Sleeper Painting: Experiment Number 1

I'm still trying to clear enough space on my desk to get cracking on Hudson's Pizza but I have now cut and gapped all 90 sleepers I will need for the circle of track.

While I was really happy with how my first attempt at hand built track turned out I've been wondering if I can make it look better and slightly more natural. Specifically I was thinking it might be possible to improve the sleepers. On the test piece I simply painted them with RailMatch sleeper grime. There were two problems with this approach. Firstly there was no texture to the sleeper tops and secondly the colour was very uniform.

What you can see on the left is my first attempt at trying something different. The sleeper isn't soldered to the test track just placed underneath for the photo. Basically I ran a file along the sleeper to add some wood grain and then painted it in roughly the same way I do my small wooden bodied wagons albeit with an extra round of dry brushing using Model Color London Grey to give a slightly more silvery appearance. If I'd painted this in situ then there would have been a bit more variation as it would have been difficult to dry brush right up against the rails. Now I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with the final colour but I'm also finding it difficult to work out if I prefer this to the block colour of the previous attempt. Any thoughts or suggestions?

And before anyone says anything, yes I know Hudson's would likely have used their own metal sleeper track system for the test track, but I'm only basing my layout on it and I think wooden sleepers will be easier to model.... possibly. Maybe I should have a go at doing a metal sleeper?

Awaiting Dispatch

I've got quite used to the idea of people buying items I've designed. After all I opened Penistone Railway Works just over two years ago and have sold a grand total of 32 items, but because Shapeways handles everything for me I never see the items people order. Designing for Narrow Planet is different as we pack and ship the items people order.

As you may remember the first things I designed as part of Narrow Planet were the L&B roof detailing parts. Within a day of announcing the parts we had a few orders (not surprising really given they started out as a commission) and as you can see the first sets are now all packaged up and ready to post out.

While I was really happy with how the models turned out there is something a little special about seeing them all packaged and ready to go.

Hudson-Hunslet Mockup

Given that it will be a while until there is any more progress to show on the Hudson-Hunslet diesel build (I need to update the 3D models and then order some more prints) I thought I'd post a couple more mockup photos to give a slightly better idea how the final model might look; the cabless variety at least. I managed to pull the motor of the chassis so that it would fit into the body again and added a whitemetal driver figure (item number MNV8 from Dart Castings) to give this...

You may notice that a) the driver is held on with blutak and b) he only has one leg! Given I wasn't sure on which figure would be suitable or fit, I designed the chair without the seat cushion pad. The idea being that you'd use a piece of miliput or DAS clay to form the cushion to suit the figure. As for only having one leg, well I was trying to bend the leg of the figure to see if both feet would fit in the footwell when the leg snapped off, and I couldn't be bothered trying to glue it back in place for this mockup.

Supplying the Horse Power

As I mentioned in the previous post the small diesel locomotive needs a chassis and I intend to build this one myself as I couldn't find anything appropriate to use. My approach to this was to 3D print the chassis and then add the gears, wheels, and a motor that I mentioned in another previous post.

The first decsion to be made is what material to use for the chassis? Mostly I print in the Frosted Ultra Detail (FUD) material from Shapeways as I need the fine detail this material allows for. With the chassis though I'm more interested in making it robust than detailed so I ordered my Mk 1 design in black strong and flexible and black detail as well as FUD. That order represents increasing price and decreasing strength and so if the black strong and flexible material works I'll get the best of both worlds.

Due to the different printing tolerances of the three materials the first job was to check that the chassis actually fitted within the body. Interestingly the FUD print doesn't fit at all. The saddle section where the motor will sit is too wide for the gap in the footplate. I find this very odd given that it should be the most accurate dimension wise. Anyway FUD is the most expensive and weakest material so I'm fine with it ruling itself out of contention. Both the black chassis (ordering the dyed versions seemed sensible to avoid having to get paint near the wheels and motor) fitted perfectly so I moved on to trying to assemble the strong and flexible version.

