Gauge Adjustable

So I think I've now got the 16mm scale chassis from I P Engineering back to where it was before it suffered from rust. As well as painting it (to stop the rust reoccuring) I've also made some modifications and while I could write about them I thought I'd try something new and have shot a short video where I talk through the changes I've made.

I don't really like the sound of my voice when I hear it back, so I don't think this will become a frequent occurance, but it would be great to know what people think about the video and if they think I should do more posts like this.

And Now For Something Completely Different

During the summer my eldest son enjoyed doing some bark rubbings and this triggered a memory from when I was (much younger) of doing something similar, but different. Specifically it reminded me of doing brass rubbing. I have a vauge recollection that the first time I did this was on some actual brasses at a brass rubbing centre somewhere in Wales: I want to say Caernarfon, but I could be wrong. Mostly though I did lots and lots of rubbings from two resin kits that I was bought: one was of Robert the Bruce and the other was the Black Prince. Unfortunately I don't know what happened to my own kits but it turns out you can still buy them, along with some other designs. Unfortunately they were out of stock of the Black Prince kit, but I bought one of the Robert the Bruce ones and it really is identical to the one I had and more importantly Toby thought it was fantastic when the prince suddenly appeared on the paper.

Of course with only one design Toby soon got bored at which point my wife made the suggestion that maybe I could design and 3D print some more, maybe even some train related things. Turns out she was thinking of Thomas the Tank Engine but I went in a slightly different direction.

When I started working on the 3D printed details for the 16mm scale Simplex I built one of the first things I did was to model the complex Simplex logo which I thought was going to adorn one side of the radiator.

In the end it turned out that logo didn't appear on the model of locomotive I was building and so it never went beyond the test print, but it seemed like something that you could take a rubbing from, so I scaled it up to as big as would fit in my printer and printed another copy. This was then stuck with double sided tape to a small offcut of plywood.

The 3D print itself if quite nice and may actually paint up well as a separate thing, but what I really wanted was to see how well it worked as a "brass" rubbing.

Both Toby and I are pretty happy with that. In fact it looks even better in real life as I had issues trying to take the photo; the black art paper doesn't seem to photograph as black more of a gray and the brass crayon reflects the light well which I think was confusing my phone. Either way you get the idea.

Anyone have ideas for other things we could print and use as a brass?