Frustration!

I was hoping to get a good few hours of modelling in today...

Anne is away racing sidecars in South Wales, and apart from a couple of hours over lunch to visit some bee-keeping friends, I was expecting a day of peace and quiet to finally knock a couple of things off.  However I didn't anticipate the modelling bug striking my ten year old stepson so hard today.  A friend of ours gave him an old Tamiya kit for a Ducati 916 (the same bike that I have).  

So I've spent most of the morning and afternoon holding parts, cutting out components, and generally being a gopher!  Pretty much all of it he can do himself, but he does like the company :-)

Anyway, I'm not really complaining.  He's shown a skill and patience level far beyond what I was expecting.  This is the result so far:

It's about five inches long, and has exactly the same components as the real thing, so he's had me going "that's a crankcase breather, that's a steering damper" and so on...

For me, I was frustrated because:

(1) I forgot that I'd switched my mini-drill into reverse to do some burnishing, so the small drills I was using to make holes for handrail knobs on my J15 were going nowhere, and particularly after I snapped the drills...

(2) Whilst spraying track for my demo board, the paint well fell off the side of my airbrush, so that was a clearing up job...

(3) I took the Pug back out of its box where I put it for the loctite on the gearwheel to set, and found that I hadn't re-done as much to it as I thought.

Oh well, in reality, it's been a lovely day!  Hope that yours was as well...

East Suffolk Light

Over the weekend we visited Snape Maltings, in search of antiques shops.  Whilst driving around the area, and seeing the maltings itself, it reminded me so much of Iain Rice's East Suffolk Light Railway.

Many people talk about the influence of Pendon or Heckmondwike on their modelling, but for me the key influence was the ESLR.  That combination of artistic observation, eclectic rolling stock, and a history that bound it all together was superb in setting a time and a place.  It wasn't just a model railway, but a model *of* a railway, even if that was an entire fiction :-)

It would be great to know "where is it now?" and whether it was ever going to appear on the exhibition circuit again, but it simply seems to have sunk without trace.  Ah well, I think that I'll be digging out my old magazines for a dose of nostalgia tonight...

Inspiration

I had last week as holiday from work, and other than getting a lot more modelling done, we had the opportunity to just chill out and do things.  On Friday Anne and I went into London to spend the day going around galleries.

To Tate Britain first, and then on to the National Gallery.  I was, as usual, completely entranced with the Turners, and not just because "Rain, Steam and Speed" includes a Green With Rivets train.

It's because Turner is such an inspiration on how an impression of substance, colour and movement can be created with just a few strokes of a brush.  When it comes to scenic works on a model railway, I definitely want to try and be inspired to create the depth and emotion in the scenery that he does on canvas.  Hmmm.... I wonder if I should try art classes before painting my backscene.

Flymo

Scrap

Well, I couldn't get enough heat from a soldering iron into the gear wheel from my soldering iron.  It's only a 50W iron, and even cranked up to full, the heatsink of the brass gear was too great to stop it getting any hotter than uncomfortably warm.

So it was out with the Dremel, and the careful use of the slitting disc...  I had to make a series of cuts to first of all get the gearbox out, then to extract the gear wheel itself.  There wasn't enough room to cut it immediately in the middle and slide the axles out.

This picture shows the four parts that the axle wound up in!

From here, it was easy to use a gear puller to get the gear off the axle.  It was then cleaned up, and re-mounted on an axle stolen from my other Pug kit.  I must get some spares from Alan Gibson when I next see him at a show...

Flymo

Stuck

Or, to put it another way, does anyone know and effective method of removing Loctite 601?

In a burst of enthusiasm (okay, free time) on Friday and today, I finished off the Pug mechanically. This has not been without its trials and tribulations... In particular, it's only after assembling the whole thing that I found that there wasn't enough running clearance for the connecting rods to oscillate as needed between the original slidebars. Cue careful use of a dremel.

But the problem that I now have is this. Having followed the instructions to the letter, I tested everything out, and fixed the final drive gear on the driven axle with a tiny smear of superglue. This done, and suitably cured, I set it running on my rolling road.

After five minutes, the gentle whirr of the motor continues, but the rotation of the wheels stops. The gear wheel has slipped on the axle. It could actually be moved easily from side to side within the gear box.

So this time I reached for the Loctite 601, and intended to leave it to set firmly overnight. However, to avoid getting 601 where it wasn't needed, and knowing that it sets slowly, I applied some to the gear wheel with it in the middle of the gearbox and well away from anything else. I then intended to slide the gear wheel sideways until it meshed with the drive gear. You can tell what happened next...

Instant bonding. How come 601 never works this way with wheels? Whether it was because the axle was warm, I don't know, but what should have been fifteen minutes of adjustment room was changed into instantly setting solid with the gearwheel in the wrong place.

I've tried a little physical persuasion and it hasn't budged. The alternative to loosening the glue is to dismantle most of the chassis - not something I'm pleased with contemplating.

Can anyone suggest a non-destructive way of freeing off Loctite 601?

Flymo

Organisation

It's been a while since I was able to find the time for some modelling, but I have been getting things ready for a final assembly session on the Pug.  To say that I'm slightly nervous about the clearances of the coupling rods behind the crossheads is rather an understatement...

I've found that during building this kit, being organised has always been essential.  Witness the case of the missing brake hanger as an example.

So when it came down to taking the Pug apart for painting I didn't want to mess up all of the neatly and precisely matched components that I had prepared earlier.  During previous stages each bearing, axle and what had been washed with a code of coloured dots to indicate their position in the chassis.   Also critical was getting the correct thickness of  washers behind each wheel, as there is not a huge amount of space to fit the clearances to the connecting rods in, and free play must be kept to an absolute minimum.

I then used the back of an old business card to mark out the respective positions of all of the components. The picture below illustrates:

Of course, the knack now is to not knock them on the floor!

Files

I was chatting with Steve Duckworth a couple of weeks ago at Scalefour North. We were comparing various tools and techniques, and the ways that we can model better. I commented on a little change that I have made, and Steve suggested that it was worth sharing.

How many times have you picked up the wrong file? You know the situation - you're doing some heavy-duty removal of whitemetal from a wagon underframe, you reach into the box or rack and pick up your very best fine-cut needle file, usually only reserved for stroking the olive-skinned thighs of Sicilian virgins, and High Level Kits' hornblocks...

Usually you only notice about five milliseconds after you've used it... There is a cry of "oh dear" and an attempt using file-combs/heat/scalpel tips to remove the shiny stuff that you've just clagged the teeth up with. A waste of modelling time, and never fully successful. I did this several times until I hit on a simple approach that won't prevent it, but will make it much less likely.

This is the box that my needle files live in...

And this is how I tell them apart...

I picked up a bottle of Tippex correction fluid, and now the white-handled files are the ones for WHITEmetal (and solder, lead and other clagging materials)

A Black permanent market pen indicate the file is for Brass, as well as nickel silver, steel and so on.

And the yellow handled one? Not for gold, but my scriber. Because it *looks* like a needle file, I kept picking it up by mistake to file things, and used rats-tail files inadvertently as scribers...

As Aleksandr would say, "Simples!".