New Workshop

I was ashamed to find out the other day that it has been nearly two years since I last posted anything on here so thought I had better start doing some updates and give our lone contributor of late (Mick) some support. Unlike some I have no plans to de-camp to the now commercially owned Warners Group RMweb. The standard of moderation there continues to be less than impartial and piss-poor in my opinion. There are plenty of good people on there and some excellent modelling of course, but I'm happy enough to stay 'local' and blog here.

Not much actual modelling has taken place over the past 18 months whilst the house has been subject to major alteration and improvement. About 5 years ago I blogged about my then new little workshop in a large broom cupboard under the stairs. Well that has now been handed back to the domestic authority and is now full of freezer, beer/wine cooler, vacuum cleaner and other assorted household paraphernalia.

I am now resident in what was the smallest bedroom before we converted the loft and the family all moved up a room size. I've fitted the room out myself, the cabinets were custom made for me to oddball sizes by a good customer from work.



View looking down the room towards the workbench with my portable workstation under the window for natural daylight. The position to the left will have my small spraybooth permantly set up in due course. The shelf under the workbench has my DCC 'power tower' on it and feeds up to the switchable DC/DCC test track on the workstation

Those 2mil wallclocks don't half tick loudly!

I will try and do a seperate posting on the workstation soon.



Machine shelf with cupboards under and over. I've been building up a selection of Proxxon kit for a few years now and its nice to be able to keep them all out at once. At the far end is my new Warco 'big' mini lathe which with MT3 headstock and MT2 tailstock gives me much more capacity and flexibility than my old Toyo derived micro lathe.

The shelf puts the machines at a comfortable height for operation whilst standing.

View into the left corner. The TV/DVD combo was bought cheaply on offer from Asda and is used to play my collection of railway DVD's as I model! I've also started to load kit instructions onto my iPhone as PDF's and can punch them through onto the screen via a little AppleTV gadget.

The shelf seen under the workbench is to stand my airbrush compressor on.

The pictures are prints of some of Mike Raithby's excellent work, often used on the cover of December 2mm Mags.

View into the opposite corner with stock boxes up on the shelves. The work bench along the wall here is a folding one and can be dropped out of the way when I need to free up space to work on a layout module. The brackets are very heavy duty and the whole thing is rock solid when up. I can work on one 1200mm layout module at a time with access to all four sides. 'Niddbeck Bridge' at 1500mm also fits but access is only from three sides.

I suppose I am now running out of excuses for not getting any modelling done! I have dusted off the boards for my 'Haromthwaite' micro layout and am looking at restarting that soon. The other major decision I need to make is wether I should restart work on the 7200mm of  'Pool in Wharfedale' or do another small 1500mm layout to utilise the expensive flight case I had made for 'Niddbeck Bridge'. Both schemes have their attractions and otherwise.

Edward S





'Peak' Decoder Installtion & Running-In

My 'Peak' now has a decoder chip fitted, in the shape of a Lenz Silver Mini (with cable harness). Whilst I appreciate the super-slow running that can be achieved with the likes of Zimo and CTE decoders, as so amply demonstrated by Nigel C and Nick M at the AGM, I find that Lenz Mini decoders serve me well. As impressive as it is for a loco to creep along at a yard every 5 minutes it's not usually something that we need to replicate on our layouts. In the real world time is money and most train operations at done as quickly as possible, even shunting operations. So all I need from a decoder are smooth stops and starts and a respectable but not super-slow speed at 'throttle notch 1'. Certainly having the majority of my fleet on one familiar decoder type helps when it comes to decoder tweaking. I do have a few examples of CTE decoders in stock and one will be going in my 04 shunter very soon, purely on size grounds.

The picture below shows the general arrangement. The decoder sits in the milled recess, tucked on top of a slip of black fag paper for insulation purposes. I'll probably replace this with PVC insulation tape before final reassembly.

