Topless Models - KiwiRail DX part 5

DB Says: Well that should increase the hits on Rhys’ blog…

As I seem to do everything in completely illogical order... now that the DX top is finished, it would be appropriate to see how that Atlas Dash 8 chassis will work for me underneath it. First up, let’s sneak a quick look at some pictures floating around inside my camera of a Dash 8 and a DX to see how they compare.

The main difference is the obvious ‘tail’ on the DX main casting, and I suppose the brake cylinders. To earn bonus marks, I’m also going to put the shock absorbers in (over both outboard axles on the DX vs over the center axle of the -8).

The first step is to take a knife and carefully shave off the Dash 8 brake cylinders and shock absorbers, carefully avoiding axlebox detail and the soft, fleshy, blood-filled parts of the fingers.

The DX tails are then made from very thin plasticard with a beam of plastic joining them which are then contact glued onto the plastic bogie casting. New brake cylinders were made from spue-ends that come with Microtrains bogies. These are unlikely to give any finescale readers a woody, but they convey the general idea. Another good reason for building layouts with the track in the far distance.

Shock absorbers were added using the same fine wire that was used for the brake hoses on the headstocks. What happens when I eat through the last of that wire and reach the grain of wheat lightbulb they came with, I don’t know. I guess I’ll stop modeling. As with all my creations, you start to overlook the sheer awfulness of it all as soon as some paint is slopped on to hide all the messy bits.

To add to Rhys' previous painting post, a key here is to paint the bits you don't want people to notice darker and the bits you do want them to look at (if any) lighter.

NEXT!

Right, onto the next project then. Today I started work on the chassis modifications for my pair of Ed's. This involved adding the leading and trailing trucks. The single axle one was reasonably easy. Brass bar with holes drilled at the correct places and then add the bearing at the correct location (I still think that the model of 101 in the latest journal just looks wrong, but I've just found in my hard drive collection a couple of pictures of the smae model and the wheel spacing is correct.). The bogie at the other end is a bit more of a problem. to start with the pin provided is not only part of the metal frame, but both sides of the metal frame. This means that the main bar must be plasticard. The actual bogie is soldered up from brass bar and tube again, and this took a bit longer to get right. The biggest problem is that there is a piece of the frame that hangs down underneath which is right where the attachment pin needs to sit. It also fouls the wheels.

This means I'm going to have to take the entire mech apart to machine some metal out of this area, while keeping the bolt that holds that end together in place. Bugger.
(Before any clever bastard suggests turning the mech round, the big bulky bit then sticks out past the end of the cab which would mean even more milling, thank you very much)

I'd have some pictures of this tonight, but the lady of the house has left the camera at work, so I will leave you with a picture of the real thing. Can anyone remind me why I'm making something so butt ugly?

"I can almost smell the asbestos"

I think its finished....

Its one of those skill that one really needs to develop. The one that says "sod off, little voices at the back of my head, the damn thing is finished!" Indeed its the law of diminishing returns where the effort required to continue adding details is offset by the fact that you are now really getting into the realms of nit picking (My departed friend Jack Watsons reply was "well, when you build your model of this I guess it will be perfect won't it"). Tonight I attached the dummy couplers (unlike the real thing, mine won't break down between stations). The kit has a large gap for the couplers to swivel, Which in real life was not there. I filled the hole from behine with a piece of plastic, and cut the coupler head of and just glued in onto the front with araldite. I also added the Mu cables to the front, and in a fit of pseudo finescaleness, made the tap handles at the top from 5 amp fuse wire soldered on the ends. I must have been sober at the time, and I won't let that happen again at the modeling bench. I also added a pipe under the car that shows clearly in photographs (though it took a while to find a decent one of what I wanted to see). Finally, the headlights were drilled out so it at least looked like something might shine out of it, even if I'm not going to fit headlights (they are just one more thing to go wrong I find)
so thats it, I think its done. Its taken 5 weeks and its only been so short I think because I've had a fair idea about how i was going to solve any wee problems that might come up.


