The Yard - A small industrial layout in 7mm

[Greengiant]

Friday turned out to be a long day, but we got there in the end. This is very much a work in progress, with loads more to do and alterations and improvements that resulted from a two day exhibition
I forgot to mention that on the underside of the the RSJ are strips of LEDs that provide the layout lighting.
Total length of layout 9 feet x 26 inches at its widest.





Phew, finished!

Things have evolved since, I will update to the current time another day.

Martin

 

[Richard Gawler]

I saw the layout at Larkrail earlier this year, it was one of several stars of an exceptional show. Thank you for all of this background.

 

[Osgood]

Time out!

Why do you prefer enamels to DAS for mortar, Martin?
The DAS looks really good in the photo above - many walls have almost flush mortar and often the depth of lasered mortar joints appears excessive.

Tony

 

[Greengiant]

Time out!

Why do you prefer enamels to DAS for mortar, Martin?
The DAS looks really good in the photo above - many walls have almost flush mortar and often the depth of lasered mortar joints appears excessive.

Tony

I like the way enamel will wick along the mortar joints and the colour can be varied easier, plus a lot less cleaning off than DAS.
Having said all that, on my 16mm scale buildings I have been making, I use very fine wall filler for the mortar, like you say, brings it out virtually flush.

Martin

 

[Greengiant]

I saw the layout at Larkrail earlier this year, it was one of several stars of an exceptional show. Thank you for all of this background.

I am glad it was of interest.

Martin

 

[Greengiant]

Roll on to a very hot August 2018.

'Euston we have a problem!'
The heat in the workshop has had an adverse affect on some of the track, the parts where the rail foot is reduced to give space for the switch rail.



The track gang will be out with pick axes and shovels to remove some DAS so that the rail can be fixed. The point infills will be lasered again, this time they will be properly bedded in, we just ran out of time previously.
On a happier note, the fiddle yard tracks have been infilled with 2mm MDF, this gives us a larger area to turn lorries providing there is no rolling stock in the way. There is still one more bit to do on this board, then it will be primed followed by a top coat of black. You can just make out in the photo the MDF has been chamfered towards the rail, this is so we have clearance when cleaning track so as not to disturb the painted surface finish. The notches are to clear where the wiring is soldered to the top of the copperclad sleepers, had we known that later we would fill in the surface we would have wired to the underside of the rail instead.


Martin

 

[Greengiant]

We dug out some of the points to fix the warped rail, now it is a little cooler the rail has straightened a bit, but not enough. Luckily there are fishplates an inch or so from the toe of the point, DAS was dug out and with the aid of a small hammer and a drift, we were able to tap the fishplates along the rail. Hopefully we can wizzy disk off a small bit of rail, release the PCB soldered joints, ease the rail into position with the fishplate and re-solder.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

Exhibitions are getting nearer, Uckfield 20-21 October 2018, then EXPONG the following weekend.
We had a knock on the door, some contractors were doing some tarmacking and had some left over, would we like some for a good price?
Here it is along the rear road of The Yard.



We have a lot to do, so stripped the layout of everything that needs work that could be done off the layout, not much left!



The fiddle yard infills have now been painted.




We binned the original fascia panel/lighting unit and built a new longer version, the old one just did not look right.



This has now been sign written.



New LEDs have been ordered. The buildings are being stripped and repainted, never liked them the way they were but time was against us.
The gantry crane hook has been re-machined and re-chained, plus a back up kit of spare chain has been made along with the tools to fit.
Extra lorries are in production but may not be ready in time for the October shows.
The crane loads have been refined with a new chain system on each load being installed, this should hopefully give us as near to 100% success rate on first time alignment and lift as possible, hopefully.

Martin

 

[Greengiant]

New wire hooks have been designed and a bending jig made to batch produce consistent wires.



They don't take long to produce.



