Atlantic's works: Portable layout - Scenic details next

[kimballthurlow]

.....
Here's a reminder of the mis-match of cornice heights (and some other features) between a Mousa D303 on the left, and the un-touched side of the "rough" D & S D301 on the left.
...

Hello Graeme,

Sorry to interrupt this interesting thread which I follow as much from admiration as from engrossment.
I was wondering if you could edit the above post.
Should one of the "left" be a "right"?
Otherwise I can no longer follow the sense of the article.

Thank you in advance.
Kimball

[Woodcock29]

Graeme the cornice on that D.301 looks much like what mine do. I actually use the method Dan suggested and make a false ceiling as part of the roof which can then be removed. Strips of plastic card are then used along the edge of the roof and down below the base of the ceiling to hide any gaps.
Andrew

What I neglected to say in the above was that when I add the ceiling I do set it fractionally above the base of the roof so the sides of the roof do overhang the top of the sides marginally. This means the extra strip I add does provide more of an overhang. Whether this is significantly too much I'm not sure but photos do indicate there is some overhang.
Andrew

[Woodcock29]

Further to my comments above here is a photo I took of the 6 wheel Howlden BT(4) at the Vintage Carriage Trust at Ingrow on the KWVR. You can see the degree of overhang of the cornice.
Andrew

[Atlantic 3279]

.....
Here's a reminder of the mis-match of cornice heights (and some other features) between a Mousa D303 on the left, and the un-touched side of the "rough" D & S D301 on the left.
...

Hello Graeme,

Sorry to interrupt this interesting thread which I follow as much from admiration as from engrossment.
I was wondering if you could edit the above post.
Should one of the "left" be a "right"?
Otherwise I can no longer follow the sense of the article.

Thank you in advance.
Kimball

Good idea! Now done. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Atlantic 3279]

Further to my comments above here is a photo I took of the 6 wheel Howlden BT(4) at the Vintage Carriage Trust at Ingrow on the KWVR. You can see the degree of overhang of the cornice.
Andrew

I agree that there is an overhang, but my impression from that photograph and others tends to be that the cornice alone stands proud of the more or less matching levels of the skin of the down-turned edge of the roof and the beading on the carriage side.

[Atlantic 3279]

Cornices are now lowered on all of my D & S low-roofed Howlden vehicles, awith the paintwork touched up and blended in as best I could without taking on an enormous re-painting job. The roofs now have more visible depth and the side heights are reduced, giving better compatibility with the appearances of the newly completed Bill Bedford 3D prints, although the differences between the visible depths of solebar and the thicknesses of stepboards remain. I've taken some pictures today which lack sharpness and proper colour because of the very poor daylight beneath thick rain cloud, also because I wasn't in a mood to fetch my halogen floodlights and try to set them up "just so". Anyway, here's how the two versions of the ordinary third now compare:

Here's the whole selection set up with the new BB vehicles nearest the camera and then the D&S BCL before the D&S six wheelers, thus dodging the juxtaposition of underframes that should match yet do not match. We'll have to imagine that this is a two portion train that splits somewhere en route:

In a "stand off" view, with enough vehicles in the train, a much more mixed up arrangement still looks reasonable. What other loco could I possibly have posed at the front?

I decided to try to take some pictures of my enlarged set of Howlden-style clerestories too. Those certainly would not fit on the 4ft long section of board on which, two and a half years ago, I had pinned some Peco BH points and SMP track as a temporary "new layout" test piece (and have still got no further). I had to move into the loft and try to find a section of my neglected and rarely used layout up there on which I could set up some sort of picture. It isn't easy because the relatively narrow baseboards around the loft edges don't really offer the opportunity to stand back with the camera and photograph a train "in the landscape" from an angle that mostly shows the side of the train - unless you want to fill most of the image with things that are NOT part of the layout! I've therefore finished up with a rather more "head on" view than I would have liked, and even after adjusting the colour to tone down the green cast that was created by the fluorescent tube lighting it isn't ideal, but until I can set up a picture on a more spacious layout this is the best I can do.

[mick b]

Nice work, which version is actually correct re the Solebars ?.

[manna]

G'Day Gents

Lovely looking coaches, layouts not bad looking as well (we don't see it very often) and doesn't 4744 get around ??

manna

[Atlantic 3279]

The proper appearance of the solebars and upper stepboards may be as per the image here:
https://www.vintagecarriagestrust.org/gnr589.htm

Perhaps the D & S version, or the way I made them, over-empahasizes the depth of the solebar and makes the stepboard look under-noursihed, but probably the 3D printed version is worse and takes things too far the other way? What do others think?

4744, one of the earlier Hornby re-incarnations of the Mainline / Dapol legacy item, is certainly capable of grinding its way around the layout if allowed to do so. The open frame motor (insufficiently braced?) on a plastic mount inside a sound-box strikes again! The green Mainline version I originally had could grind even more loudly until I traced the worst of the noise back to loosely joined motor frame plates. I was then able to insert a packing piece to stop much of the vibration.

[MikeTrice]

Does this help? Not shown on the drawing is the solebar height which is 11".

