Finding Faults

Himself is plugging away at the snagging list prior to taking Bron Hebog to Bressingham for Narrow Gauge East this summer.

The problem is that in trying to sort one issue you discover others.

So it was when he set up one half of the fiddle yards to try and sort an electrical niggle on the 'cab control' wiring and found that a number of the indicator LEDs on the Rhyd Ddu end panel had failed.

So he's had to open all that up to replace them.

Quite why they've failed is a mystery.

The ones in the control panel on Dduallt have lasted for more than 20 years, but after just two years in the west of Scotland climate these have gone pop!

Is there a connection?

Anyway, I thought you might also like to see a snap of the loco he's been using for testing duties.

Our original Dundas Linda, which had major surgery to its Ibertren chassis to fit it with cranks and outside frames (and a heart transplant with a Mashima motor) is still going strong.

Doing The Twist

As I alluded to in the previous post, Himself has been getting on with fixing a couple of irritating track faults which have been there since we first started running trains on Bron Hebog.


Coupling heights are critical in OO9 perhaps more than any other scale, certainly if you use the very fine (in both senses of the word) brass Greenwich couplings which we do.

A slight imperfection in the track can also cause stock to derail which sometimes happens to trains as they descend the hill into the station where there is a little dip on one side on the Cwm Cloch road bridge.

The remedy is not particularly difficult, it's just taken him more years than I care to remember to get around to fixing it.

So the three pictures here show how he first dug out the ballast..

...put some bits of packing under the sleepers on one side...

...and then re-ballasted.

You may be wondering how there came to be this dip in the trackbed, especially if you're used to building your layouts on a solid, flat piece of baseboard.

Bron Hebog was built with what is known as the open baseboard approach where a narrow, plywood trackbed is raised up on stilts all the way around, even in places where the trains are running in a cutting.

This makes it easier to model embankments or underbridges and you can see the same section of the layout under construction here.

The place where there was the problem is where it's a narrow, single track formation, going uphill on a slight curve and it seems that at some point there was a very slight twist got into it.

Hopefully that will be sorted now and he can take a look at the issue in the tunnel I mentioned previously, and a rather odd electrical gremlin in the fiddle yards which cropped up the last time we had the layout out on show.

Fully Enclosed

Himself is concerned - quite why, I can't imagine - that I might think he has been swinging the lead and so sent me a couple of photos with the caption that they prove he has been busy lately.

Quite where he's got this notion from is beyond me, because his output has been prodigious these last few months.

The latest project has been completing the wire fencing along the front of the station.

This is made up of 8 sections of etched brass fencing panels from Wizard Models.

He tells me they're quite fiddly to put together and it takes quite a while to paint them.

(If he describes it as fiddly then you may draw your own conclusions...)

The one thing missing from the station area before we can consider it complete is to make, or obtain, some portaloos.

Oh the glamour!

Next he's talking about getting on with sorting some of the things on the snagging list including some relaying in Goat Tunnel.

The track bed has always had a slight dip in the middle which sometimes causes stock to uncouple.

It's never a good look leaving the back half of your train behind...

Skirting

Before I pass 152 over to Himself to do the metal working there's a something I can do which will give him more of a solid foundation to work with.

All the Superbarn family of carriages have a very obvious underframe which the body sits on top of, but I represent this on the models with a rather flimsy-looking skirt which I fix on the bottom of the chassis.

Normally these are made up only of straight sections of 90 degree bends but on these two carriages there are curvy corners at the front to be formed.

Fortunately the Evergreen styrene strips I use are very soft and pliable and it's usually possible to form a bend which will stay in shape long enough for you to weld it in place with solvent.

You can see that I have also drilled the holes for the bolts for the bogies (centrally, this time, I hope) and the bolsters are in place to set the correct ride height as well.

This skirt makes the floor piece rigid and it also provides a firm base for the carriage body while it is being worked on.

One Five Two

So, I've run out of excuses and there's nothing else for it than to clean up the castings and start putting the second Superbarn observation car 152 together.

I find I need to make sure I'm in the right mood to tackle a job like this because gluing the pieces together is a precision job.

It's been a lot easier since I discovered 60 second Loctite which does indeed give you an opportunity to play around with the position of the piece without having the difficulty of trying to hold it in place for minutes on end as happens with even the fastest-setting epoxy resins.

You might be able to see that this one has an almost imperceptible curve on the front section which was done by altering the master (a piece formed out of brass with styrene layers on top) which could be bent very carefully and another mould made from it.

Once again I will be giving it to Himself to add the roof, and the window pillars at the front, in brass,

Before that I will drill the holes for the bogie pivots.

This time I will do my utmost to make sure they are completely central. 

You may remember I failed to achieve this on 150 with unfortunate consequences when it scraped the sides of the cutting beneath Rhoslyn Bridge on Dduallt.

Not my finest modelling hour, that.

Making Myself Unpopular

Himself's birthday has come around again, and just like last year I decided to treat him to a Robex 3D print.

We've seen what a fabulous job he made of the Lilla so I thought I'd challenge him with the WHHR's Bagnall 0-4-2 Gelert.

As the real one has made a test trip as far up the line as Beddgelert it would be nice to be able to represent that on Bron Hebog.

It's true that in his first experience of the material he found it very much less robust that he was used to with brass, and it was quite a steep learning curve, but at least the project with the Minitrains chassis was quite straightforward.

Not so with Gelert.

The Robex print is designed to fit the Fleishmann 0-4-0 chassis, and no problem there because I've had one of them in strategic storage for years.

The difficulty is that the Bagnall is outside-framed and Himself looked rather unimpressed when I broke it to him that his challenge is to try to covert it with new driving axles, fly cranks and all the rest,

I've no doubt he'll be able to achieve that because he managed it brilliantly on a pair of Ibertrens under our original Penrhyn ladies more than 20 years ago.

I am expectiing my name will be mud when he gets round to trying to do it, though.....

Adaptations

Altering the Dundas WHR carriage to make the flood removable, as we do with most of our other carriages, has meant a lot of changes on the inside too.

On the kit the seats are supposed to be fixed to the insides resting on these moulded ledges.

Not only are the ledges not required if the seats are going to be free-standing, they will also prevent us slipping in the glazing, so they'll have to be removed.

Fortunately this kind of plastic is very soft and it's easily done with the scalpel.

Next, the seats need to have new ends made to support them where they would have been fixed to the inside.

All these seats, once they've been made up, are fixed in place on the floor, which has also had its footsteps glued in place.

Here you can see it in place inside the body.

The roof has not been fixed in place yet and is just resting in position for now.

It's been handed over to Himself to get on with painting it at his leisure.