We assembled another batch of laser cut load skeletons for prototyping, here you can see the hole for receiving the crane hook, the hook then passes under the wire armature, which themselves are set into fine tubing fixed in the skeleton, we will be getting finer tube for the final ones. Four chains are attached at the shoulder of the wire armature, the other ends will be affixed to the upper corners of the decorative load.

When lifting with the hook the wire guides the hook and because of the width of the top piece minimises any twisting on the hook. For the first part of the lift, which is mostly hidden because the decorative load will be built up around it, the four chains come along for the ride until they get to the point of tightening, then they take over and support the weight of the load, at this point the armature comes along for the ride.

Lowering of the load is a complete reverse and allows the hook to be cleanly removed from the load. This has improved from the chain only versions we started with, which could at times twist or park the chains untidily making subsequent pick up a challenge, I think that makes sense.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

With the layout going through a bit of a rebuild and just over a month until the next exhibition outing, some of the buildings have been stripped right down!




I was never happy with the brick finish, but time limits for the exhibition meant they could only be one colour and a wipe over with grout, which looked OKish when first applied but when the grout fully dried it whitened the bricks too much. The front buildings had a quick sand over to remove some, the rears did not. So these past week days I have been lightly abrading away excess grout.

This is part of the tank building originally.



The same bit after some work using a suede brush, large scratch brush, scalpel and toothbrush.



One of the rear buildings which in this photo looks worse than it does in the flesh.



Now after some work.



Now the fun bit begins colouring this lot up and weathering.

Not much left on the layout, this was now the ideal time to add some safety features to the back road that passes under/behind the buildings. When the lorries get past where the tarmac ends they have entered behind the factories and the driver can be unsighted depending where they are standing, this meant hopefully they set the lorry in a nice straight route as it entered this section, veer off to the left and they could get caught in the railings, veer off to the right and they drop off the road down into a factory! To alleviate this issue, two smooth sides have been added which should funnel any straying lorry to the fiddle yard without a hitch.

Seen here the rear fencing has been removed, front and back ply walls added, the base of the walls will have a small fillet of filler to encourage a wandering lorry back on path, then this lot will be painted black.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

The extra side pieces for the back road have now been painted black.



I really needed to get on with drawing and cutting of the 11 x sets of railings for the rear wall, so an initial test piece was done in 1mm Trotec Trolase ADA, the thinner rails are 0.5mm and the thicker ones are 1mm, all spaced by 1mm. Pleased to say the cutting settings Giles used on his E1 worked just fine on my E2.



So I drew up a panel and went for 0.75mm rails spaced 1mm apart, which worked, but a bit twisty, this picture shows up a fundamental error I made on the drawing, it must have been getting late!



I scrapped that drawing and started again, I went back to 1mm rails spaced 1mm apart, this has stood up well, there will also be an overlay laminate cut which beefs up the horizontal bars and outer frame. This time I got the railing spikes in the right place at the end of the railings. Using the thicker railings means they can also be seen easier viewing from the front of the layout.



Encouraged by this I set to and drew up the doors that have always been missing on two of the buildings, one will be fixed in an open position, so is dead to size and made up of two layers. The other a much larger door opening, will be in the shut position, but also has a feature window at the head, this one is made up of three parts with a large border to give plenty of surface area when gluing to the wall.

In the laser just after cutting, pleased to say the cut outs were dropping already which is always nice to see when you open the lid.



The component parts.



Roughly assembled.



Then I cut the factory front wall windows to replace the piece of black card that currently resides in the apertures.



The corrugated roof has seen some initial colouring.



The gantry crane is also turning from grey to a variety of colours. I must remember to fix the hand rail on the steps.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

We are now in the 2nd week of October 2018W and have been very busy developing The Yard for exhibition appearances at Uckfield 20-21 October, then the following weekend 27 October at EXPONG.

The gantry crane has had some weathering work done, it won't be to how I want it to finally look, but will someway in the right direction. It is a very fiddly model to weather, there are so many bits that aren't as easily accessible with a paintbrush as you would expect. I had not helped myself by working with a new weathering product to me at the time, MiG Oilbrushers, although the more I used them, the more I liked them. They are my 'go to' weathering treatment now.