My preference for using the strong and flexible material is that as well as being the cheapest option it should be the most hard wearing. My hope is that I can get away without bearings and just let the parts run freely in the chassis without it wearing away. I deliberately made the holes in the print the same size as the parts (it's easy to remove material, but impossible to add it back), so I started by reaming out the holes for the axles and layshaft. Once I had what seemed like reasonable clearances I assembled the parts. This was very fiddly and time consuming. Most of the problems came from me not reaming out parts far enough but mainly dealing with the pulling a wheel off each axle and then refitting it. I guess I need a wheel puller and press; any suggestion on where or which model to get would be most appreciated. Anyway after battling away for a little while I ended up with this.

As you can see turning the layshaft by hand turns the wheels nicely. I did make a couple of mistakes though. Firstly I should have opened up the holes a little more, as it ended up requiring quite a bit of force to turn the layshaft. Secondly I managed not to keep the worm gears at the ends of the chassis which means the layshaft moves when changing direction before the wheels start to turn. For a first attempt though I think it proves the general design.

Unfortunately from this point on it was one disaster after another. First I added the main pulley to the layshaft and in an attempt to stop the worm gears moving pushed it up to the chassis. This had the desired affect but made the layshaft even harder to turn. I then realised that given the pulley location I'd need to push the pulley on the motor as far down it's shaft as possible. Doing this I managed to drive the shaft through the plastic back plate of the motor. Ooops! Amazingly the motor still rotates under power. Even then I had to offset the motor from the designed position to make the pulleys match up at which point the combined chassis no longer fits in the body. And to top it all off the motor can't provide enough torque to turn the tight drive shaft.

This was attempt number 1 though so I'm not too disheartened by the outcome. I've proved that the general layout seems to work and that I can use the black strong and flexible plastic which should allow me to avoid using bearings. I also now know that I could do with making a few adjustments to the body as well to give a little extra clearance in a few places. Altogether I'm happy with the progress.

Twenty-Four (Frosted Ultra Detail) Horses

Yesterday saw the arrival of yet another delivery from Shapeways. It was a nice large box so contains fodder for a number of posts, but I thought I'd start by showing you all the body for the Hudson-Hunslet 24HP diesel locomotive the render of which you've seen a few posts ago.

I'm really happy with how it has turned out. There are a few stepping lines on some of the large surfaces, but as there is no rivet detail this should be easy to clean up. Of course the body still needs quite a few parts before it is complete but these will be etched parts and I've yet to draw these up. I'm hoping I can use the same body with different etched parts to build a few different variants but we will have to see how that goes.

I was actually slightly surprised as to just how small the model is. I don't know why it surprised me; with a wheelbase of just 2' 10" (which scales out to 11.3mm) it was never going to be huge, but holding it brings home just how tiny it is. Next step will be to sort out a powered chassis for it. There were parts for this in the same order but I'm going to build the suspense and make you wait for another post to see how successful that is (hint, I don't know as I haven't built it yet).

Pizza Track Template: Take 2

Another day, another track template. After posting about the track template yesterday I took another look at it and realised I'd messed up. The template consists of four pieces of paper stuck together and I initially thought that the white space at the edges of the sheet was intentional so cut them off before joining the sections to give a single template. Unfortunately that wasn't the case and cutting of the paper meant the circle wasn't completely circular. You can see this in the join at the front in the photo from yesterday.

I also decided that I'd probably got the sleepers a little too close together on the original template, so rather than just reprinting I've generated a new template with only 90 sleepers (down on the 120 sleepers on yesterday's attempt). I think this looks better and given how tedious and time consuming cutting the sleepers is I think it's a good decision.

Pizza Track Template

As my modelling area starts to reappear from under the detritus of Christmas I've made a small start on my new Hudons's Pizza layout; I've designed and printed the track template.

The next job will be to cut the 120 sleepers required for the full circle before I can think of doing any actual track laying. This time I'll also remember to gap the sleepers before soldering on the rails, especially as it will be much harder to do afterwards on a circle of track than it was on the straight test piece I built before.