If you are shy..

I now have an E-mail address for you all to contact me. be warned that anything you say can (and probably will) be either taken out of context or used against you at a later date. Its just the kind of guy I am :v).
I'll be very up front now and say that I do not require a Russian bride, help in the bedroom (unless its vacuuming under the bed or finding space to fit stuff round my wife's shoes), nor am I interested in having $10 million in US dollars funneled through my bank account, Unless your name happens to be Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and you have US$700 billion that you and your buddies need a hand with moving out of your country, in which case just leave your phone number and I'll get back to you.

We all mess up

Second post tonight; whats the most embarrassing mistake you have made in your modeling career. I've already got some entries. my 2 are
-Talking about my Cass bank modules and how I found the inspiration for them in a book to someone who Kiwibonds later pointed out was Geoff Churchman, author of the book.
-While staying with my brother 'helping him with a 9mm Yb kit. prior to assembly we decided that it would be a good idea to paint it, and then bake the paint on ( with lead you can heat it to 200C after painting and the paint binds to the surface to the lead. its like modern roofing iron. however, the Von strap kits are white metal arn't they. The look in the oven after 10 minutes gave the great line 'looks a bit flat doesn't it'. No mistake there.

From another who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty;'I once superglued a Dx to my knee'(nearly fell off my chair at work :v).
Things like this require a fair slice of 'talent'

So who are you all then?

I've installed statcounter on the blog just to see how many people were checking in, since you lot give me sod all feedback apart from one or two. At the moment there's an average of 6 returning visitors and 4 new visitors a day. There's a stack from Auckland (which judging from the numbers should be a hotbed of NZ120 modeling), a sizable group from Oz, and then a smattering from all over the planet. I've been visited twice by the Googlebot. Oddest web search to turn me up; 'how to make chores more fun' all the way from Waukesha, Wisconsin (take a bow please). Apart from that I don't get much more info, other than that I can work out one or 2 of the overseas visitors.
I'll have to get a web e-mail address so the people can contact me without having to sign up to the site.

A different way of looking at things.

More from the most prolific NZ120 modeler on the planet currently (if you believe I'm incorrect, please provide photographic evidence and a blurb about what you have been doing).
This time its an interesting take on modern wagons, and the paint schemes that they carry. These can be a bugger to paint, and its not a simple task to most of us to create a decal to match. However, with a camera and a bit of naked cunning, so very good results can be achieved.

"This week I discovered some pics taken at Westfield and printed out on a laser printer 10 years ago.

Better late than never, I cut some ¾ inch stick to size, and made the ends from corrugated (roofing) plasticard. The tops were thin plasticard. Paint for these bits was matched to the sides by trial and error. Although the sides of the containers look detailed in 3d they are obviously flat... and with the technology of the day they’re not of great resolution by today’s standards, but pass the 2 foot rule.

Problem was, when it came to make the UK, the wagon seemed about 5mm short. It looks like I scaled the printout to the correct height but not length… Still, they don’t look bad in a train and now armed with better technology I may rescan and reprint the pics. Bogies are some old MDCs with microtrains pizza cutter wheels as for once I don’t have any spare MT bogies lying around. The NC (or whatever) is plastic on brass on Peco."

Note that the photographed model in the middle looks better than the hand painted examples on either side.

I remember Karl Morris (and the walrus moustache, it must have been a 90's thing)doing something similar for GT car wagons, and sides of containers many years ago. They looked OK from a distance as well.

Tomorrow night, whats the most embarrassing thing you have done while modeling (names will be omitted to protect the guilty), and I'll reveal what statcounter tells me about my readers (and possibly the oddest web search hit you'll ever get).

Friday night pic

This from amateur fettler, fresh from a visit to the center of the south and over a bit (Timaru).
Its an unusual view of Kingston and shows how it could be used as a terminal station for a layout.



I'm not going to do a plan as its all rather self explanatory.

A Challenge

This interesting item wandered across my e-mail this morning while I was trying to look interested about black goo (the goo industry has been going well lately). Its an interesting challenge concept for the 2010 convention, and one that sparked my eye. I've tried to embed it, but failed so here it is in its entirety.

The A3 Modelling Competition.

This competition is designed as a bit of fun; it complements but does not supersede the NZAMRC competition and has a different aim. Whilst we will be happy to see the highest standards of scratch building equal weight will be placed on an out-of-the-box set up – what we are looking for here is for people to build something that they can be proud of, maybe use at their local train show and to enjoy themselves. It need not require a massive investment and should be complete in itself although it may be designed for incorporation in a larger layout at a later date. It is also an ideal opportunity to step outside your comfort zone and maybe try a new scale, period or country.

The rules are simple – to build a layout or diorama on an A3 footprint. We are looking for ingenuity here so if you can find a way of interpreting this other than as below please feel free to do so however the classic interpretation is:

A layout or diorama, excluding the support structure or any detachable parts when detached whose area (not shape note) does not exceed that of an A3 sheet of paper. If cassettes are used their area counts only when attached to the layout and only the deck of traversers or sector plates is counted in the area. There is no restriction on height, gauge, scale or period – that bit is up to you.

An A3 sheet of paper is 297 x 420mm – therefore a layout of 596 x 210mm is perfectly acceptable as is a circle of radius 199.25mm or any odd shape in between. If your layout has cassettes then these come from the total area when connected – this does mean that you may use a single cassette in multiple locations or multiple cassettes as long as they are not all connected if the total area exceeds that allowed.

Interpretation of the rules will be at the discretion of the organisers and the judge – our guest speaker – and their decision is final.

This is meant to be fun so there is no legalistic scoring system – inventiveness and atmosphere will be the deciding factor. The prizes will be awarded for best diorama, best working layout and the Speaker’s prize for ingenuity.

Inspiration:

http://www.wymann.info/ShuntingPuzzles/index.html
http://carendt.com/

Now this has got me interested in a number of ways. We are the only scale in this country with a decent sized following that could actually assemble a modular layout based on this concept, along the lines of http://www.t-trak.org/ but larger. Maybe this needs to be debated some.

The germ of an idea

Sifting the interweb thingy last week I came across this blog http://neag.2mm.org.uk/.
While it's not the right scale ( are any of the British scales right? Answers on the back of a postage stamp please.), I was impressed by the layout shown being assembled.

I think the child is optional

With a bit more thinking, this has developed into a fiendishly cunning plan for world domination. So cunning in fact that I'm expecting James Bond to appear at the ranch slider any time. Must get onto building that death ray out of plasticard and wood.
(Now, if it was Kiwibonds, I could distract him with a couple of bottles of Marlborough sauvignon blanc while I made my escape by bicycle as the submarine is still on back order).
I'll post some more about this idea once its more fully formed.