Tullygrainey

Thank you Killian, very much appreciated. However, much as I'd like to claim this one as a scratchbuild, it's a NorthStar kit for a change

Me neither, David. In fact, I'm not a fan of fitting brakes of any type. There's always the risk of brakes shorting on wheels, especially on compensated axles where the wheels are moving up and down and tilting so I tend to play safe and end up with a bigger gap between wheel and brake than I'd like. In some of the scratchbuilds, I've used plastic brake gear from Gibsons which eliminates the risk of shorts but gluing these in place is never as secure as soldering metal ones. Swings and roundabouts

I've been avoiding fitting the brake gear to the PPs chassis up till now though some of the work was already done. Brake hangers using 0.7mm brass rod were soldered in at the time the chassis frames were assembled and the brakes themselves were made up and drilled to fit. Stringing it all together was tricky but slightly easier than I'd been dreading. This loco has brake pull rods on the outside of the wheels. I used these to help line up the brakes and solder them onto the hangers. Cross shafts were then fitted and soldered into holes in the bottom of the brakes. Finally the pull rods were soldered onto the cross shafts which were then trimmed and filed to length. I fitted the outside brake pull rods as far outboard as possible to allow for the wheels to be removed if ever necessary. The superstructure now has most of its details added and is just about finished. I scribed a horizontal line along each side of the boiler to guide drilling the holes for the handrail knobs which were superglued in. The white metal castings were epoxied on. If this was a tank engine we'd be done now but there are the makings of a tender still in the box. Alan

Wonderful modelling. That's a very drunk passenger in the last carriage.

That’s a useful tool David!

More PPs. The boiler came ready rolled which was a real help. It just needed tightening up a bit on the rolling bars. Boiler bands can be a bit of a struggle to fit. Three cheers for fibreglass pencils to clean up the mess afterwards. The boiler needed quite a bit cut out of it to clear the motor, gearbox and wheels. The danger is always cutting too much away and leaving an unsightly gap somewhere so it's a time consuming exercise - boiler in, mark it up, boiler out, cut a bit, boiler back in again, fit the chassis, check for clearance, repeat until done. The smokebox has three layers and needed a lot of heat to get everything soldered up. I had the temperature controlled iron turned up full and still it was struggling. A trial run at Loughan Quay PPs.mov Time for a tidy up, more fibreglass pencil and a scrub with scouring powder.

That’s what underbellies are for. A place to hide all the solder Lovely work

That’s shaping up beautifully. I like the tight arrangement of the industrial buildings. Lots of shapes, levels and angles. Even in mockup they look great.

I wish I had the definitive answer to that one! The challenge, as David says, is that there's no 'concrete' colour as such since age, texture and weathering affect the colour and appearance of concrete in widely varying degrees, not to mention the ingredients used to make the stuff in the first place. My experiences in wrestling with this suggest to me that a single flat colour won't look convincing. A mixture of shades in the finished surface will look much better. I generally use cheap artists' acrylics from tubes in three colours - Mars Black, Titanium White and Raw Umber. Mixed in different proportions, these can produce an infinite variety of suitable tones. The process is distinctly trial and error. I just prod away until it looks right to my eye. Thin washes allow different colours to show through in random places on the final surface. I think we're agreed too that talc can add a bit of texture. Some dry brushing using the raw colours and sometimes some yellow/green to hint at moss or algae also contributes to the overall look. For largish areas of concrete, remember that it will likely have been laid in bays, with lines of tar between the sections. For modelling this, I scribe lines into the card surface and run black paint into these. Cracks can be modelled by drawing lines with a pencil. I'll leave the last word to the Grand Master, Gordon Gravett in his book Modelling Grassland and Landscape Detailing (Wild Swan, 2013). "For concrete slabs, I use Humbrol matt enamels: No.110 Natural Wood, No. 64 Light Grey, No. 34 White and just a touch of No. 81 Pale Yellow in varying proportions".

More work on Kieran's GNR(I) PPs. Pickups fitted and shouted at until they worked reliably... IMG_3925.MOV ... then a start made on the superstructure. Tricky stuff this, with a lot of soldering edge-to-edge in two planes. Difficult to keep it both straight and neat. This one will need a bit of filler here and there. The instructions recommend making cab beading from soft copper wire soldered round the edge of the curve, not on the face of the etch. I found this just about impossible to do neatly so resorted to my usual method of using scrap etch strip and filing it back. The little crankpin splashers were a job in themselves, each one laminated from two bits then soldered in place on the main splashers. I spent as much time puzzling over the instructions as I did making them. As is often the case with etched kits, head scratching and soldering require roughly the same amounts of time.

By the time you’ve finished the Bredin, you won’t even notice the burns any more Great progress JB!

Ah,

Wow! I've found the High Level Coreless motor range to be high quality and a pretty good replacement for the late lamented Mashimas. There's one with a 30mm barrel and they all come in around £30.

No, it's a High Level iron core. It's painted matt black to help disguise its presence under the saddle tank.

Patrick's Countess of Antrim is back with me for a little remedial work. The attached video is the Countess's chassis. Can anyone explain the strange groaning noise it makes on startup? It's not dry bearings or gearbox noise or anything of that mechanical sort because it didn't make these noises before it was sound-chipped. The noise is still there when the sound is turned on but largely masked by the chuffing. Is it some sort of mismatch between motor and chip? Incidentally, my BCDR 2-4-0 No 6, with a similar sound installation and motor does exactly the same thing. IMG_3947.MOV