Categories
Electronics Locomotives

A day of modelling progress

Thanks to Mark Tatlow for hosting today, and to Oly & Chris for great company. I think all four of us made progress on various projects. Mark was making holes in the side of a nice looking Gresley Buffet, and had made them disappear again by the end of the day.

My own projects were to try and complete the build of the MERG DCC system for SLAG’s Bankside project. I had to cut a new support for one of the PCBs and jigsaw it all into the case. I succeeded at the first task! Re-assembling the boards (it is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle), I discovered one of the internal connections wasn’t mating correctly, so that will need replacing in another session.

Here’s one of the boards, captured to record which colours I’m using for connections (note to self: green: 0vDC, Blue, +5vDC):

PCB and wiring harness

This one replaces the buzzers the system uses by default to tell you when there is a short or other fault. By translating that information onto CBUS, we’ll be able to have buzzers or LEDs at any control station. Hopefully those will be more useful in noisy exhibition halls.

For the afternoon, I dusted down the Tornado chassis I’ve been looking at for a while, and assembled two more links for the Walschaerts valve gear.

Categories
Locomotives P4

Published in MRJ: Exactoscale Wheels for Tornado

Yesterday, I was pleased to see an article I wrote a few months ago make it into print:

IMG_4857

Earlier this year, Paul Willis approached me to write this up, having seen the similar article I had written for the Scalefour societies newsletter. I was honoured to think something I was up to was worthy of MRJ, which is a magazine that sets an incredibly high standard for the models it features.

I don’t think Tornado will be ready for Scaleforum (this year), as I hoped when I wrote the piece, but progress is continuing!

Thank you Paul, and all involved in MRJ, for publishing my work! I’m very pleased with the result.

Categories
Locomotives

A Year Ago

Having started from a fresh kit, the first weekend of time I spent with Tornado was making some basic assembly decisions, and then getting started on the mainframe.

Given the kit’s design, the consensus of advice was to assemble it without the aid of a chassis jig. It is very carefully designed to fold up square and true. This seemed reasonable, but I certainly felt a bit wary getting started.

So far, the chassis seems to roll well as an 0-6-0, so the advice was sound!

After a weekend’s work I had:

Tornado mainframes, coupling rods and driving wheels

So far, assembled exactly as the excellent instructions suggested.