The concrete side beams have started getting some dirt.




The crane control hut has started getting the first of many layers of colouring.



The yard stonework getting the base coat applied, looks horrific at this stage.




Once blending has taken place, things become a lot more subdued.





The point infills are done in drab olive with gunmetal dry brushing which now needs to be polished where the lorry wheels will generally cross.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

The rear wall railings, various doors and windows are now base painted.



In an attempt to add a bit of interest to the factory building complex, one of them now has a roof extension, cut out on the Emblaser 2 laser cutter from Hobarts 3mm laser ply. Had a bit of a love/hate relationship with this cutter, when the lid safety contact pads play ball it is fine, when they don't, as has been the case a lot unless I put a very heavy weight on the lid. Have contacted Darkly Labs about the problem, who have been very helpful, since my machine was manufactured they have changed the design of the contact pads so they have shipped out new pads to me from Australia at no charge.



I had to remove some roofing sheet to allow the extension to seat properly.



Now clad in various Slaters embossed sheets.



Never one to throw things away that may come in useful one day, these are tap spout filters, the water company gave us bags of these earlier in the year on a water saving visit.



So one of these came to be a vent outlet on the roof extension, will probably make some support bracketing for this when I have more time.



Now with some initial painting.



The main door for the tank building has been assembled from the four layers of laser cut Trotec.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

The new design crates for the gantry crane have been laser cut from 1.5mm ply. These are formed for multiple layer laminations.



They are stuck onto the outer edges of our base lifting frame, which itself is wrapped with sheet lead to give some 'load' for the crane and minimise unwanted swing. Here you can also see the brass tubes the lifting wires slide in.



Then it is a case of building them up layer by layer, side by side.



I have become a big fan of this glue, goes off fairly quickly, but not so quick you don't have time for adjustments.



The long application tube is great for laying down thin beads in those awkward to reach areas.

r

Before long you end up with a batch of crates.



We had some little people arrive, these are Modelu 3D printed figures painted by the excellent Claudia Everett.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

Time is fast running out with the Uckfield show now less than a week away!
So best get cracking on with things.

A task I have been putting off is fixing the railings panels into the wall section that stands in front of the road that runs along the rear of the layout. To mount the panels 1mm wire is inserted into the wall pillars, one near the top, another near the bottom running behind the cross bars on the railings. The holes in the pillars had to be exactly right, so I made up a small drilling jig from some brass angle, one face for a left hand pillar, the other face for a right hand pillar.



The wires were inserted fully into one pillar and then backed across to the other pillar, that way the wire did not need bending to fit. These wires were fixed with super glue wicked in at the insertion point.



I had deliberately laser cut the fixing spigots on the railings slightly long, this enabled me with a few light strokes of a file to get an exact fit. Once in place, the panels were held in place with miniature clothes pegs and super glue wicked in along the wire which is now at the back.



The wall is made up of a small two panel section and one long 9.5 panel section which itself is 2'6" long as one piece, I was a nervous wreck once finished, but so thankful when completed, it was very fiddly and delicate, now I just need to get it finally fixed to the layout.



Next up was to finish repainting and weathering the crane, or at least as much as I have time for before the show. These are some before and after pictures, still lots to do, but that will have to be for another time.







Tried out the new hook and lifting system and pleased to say it works very well.



While the layout is in bits it was a good opportunity to take a photograph to show how the whole lot is arranged for display. We have a black lower banner, but when this photo was taken the support arms for it were away being welded with an adaption we came up with.

The support legs will double up as a trolley when traveling with the layout. We drop in a piece of ply to form a base in the central baseboard support beam, then all the back scene supports apart from the two upper uprights go in this beam, along with the rolled up backscenes (inside a cardboard tube). The upper supports are pulled apart at beam height, then they are dropped into clips welded to the sides of the lower uprights, then the RSJ lighting rig is put upside down on the beam and held on with bungee cords.