[Atlantic 3279]

Very handy Mike, thank you. That seems to confirm what I thought I could see from photographs, namely a narrow strip of solebar also showing below the upper stepboard.
If I remember rightly, and that is by no means certain, the D&S 6 wheelers probably had fold-up, half-etched, long tabs with raised bolt-head detail on the inner edge of the upper stepboard strips, those long tabs requiring to be soldered to the solebar faces, probably over another set of even longer tabs that carry the lower stepboards. I can't remember whether there was any instruction or any scope for folding things in such a way that the upper stepboard would be made to sit any higher up. At the time of building them I was simply glad to have some kits to build that appeared to give almost all of the correct features, so I just "built the kit", making single right-angle folds in the tabs at the inner edge of the stepboard, and aligning the end of each tab with the top edge of the solebar, probably being quite ignorant of the exact height at which the stepboards ought to be.
The arrangement incorporated in the D&S bogie vehicle, the BCL, appears to be more accurate, the stepboard evidently being a separate piece that I had to add to the solebar, inserting short tabs on the stepboard into slots just above the lower edge of the solebar.

[Chas Levin]

... I must be mad to bother with it all for such a small eventual alteration to appearance.....

Ha - no, not at all IMHO: I find that once I've noticed something wrong that I know I can put right, it will not stop bothering me until I sort it out. Sometimes I'll try and ignore it for a few days, tell myself I'll be able to live with it... but I always know when I'm kidding myself!
Mind you, other times, I'll say 'nah - that'll fade from sight in time' and it does, and I realise weeks or months later that I can barely remember what I was so bothered about .
Well done for height alterations, nice job .

[Atlantic 3279]

I've been making a fairly large batch of resin castings in recent days. I knew before I started that at least one of the necessary moulds was past its best. When new, the silicone rubber moulds are supple, smooth and almost "moist" to the touch. Repeated casting in the moulds gradually makes the parts that come into contact with the resin feel very matt and dry, with cracks beginning to show in areas that have to be flexed. While the cured resin parts easily from a new mould, it shows an increasing tendency to grab on to the older mould surfaces, eventually tearing pieces out especially where a thin ridge of rubber projects into the resin, or where there's a sharp exposed corner.
For one reason or another, good or bad, I felt greatly disinclined to make any new moulds unless I was absolutely forced to do so, and nothing vital had thus far torn out of the older moulds I wanted to use. Based on the behaviour of new moulds I've never developed the habit of using any additional release agent, although I seem to remember some years ago Phil Traxson mentioning use of silicone spray as a dodge to try to get an older mould to survive one of two more cycles of casting, but I haven't tried that. What I have however now proven by experience is that a thoroughly smoothed out thin smear of Vaseline on the faces of the old mould results in release of the casting much more readily and seems to postpone the expected tearing out of vulnerable details by quite a number of casting cycles. The Vaseline MUST be very thin and thoroughly smoothed out, as any blobs that are not smoothed will leave impressions in the casting. All small or narrow recesses in the mould have to be cleared of accumulated Vaseline using a slim, rounded-end probe before any casting is attempted, otherwise details will not cast cleanly (or at all), so it is a bit of a faff, but it's a time and cost saver if the making of a new mould is likely to involve a lot of either one of those commodities.

[Atlantic 3279]

Resin casting session finished for the time being, outdoor jobs and cycling trips curtailed by weather and reduced hours of daylight, household improvements and maintenance paused for a while, and I decided it was time to do more than just contemplation or investigation of model making ideas. I wanted some quick results for start, to spur my enthusiasm for more, so a couple of days ago I started by delving into the accumulation of wagon kits and putting together a Cambrian Models kit for an LNER six plank open wagon. That involved in no hardship, save for minimal cleaning up of flash so as to get a really close fit of parts:

I then thought that a D & S etched kit for a GNR ballast brake looked pretty and would go nicely with a couple of ballast wagons passed on to me by a friend. The illustration on the packet, and the etch within, both looked at first glance to be free of tricky, time-consuming details that would have to be built up from a multitude of fiddly little bits, so I made a start. It is going quite well, but as usual, I had grossly underestimated the amount of work involved...

All of those handrails that have to be cut and bent to exact length, spaced off the body evenly, aligned neatly and persuaded to form those T-shaped joints certainly soaked up time and patience, as did the forming and fitting of the corner lamp irons. Those not shown here, which went on the ends later, were much easier to deal with.

Although there's probably little need (if any in OO) for the provided rocking W-iron at one end of this short wheelbase van, I've fitted it "rocking" rather than soldered-up solid, but I've added that z-shaped piece of springy nickel-silver wire to provide gentle downward springing of both sides of the unit. The idea is that the springing will help to limit any wobbling of the van, and prevent it from dropping into any crossing gaps that are not quite as "finescale" as they ought to be.
Unfortunately the instructions, and the published photographs of these vans are a bit short on information about the exact layout of the operating gear for the eight-shoe clasp brakes, so I've modified the parts that were included for a four-shoe linkage to give a logical but sketchy representation of what little is evident from combined study of photographs and of the four-shoe layout diagram in the kit.
Coming soon-ish, stepboards and body strapping, but I need firstly to think further about the sequence of jobs as there are various whitemetal castings to add too, such as axleboxes, buffers and end stanchions. Ideally, I almost feel as if I should add "everything before everything else", but that's not possible! Some of it may have to be glued rather than soldered, so long as it isn't likely to get knocked off again, but the kind of glue and the right time to use it depends upon when I might need to do any soaking or scrubbing to get rid of flux residues...
Maybe I'm thinking about it too much?

[mick b]

I built my one a few years ago, make sure you cut the glazing for the Birdcage Lookout before you go too far into the build. Gluing the roof on was also fun !!.
The go for silly money on ebay !!