Making Up The Neighbours

Some rapid progress on the second Oberon Wood house.

It'd cut out another set of the main walls blanks when I made the first house so they only required the window apertures to be cut and as I explained in my previous post, because of the way this house is positioned there are less of them to do.

Most of the eastern half of the house is now assembled as well, as you can see.

The obvious space below the overhang will be filled in with a fake stone clad wall which I will scribe by hand into styrene.

Here, then , are the two of them together for comparison.

Time to scratch some stonework next, I think.

The Wheels Of Commerce

Good news for everyone waiting on the SAR ballast wagon kit.

At long last we finally have some designs prepared for the missing items on the wagons which are to be made in brass and hopefully the first test etch will arrive with me very soon.

The bits in question include the ballast chute door mechanisms which you can see in this picture below.

The plan is to etch the cogs and the brackets which can be threaded onto brass wire and fixed in place on the wagons.

Other parts to be included on the fret are the small and large handwheels which control the brakes and the ballast doors as well as the hood which covers up the brake cylinders at either end.

Once these parts have been test and any necessary revisions made either to the photo-etching artwork or the cast components of the kit we can begin to go into production.

Needless to say I will keep you in touch with developments here on the blog.

Tanks A Lot

More details are emerging about the variations in the new batch of B wagons imported from South Africa to Wales earlier this year.

The specific area of concern is the vacuum reservoirs.

Himself tracked them down to Dinas during a week volunteering on the FR and it appears some of the six evidently had new tanks fitted when they were refurbished.

Not only have they changed position, to the same side as the brake cylinder, but there also appear to be a number of different designs of tank, as you can see below.

As Himself says, there's never a dull moment modelling the Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland.

The West Wing

I've started work on the second of the Oberon Wood houses.

If you recall from the last time these are built in two distinct blocks and it is the smaller, west facing half that I have begun with.

Although he dimensions are the same there are a number of variations in the size and layout of the windows.

This is the rear elevation and you can see that the new one, on the left, has a door on the ground floor whereas the other one on the right does not.

Similarly at the front, the new one, on the right,  has a much smaller window upstairs that its next door neighbour.

At the moment I just have the three sides you can see prepared.

The fourth wall, which faces onto the railway in Goat Cutting, is different again. It has three windows, two downstairs and one upstairs, which I will have to cut out.

The first house has a blank wall on this elevation because the houses are positioned close to one another.

However the upside of this arrangement is that the big wall, on the eastern side of this new house is blank whereas the first one had quite a number of windows including the rather complicated bay window I wrote about previously.

Swings and roundabouts....

Going Round In Circles

I'm preparing another pair of demo wagon kits.

These ones are destined to spend their lives running around a display track in the FR's shop in Porthmadog in the hope of enticing customers to invest in some of examples of my Boston Largs Works kits which they will find on sale within this beguiling emporium.

For those who are unable to get to Wales they are also available through the webshop www.festshop.co.uk

As you can see here John is getting an example of a 'standard' WHR DZ wagon and one of the 2nd generation B Wagons, although extra parts to model the high end SAR version of the DZ and a bike wagon conversion for the B are available on request.

Hopefully they can soon be joined by an example of the forthcoming ballast wagon.  Production of this kit will commence when I receive etches for the door mechanism and the hand wheels which are being prepared for me elsewhere.

Not too long to wait now, I hope.

Steps, Rails & All The Gear

I've been cracking on with the WHR Tool Van this week and it's almost there.

Although the progress doesn't look spectacular there are a lot of details that have been added that all contribute greatly to the look of the complete model.

The handrail on the end which I mentioned in the last post has been fixed in position now.

The usual SAR brake gear has been glued and assembled. Because it's essentially a flat DZ wagon it's just a case of fitting on the etched components designed for my resin kits, most obviously the V hangers and the hand wheels at each end.

I have also knocked up a pair of footsteps from brass strip which are positioned at the platform end of the wagon.

Being cheap - or what I prefer to see as sensible recycling - I did not go to the expense of buying in a pack of brass strip for this purpose, I just snipped a section of thin waste fret from a large A4 sheet that came from Narrow Planet to hold together 30 sets of bogie parts.

It needed to be thinned a little further with a file but it's much better for the soul that paying for a whole pack when you only require a 50mm length...

You might also be able to spot the remains a couple of the hinges that used to support the doors in the long-distant days when this was a proper DZ wagon.

Humble Pie

I've had my comeuppance for extolling the virtues of my homemade roofing slates here on the blog.

Himself logged on and had a look at the pictures and sent me a message saying: "Very nice, but aren't they a bit on the large side?"

I grabbed my research pictures of the house in question and started counting slates.

Dammit, he was right! (He usually is...)

The prospect of ripping off and relaying all the slates - only even more of them - didn't immediately appeal.

So out of curiosity I delved in my drawer and pulled out the remains of some sheets of Wills 4mm roofing slates I had left over. (I erroneously wrote last week that these were made by Slaters) and they were indeed much smaller than my paper ones and a much better match, in terms of the number of slates on each section of the roof.

You can compare below.

Fortunately I had just the right amount of sheet, in the right sizes, to cut some replacement roof sections.

So, a week on, the house is back where it was.

 

Oh well, some you win....