In the next shot you can see the orange wire connecting to the now isolatied motor, routed via the milled slots.

Here you can see the red and black pick-up wires connected to the two halves of the chassis block. The chassis block is drilled and tapped 12BA and a couple of terminal tags made from scrap etched nickel silver.

In the final shot we see the loco with body back on, undergoing testing and running in on a Bachrus rolling road. The cosmetic bogie outer frames have been left off so the wheels and gears can be easily observed. These are great if you don't possess a circular test-track or layout but don't rely on them 100%. At first the loco ran well on the rolling road but on the track had an intermittant and very annoying 'stall' whilst running on the first three throttle notches. I eventually stripped the bogies back down again and found a few tiny rags of plastic swarf on the rear faces of the wheels near the axles, left over from the wheel turning process. These were removed with a scalpel and the bogies reassembled, also paying attention to pick-up strip adjustment. Running is now good and it runs very slowly at throttle notch 1 without a stutter now.



The only other problen I identified was that the outer pony wheels had insufficient side play on 24" radius curves, so I removed the previously installed limiting spacers. The pony wheels now actually just kiss the inside of the narrowed cosmetic side frames on 24" curves but not enough to stop them revolving or derailing.

DG's on 37

Compared to the class 45 with it's old Farish type couplings with coil springs, putting DG's onto my pair of new 37's was a doddle. They are fitted with NEM type coupling pockets which allow the N Rapido type coupling to be just pulled out.



Below we see a DG soldered onto a small brass block that is a tight fit in the NEM coupling pocket housing on the chassis underframe moulding. It is drilled and tapped 12BA and blackened. The screw is a countersunk one, also blackened.

The only modification is to drill and countersink the bogie keeper frame for the 12BA screw. The New DG coupling just drops into the pocket and nips-up tight with the screw. The coupling height comes out just right at the 4.5mm measurement above rail height that I use.

I originally purchasesd a split headcode 37 and a centre headcode one as well. Unfortunately research showed that the centre headcode ones did not arrive on NE Region until after Pool in Wharefdale closed in March 1965. Thanfully Andy Hanson was wanting a centre headcode one, so he purchased a split headcode one and graciously did a body swap with my unwanted one. Thanks Andy !

Next job is to carefully remove the existing tampo printed numbers and renumber them as Thornaby based machines. I've seen two approaches to doing this, cotton buds dampened with meths or T-Cut applied gently with a cocktail stick. I'll let you know which method worked best for me!

DG's On 45

Work continues on my Farish 'Peak' conversion, with DG couplings now fitted.

The bogie frame assembly is a U-channel plastic affair. This shot shows the end filled in with a double thickness of black plasticard, drilled 1.1mm, tapping size for 12BA. It is secured with 2-part epoxy.



In the shot below we can see the rear of the plasticard infill, with a captive 12BA nut. The plasticard is counter-bored undersize and the nut pressed home in a vice, before the infill is bonded in position.



Below we see the cosmetic outer frame/bufferbeam unit clipped back into place. The original Rapido type coupling slot has been widened to about 2.25mm and lengthened by about 1mm.

The DG coupling was drilled 12BA clearance size and then bent through 90 degrees at the point where it widens out to it's mounting plate. The bend position is first scribed with a scrawker, to ensure a neat, tight bend. After bending it is reinforced with solder.



Here we see the underside. A 12BA screw with head diameter and thickness reduced and reslotted with a one of those ultra thin 0.3mm files from shop 1.



The couplings and screws have now been blackened and buffers reinstalled. The saw cuts need filling/tidying and the red paint touching up. How many of the brake pipes etc can be installed without fouling the DG couplings remains to me seen!

Over the weekend I will be fitting the decoder chip and reassembling the loco. This loco is going to be renumbered as D32 which as far as I can tell was the only Leeds Holbeck based machine with centre headcodes prior to March 1965. It would be great if Farish could do a split headcode version!