adrian
Flying Squad
After a brief(!) interlude building a few more wagon kits and other things to keep me busy I switch back to Holywell Town - so a small update as a little progress has been made.
So the track building was finished and painted. I then laid down some foam underlay, glued down with a copydex/water mix. I then soldered some wire droppers to the rails and then using the templot template drilled some holes in the appropriate places for the wires. The track was laid in sections, again with a copydex/water mix. Word of advice - don't forget to wash out the brush as soon as you have finished. Once it's dried it's not coming out of the brush! You'd think I'd learn after the first one but no, there are now 3 wrecked brushes in the bin. It's a good job they were the cheap ones I picked up when the local art shop was having a closing down sale.
So the track is all glued down although I've still got to fit the tiebars and none of the wiring is done underneath.
One defining feature of the layout will be the bridge - I imported a couple of photos into QCAD and adjusted the scaling to match known dimensions. I then drew out the bridge outline to the photo and now I'm cutting and adjusting the profile. So now that the track is laid I can play around with the heights and clearances. I'm not quite there yet so a few more adjustments will be needed, when I cut out the bridge the gradient didn't look steep enough when looked down on it, however the photo from above the end retaining wall actually seems to match quite well to the photos.
In the meantime on my workbench is a delivery from MERG this week. So I have some plastic box tubing to make the under baseboard turnout mechanisms, these will be driven by a Merg CBus setup with servo motors.
So the track building was finished and painted. I then laid down some foam underlay, glued down with a copydex/water mix. I then soldered some wire droppers to the rails and then using the templot template drilled some holes in the appropriate places for the wires. The track was laid in sections, again with a copydex/water mix. Word of advice - don't forget to wash out the brush as soon as you have finished. Once it's dried it's not coming out of the brush! You'd think I'd learn after the first one but no, there are now 3 wrecked brushes in the bin. It's a good job they were the cheap ones I picked up when the local art shop was having a closing down sale.
So the track is all glued down although I've still got to fit the tiebars and none of the wiring is done underneath.
One defining feature of the layout will be the bridge - I imported a couple of photos into QCAD and adjusted the scaling to match known dimensions. I then drew out the bridge outline to the photo and now I'm cutting and adjusting the profile. So now that the track is laid I can play around with the heights and clearances. I'm not quite there yet so a few more adjustments will be needed, when I cut out the bridge the gradient didn't look steep enough when looked down on it, however the photo from above the end retaining wall actually seems to match quite well to the photos.
In the meantime on my workbench is a delivery from MERG this week. So I have some plastic box tubing to make the under baseboard turnout mechanisms, these will be driven by a Merg CBus setup with servo motors.