Review Of The Year - Part 3

And so to the final installment of our look back at the modelling year.

September

The Disco Car was finally complete and painted and underwent some light test running on Dduallt prior to delivery.

The method of delivery was very unique, and appropriate, in that it involved a trip in the cab of Lyd from Porthmadog to Boston Lodge Works.

Another significant carriage development this month was the fitting of the roof and glazing to our model of 150 with their devilish curves.

October

Within a few weeks of Himself handing it back over to me I'd finishing making and fitting the interior to this most luxurious of narrow gauge carriages.

The posts for October - which you can search for on this blog - described how I made masters for the saloon armchairs and the seats in the front observation section from styrene and cast the ones I used out of resin, with some extra styrene details glued on to finish.

Himself also delved into his drawers and put together a couple of B wagon kits which had been lying unmade for a couple of years.

They required some modifications to represent the prototypes in service on the F&WHR

November

Towards the end of the year Himself decided that it was time to resume work on Bron Hebog itself which hadn't been touched for more than a year since it was last shown at Super Power at Dinas in the autumn of 2015.

The task in hand is to model the line side fencing, which we're doing using cocktail sticks and thread.

With 150 sent back to Himself for painting and lining I could devote myself to making the service car 125.

By the middle of the month the sides and ends were ready to be assembled into a body shell.

December

And so to the final month which has continued along the same lines.

I have been working on fitting an interior to 125.

While Himself has been making progress with the fencing on the layout.  There's rather a lot of it!

 

So all that remains is to thank you for dropping by and reading the blog in 2016, and to wish you all the best for 2017 and we hope that you will continue to come to these pages so we can share our progress with you.

Review Of The Year - Part 2

So here we go with a look back at the second third of 2016

May

It was only now, many months after I'd made it, that Himself got around to painting the model of the Cwm Cloch farmhouse, which in recent years has been spruced up with a rather natty duck egg blue shade on the render on the front extension.

I was trying - and usually failing - to keep up with the production of carriages at Boston Lodge Works by making up another set of superbarn resin castings to make a model of carriage 117.

June

With the bodyshell made I turned my attention to the interior of 117.

These days I have taken to casting the seats and tables from resin with some units which I designed to fit together in multiple so the seat backs and the table tops line up with the windows every time.

Himself returned from a holiday to find that in his absence the cat had been wandering around the house - and the garage - looking for comfy places to curl up to sleep.

Unfortunately one of them turned out to be the Up home signal on Dduallt!

July

Come the summer months I'd finally plucked up courage to tackle the most complicated FR carriage yet - the new observation car 150.

Himself was putting the finishing touches to the 'Disco Car' 121.

My client's exacting specifications included having the sliding light windows wide open as they always were to ventilate the carriage while the dancers were enthusiastically boogieing.

August

I'd chosen to cast the sides of 150 to give the model extra strength, and after pondering the issue for a while decided that the best solution for the curved end would also be to make a master using brass with a styrene skin, and then cast the production version too.

Of course, the real carriage 150 couldn't enter service until its partner Service Car 125 was, er, ready for service.

So I also began work on a model of that too, only this time it would be made entirely of styrene.

It's another very complicated carriage with the generator compartment door on one side and an inset staff access door on the other.

To be continued....

Review Of The Year - Part 1

For the last few posts of the year I always like to take a look back at all that we've achieved together in the last 12 months.

Sometimes when you're only spending a few minutes at the workbench at a time it can seem like you're not making much progress, but when I review the year like this it brings home how much has been done.

January

I began the year by attempting to have something of a spring clean of the shelf above my modelling desk which is where I dump the castings which don't turn out perfectly when I am producing a batch of wagon kits.

Fortunately, one of my customers is happy to take them off my hands as 'scrappers' to decorate his South African NG layout .

So I thought I could make a quick few quid by assembling them into some very tired looking wagons for him.

The only flaw in the plan is that I never did get paid for them....

I also began the year making a big effort to build some of the remaining houses we need to complete the Oberon Wood scene.

February

The big news in the second month of the year was that the layouts completed their migration to Scotland with Himself after just over a month in storage.

They survived with only the most minimal damage - a couple of fence posts knocked over on the edges of some of the boards - and we soon had Dduallt assembled for a test run in its new home.

I continued building houses and by the end of the month we had three of them ready.

March

By this time I reckoned I needed a break from house building and I decided to make a start on a carriage commission that I'd promised to build for a friend more than a year previously.

This customer wanted to recreate his misspent youth in miniature with a model of the (late) FR 'Tin Car' 121 converted to be used as a 'Disco Carriage' on special charters for the volunteers.

With Himself getting settled in his new home we were able to get out the board with the Oberon Wood scene on it and try out the new houses in position.

April

As a one-off favour Himself agreed to take a look at a friend's Backwoods NGG16, which he'd bought from a popular internet auction site.

The loco ran very rough and some major errors had been made during construction as water tank on the front power unit looked like it was ready to be launched from the ski ramp at the bow of an aircraft carrier!

I was also making steady progress on the 'Disco Car' with the body or less complete by the end of the month.

To be continued..

Merry Christmas

A lot of people like to recycle their Christmas cards at the end of the festive season, and we're no different here at Bron Hebog.

We thought you might like another chance to see one of the Artistic Director's seasonal sketches which we featured as our Christmas image back in 2010 in our first year of blogging.



Happy Christmas to all our readers!

Boxing Day Comes Early

A rare midweek day off meant I had a view hours to try and finish off some of the remaining
jobs on 125, the biggest of which was adding all the ancillaries beneath the carriage.

The way we build our carriages, with all the interior detail fixed onto a removable chassis, it sometimes seems like this is the major part of the model and the bodyshell just an extra we slip on top.

While not attempting to go down the super-detailed route I felt I simply had to try to represent the kitchen taps.

Just when I thought I had done all my bits and was ready to take it over to Himself to fit the brass roof and fettle the bogies I remembered the inevitable thing I've forgotten - the electrical connections at each end.

Oh well, it'll just have to wait until after Christmas now.

Marker Posts

There's been more work going on setting out the fence lines on Bron Hebog.

Last time I 'posted' on this topic they were being laid out on the ground around the farm, now they are fixed and painted.

As well as progressing the lineside fence Himself has been inserting some markers   on the land in the middle of the S bend.

Work in the garage will probably have to be suspended due to the demands of festive family duties but will resume in the New Year, no doubt.

Making It Look Hard

Whenever I have to work with brass I always end up making a meal of it.

Bending and fitting the truss rods is always a lot more hassle than I suspect it is supposed to be.

Maybe it's because the angles are so subtle, or perhaps there is a trick or technique I haven't cottoned onto yet, but there is an almost never-ending series of tweaks and adjustments to try to get the pair of them to match.

Now they're fitted I can breath a sigh of relief and get back to the styrene to make up all the other bits that hang beneath the carriage.