So, now I guess its review/comments time. Its been a mostly trouble free build compared to some things I've seen over the years. the 'Instructions' are an interesting assistant rather than a blueprint. I think the best thing is that it does look good while you are building it, which I find is one of the big hurdles to kit completion. No matter how good the actual kit is, if it looks like a dog while its going together then it tends to stay in the box longer, rather than sit out on the workbench, daring you to just do one little bit more. Its not a simple kit to put together, and I would definitely not recommend it to a beginner, but for those of you with a reasonable/moderate amount of skill, or if you are a member of a club and can get assistance from others, it is achievable, and it builds into a pleasing replica of the prototype. I've also seen rumors that the new owners of the Trackside range are thinking about doing another batch of kits. I'll ask The owners to post some details to me. I think I promised to help upgrade the instructions as well. I suppose I'll live to regret that.

I guess the biggest complement is that I'd buy another one, if I didn't have so many projects that were 1/2 finished, and I didn't need 2.
I'm now interested to have a go at some of the other kits in the range.

Guest post

Tonights guest is Worzel.

"I'm building a NZ120 layout using hand-made pointwork. Something I had always pretty much taken for granted with Peco points is that they have a throw bar with spring built in, so now I had to come up with something to throw the points with and keep them in position. I wasn't keen on fitting out every point with a Tortoise or solenoid so set about producing some manual linkage systems. After a bit of googling I came up with a couple of designs - one based around a slide switch and another around a toggle switch. Both use a vertical rod going up through a slot in the roadbed to move the throwbar on the points from below - much like a Tortoise or solenoid switch machine does. Maybe it says a lot about my lack of mechanical prowess but neither of these worked as well as I would like - too much flex in the vertical bar and/ or adjusting the amount of throw was fiddly. The other thing was that in order to get the vertical rod stiff enough it had to be big and that required a large hole in the throwbar, and the PCB sleeper would break where the hole was.

Fast forward a few months and I found another design described in the September 2008 Model Railroader. Fast forward to this month and I have finally got around to collecting the various materials and putting one together. In this design the vertical rod going through the roadbed doesn't slide sideways, it rotates and an arm moves the throwbar. I've just finished installing this and it seems to work pretty well. It is more complicated to build but is easier to install and works better. You end up with the arm being visible above the ties but I think that's a small price to pay for better buildability and reliabilty, and hopefully not too noticeable from 2 feet when the track is ballasted. This design also has two advantages over the other systems. The main one is that the control bar (that comes out to the fascia with a knob on the end) and the switch don't have to be in line with the throwbar. The other is that the switch can be positioned so that the knob on every point can be in against the fascia when in the main position and pulled out when set for the secondary route.

This might be old news to most of you, but this is all new to me. I've attached a couple of pics - one from above and one from below."

Halter top - KiwiRail DX Part 4

DB says: Mmmmm, halter tops. But I digress...


What began as a 'rapid upgrade of an old resin DX top' has dragged and stumbled haltingly over the past few weeks…

Hiccup #1 was a bit of travel. Bruges is not a shithole. Chicago is a much longer drive from New York than it looks on a small map. Won't do that again.

Hiccup#2 was a final touching up of the red a few weeks back with some overthinned red paint which promptly ran down all the panel door crevices over the gray. Won’t do that again either.

Hiccup #3 was using a DB-mixed custom gray colour, which looked good until covering up #2 (and a couple of previous touch ups) left the DX covered in four shades of gray patches which looked awful. Won’t do that again either. I went out and bought several pots of gray paint that appeared to be decent candidates, painted some samples, picked one that looked right and recoated the whole lot.

Not a lot of other wisdom to share … drilled holes for handrails and used fine piano wire as I have done for about 20 years. One day I’ll see if I can find something finer - I tried brass once, but I like the way this stuff doesn't bend if it gets knocked, it just springs back into place. Brake hoses are wire stuck into drilled holes and bent down. Horns stolen from some old N scale top. Grilles are superfine mesh from Tasman Products of Wellington, again something I’ve been carrying around forever. Lights are MV Lens jewels. Technobits on the roof are plastic.