The electrics are permanently mounted on a tray bolted at the rear of the legs. We just need to make up an axle and wheel set that will fix when required to one set of feet, then the other foot will be lifted as a trolley handle, well that's the theory.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

On The Yard we run one standard gauge engine with a spare as back up, both are steam and sound fitted, on the narrow gauge we run one steam and two diesel, all with sound and stay-a-lives fitted, or we are supposed to, but one of them had yet to be fitted out.

My little yellow bogie diesel needed to be fitted out, this is an ex Whiteoak Light Railway loco and has factory fitted DCC without sound, at the time I built the loco this was fine so the bonnet upper halves are stuffed with lead because this loco had to pull a good load on Whiteoak and now also has to on Theobald's Yard. This meant there was not that much room left to get in a sound chip, stay-a-live and sugar cube speaker!

I cannot remove the lead weights for fear of wrecking the body, plus it will need the weight for when performing duties on Theobald's Yard.
The first task was to remove the factory PCB, at this point I realised it was split chassis pick up, so I made a new mount from thick plasticard.



I matched all the original screw fixing holes, using two of them to take power to the chip, this I did by making little brass tags soldered to the chip wires, the screws pass through these tags and transfer the power from the chassis blocks. I was able to strap on the chip, stay-a-live and speaker to this new mount, only trouble was, the body would not fit, no matter how much I dare carve away inside.



No option but to raise the body, so 4.8mm Evergreen strip with an outer laminate of Slater's embossed rivet sheet was fixed to the lower edges of the body. Notches were filed out to leave access to the original bolt mounting holes I had put in the chassis plate.



This shows the finished lift of the body, which now needs to go into the paint and weathering shop to blend it all together.
The plug hanging by the exhaust stack is the stay-a-live plug which came out through the door window on the other side, this needs to be disconnected before programming up the CVs and will be plugged back in and tucked down on the cab floor.



The Yard is a very short layout, so we need the locos to run as smoothly as we can for what little track there is for them to run on, so good low speed running is essential. To achieve this we use JMRI to fine tune the CVs to get what we want, the main work is altering the start voltage and acceleration curves. We use a very long gradual curve for this and change the notching up values for the frequency of engine rev rise. Some of the sound function volumes are altered from factory spec and customised to our function key preference across all our locos. For this loco we have two sets of CVs saved in JMRI, one set for The Yard and a different set for when it runs on Theobald's Yard where a higher top end speed is required with a quicker acceleration curve because a complete circuit on Theobald's is about 70 feet.

Martin

 

[Greengiant]

Well, that's the Uckfield show been and gone, a good time was had by all with The Yard, we were made very welcome by Adrian and his team, well looked after, fed and watered, sometimes too much drink, but to have a waiter service to your layout was very welcome.

Operating the layout was intense and by the close of each day we were ready for a rest. We have a few ideas for things that may help with the operating, we will be trialing out some of these once the layout is back in the workshop.




Sunday afternoon was especially pleasing when it was announced our layout had been voted Best in Show by the exhibition visitors.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

With a few shows now under our belt with this layout we have a Snagging/Wish List to work through.

Some of the items on the list involve the gantry crane and it's operation over many hours across two days. Targeting the lifting hook into a 5mm x 10mm slot from a distance of 3' to 4' feet away, consistently all day, while vision can be compromised by the main crane frame itself, needs a solution to improve the accuracy of this operation.

To this end we are making a custom control box which will be switchable for left and right handed operation and contain a screen that is fed images from a camera mounted above the hook and to one side in the cabin. We have sourced some high quality joy sticks with first class centring, this is important so that no movement or winching can take place by accident when the controls are released.

A screen and camera have also been sourced. The camera works off the same battery already installed in the crane, but does draw quite a lot of power transmitting the picture, so to keep this to a minimum we will be installing a momentary button in the control box to switch the camera on for a five second burst, we only need the camera for the very final positioning of the hook, so five seconds should be enough, if not we can alter it to whatever time we need.

