassis

I can't remember the reason, but a while back I decided to make a model of a Breda LRV, from the San Francisco Muni light rail network. I rode on one of these when I first visited America, from underground out to the beach. They are an interesting vehicle, running on both underground subway-style lines, and running on the street.

So they have unusual features for a train, like indicators and side mirrors. They also have a high level floor for subway platforms, yet once they emerge into daylight and start running on the street, steps down to street level magically appear inside the doors.

Ballast and platforms down

Tonight was Girl's Night Out for Mrs A, so a great opportunity to get some more work done on my fiddle yard module.

On Friday I'd dyed a batch of chinchilla sand with a watery mix of Resene Sandcastle and Gravel colours and left it in the sun all day to dry, stirring occasionally so it didn't all clump together. After putting it through a tea strainer and a fine sieve to remove the larger lumps, I had a nice batch of grey ballast ready to use.

(Chinchilla sand is apparently a fine white sand that your pet chinchilla bathes in, easily found online or at any pet store. The great thing about it is that it very fine and uncoloured, and being a natural product it isn't all a uniform size, so it works very well for N scale scenery. I highly recommend getting some.)

Before I could ballast though I needed to affix the platforms. I made some careful measurements and then made up a spacing template on the computer. With one of...