Logo decals were made up on my temperamental Alps printer from a side-on shot of the real thing taken a few weeks back and quickly cut out in Photoshop by setting the levels to turn everything that is close to white (i.e. the logo) into pure white and everything else (the red/gray background) into pure black . From there its easy to select and cut out the bits you want. They look OK from 2 feet. I’d hoped to lazily borrow cab numbers from an N scale BN green diesel decal set but they turned out to be too big, and they're not the right font anyway so I made my own. As an aside, there aren’t many typefaces that are within close-range spitting distance of NZR Univers (if that’s what they’re back to using) - check out the 90 degree angle on the top-left of the ‘5’, the straight legged '7', the straightish diagonal on a '2' and the top of the '1' when looking for imposters such as that old Lettraset we used to use way back when. Not sure if this is still the case, but custom produced, yet incorrect, TMS fonts were still mandatory inclusions in S scale commercial kits when I stopped doing that 15 or so years ago...

Overall, the (finally de-halted) top looks pretty decent from beyond the mandated NZ120 examination exclusion radius. Next time I'll make sure the handrails along the top of the long hood are closer together and I also have a bit of supersnot frosting on the windows, but I’m not pulling the cab apart for that...

Making an Exhibition of Yourself

I often look back to those Halcyon days when The Head Druff and Kiwibonds were the toast of several small hamlets (if not towns) as they toured the country with "Otaki and Cass". I was an interested bystander as the Cass half of the layout slowly progressed from 2 to 4 modules, each one 1200 long and 750 wide (thats 4' by 2'6" in Queen Victorias coinage, God bless her...). As built, Cass was designed to be standalone, and so had hidden sidings along the back edge.



This has often struck me as the ideal exhibition layout for the scale: It replicates the "Long and Narrow" cross section of the railway corridor, the single track main line meant the operators were always busy crossing trains, the small country station at the front had all the essential parts of railway infrastructure everyone can remember (good shed, pine trees, etc) and the storage sidings at the back allowed several trains to be kept in hiding until it was their time to perform. And even more importantly, its overall length ("only" 16' long) could easily stay setup at home between the shows. An even shorter version would be even better, cos lets face it: everyone has a 12' wall at home (and that s a topic for a future post).

Working on the ideas proven with Cass, here is an idea for something slightly different. Patea in southern Taranaki would really suit this style of layout, being sandwiched between the river and a low ridge which , after meandering past the decomposing corpse of the old freezing works, it has to wind its way up to climb out of the river valley.



So how would it look in a model? Well (thanks to Google Earth) we can see the railway entering from the west from under the main highway bridge, curving through the station behind the old Cheese Grading Buildings on the wharf and then off to the east and the climb up towards the Wharekura flats.



I know Drew loves the area, and I am quite taken with it after my excursions through it in the cab. And with the traffic from New Plymouth, it isnt all milk either! HUG containers with Urea (that word again), 20' Intermodal tanks with CO2 or LPG, UCG LPG Tankers, CF's for fertiliser, VRB's for cheese/butter, a US or two for steel......



Hmmmm.....very tempting!!!

So which stations or areas do you know that could fit this style of layout? Lets hear them!

Whats in the scale

After the title on Darryls last post, I think he should get a new career writing tabloid headlines.

Tonight it's time for another one of those wandering posts about what the scale really needs to move forward.

-More exposure in the modeling press. This basically equates to articles in the Journal.I guess some more pictures of layouts (though I don't know how many good layouts are really out there).

-More kits available. We currently have the soon to be re-released Trackside range, and some etched kits from Etchcetera. I was posed the question this week "why are there not more etched kits' and the answer is I have no idea. It seems to be a perfect medium for diesel loco's, as shown by the Da and Dc kits which are beautifully done. In Britain its a very commonly used medium for a wide variety of models in all the main scales. I'm not sure what the problem is as it's no more expensive than doing anything else.

-A complete lack of Steam kits. Lets face it, even the most rabid modern image modeler has a secret hankering for a kettle to run on his layout (even if they would only admit it under torture, which as we all know is perfectly acceptable in these circumstances). the commercial mechs have the wrong size wheels, and there is a chance for someone to seize the bull by the horns and build one from scratch. The price of said kit might well put the majority off it though.

Personally , after much thought, I think the scale needs more cowbell. Now where did my beer go.