From some rough testing it was determined the camera will need to be mounted at about 20 degrees from upright, so we 3D printed a camera mount and a drilling jig for the crane cab floor. Being 3D printed, if we need to tweak the angle of the camera it will just mean printing a new mount.

This is the drilling jig, camera mount and camera. The camera is a security camera disguised as a cross head screw, we have not found a way of removing the screw head without causing damage, but I doubt it will show unless the crane is viewed from a very low position.



To give an idea of size here is the camera and mount next to a scalpel blade.



Here is the drilling jig on the cab base, the letter 'C' was also printed on the jig to ensure I get this the correct way round before drilling and cutting the cab floor.



To enable testing of the crane while we do these changes, rather than having to go to the workshop and erect the layout to do this, I laser cut a desktop version of the main crane framing which exactly mimics the operating area of the layout version including the narrow and standard gauge track positions, the only thing different is it is slightly shorter because I was limited by the size my laser could cut. This was all cut from 2mm MDF, luckily this was also just the right size to form the rails for the crane bridge wheels to run on.

The component parts.



Now glued together with the bridge in place to test. I cut upturns at the rail ends so we cannot over run the crane, but I forgot about the cab has to be mounted on the bridge as well, so one end this will not work with the upturn stops, the cab will hit first if we over run!



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

Camera now mounted in the cab floor.



To house the camera transmitter and antenna we have drawn in CAD a case that will mount on the rear of the cab, there is also a cover that just clips in place giving us easy access if required, the hole at the top of the case is for the tube in which the antenna will be hidden. This will have some brass wire handles added and then be painted and weathered as a metal casing.

These are the CAD drawings.
The main part that will bolt to the cab rear wall.



The cover that will clip over.



The case with the transmitter installed and yet to have the plastic pipe added to cover the antenna.



Martin

 

[Greengiant]

We have now moved on to January 2019.

With the next show approaching, the Erith Club show, held in Longfield on 26-27 January, I thought it best I made the three new controller holders we had planned.

Today I found out there is now no rush, despite having received confirmation of our booking back in June, by chance last night I looked at the latest exhibitors and traders list and floor plan for the show on the club website, to see out of idle curiosity where we were to be sited. I could not find us, so sent an email to the organisers, who replied today that they had indeed forgotten about us and do not have any room for the layout, but they could have us for 2020 and sent me some new forms. I am so glad I looked, would not be best pleased to have turned up on the day with layout packed in trailer only to be turned away.

Anyway, moving forward our next show will be at SWING on Saturday 18 May.

Having now completed three exhibitions with The Yard, experience has shown although the original controller holders worked well for the purpose they were designed for, simply just to hold a controller while not in use, rather than just be left on a seat or shelf with the risk of accidental damaging by knocking on to the floor.

This is one of the original holders.



What did become apparent was it held the handset fine, but if for any reason you wanted to operate while in the holder it was not a good design. This style of operation need, only became apparent after many hours running the layout, the locos never really run more than about speed step four, we always use the '+' and '-' buttons rather than the control knob for speed setting, we find it gives much finer control.

We sit down to operate so no real need for the controller handset to be mobile, with this in mind I designed units that would hold the controller securely at a 30 degree angle, can be operated fully without needing to hold the handset and be easily removed if required. I drew out the designs in Adobe Illustrator, imported into LightBurn and cut them on the Emblaser 2 laser cutter from 3mm ply.

These are the parts for one holder and angled support bracket.



One holder with assembly starting.



This shows one holder and the single angled mount for the lefthand end controller. It will be fixed to the existing shelf using threaded and smooth captive 'T' nuts.



The complete unit test installed. I will probably lightly sand and radius the edges before priming and painting black. A second unit for the righthand end will be a double unit, that way we can leave two locos with individual controllers programed.



Martin