murphaph

I'm not sure if they are really required to be honest but I have a vague recollection of needing them when summing stereo to mono. Maybe I'm wrong but in any case it should be trivial. It may even be trivial to just stream everything to one channel as the ESU files are mono anyway, and then just connect one of the channels to the speaker. I think these boards are like twice as powerful as a Loksound 5 anyway so sacrificing half the power would see no dis-improvement.

I doubt it will finish at that though . A 111 (I think 8113) was buy it now at 300GBP and it was gone yesterday. That was actually "cheap" compared to what some of them sold for recently. This one will probably hit 300 at least I would imagine. I can only recommend the use of eBay bid snipers where you set your genuine max bid and walk away from the auction. You don't get sucked into the bidding fever that way and nobody pays more than they really wanted to. The only losers are sellers and eBay really. If everyone used a bid sniper, prices would be significantly lower on eBay.

Even if I had three pots to piss in I wouldn't pay the money being asked for these 071s. Just buy what is available from IRM and MM and be patient. Good things come to those that wait.

Sean, I'll take a look at the board in the morning. Mine arrived from China the other day. I was going to desolder the speaker connector completely as it's some proprietary one I think and I will just sum the stereo output to mono and solder directly to the board. I'm sure there are through holes to solder to, but I only looked quickly at the board before chucking it in the drawer so can't be certain. I think you just need a couple of 1k resistors to do that and job done.

That's gonna be so awesome.

I would have assumed a combination of powered track and RC would make the most sense: 12V or whatever permanent track voltage (don't need to worry about reversing loops being powered or point frogs being correctly polarised, just leave those "complicated bits" completely unpowered. The track can be dirty with unreliable pickup, as long as there's enough power being supplied to keep the on board batteries fully charged, there should be no limitation to run time. The track is just being used as a charging cable basically.

Excellent use of the blowtorch. I've seen that truck used on US gondola cars with dents put in them from the inside to simulate where the scrap iron crashed into the car over the years. It's definitely a technique I want to try out some day.

That is actually not a bad idea if nobody has a better suggestion! I had just assumed buying wheels individually would be cheaper but of course that's often not the case.

The ones on the Tara's would be grand. That sort of thing.

Hi all. I'm building up a pair of Dutch vans. I've assembled 21mm brass bogies from John and I have the Werkspoor bogies from SF to use decoratively. I have the 28mm pinpoint axles from the S4 society. Now all I'm missing is some wheels! This is not finescale. I have no intention of binning all my IRM wheels. They will all be simply regauged by pulling the wheels out. So I don't need to start adding finescale wheels to other stock. The IRM wheels are NMRA RP 110 are they not? Any suppliers for these wheels that are recommended? Should be simple but some of the suppliers have very long lists that I find hard to understand. Could someone point me at a wheel with the same profile as the IRM ones?

My nearest and dearest would be my furthest and angriest if she knew what it was all worth

Transfers applied. A mix of SSM and Railtec.

The upcoming 201 re-release should indicate what sort of price point MM is operating at I would have thought. That run can't be too big really as it's only covering missing more modern liveries. If the 201s cost €300 there won't be too many sold I reckon.

They're both hi-cubes, right?

Oh that's interesting. I never knew that!

Another work of art in the making! Why does the flywheel need tapering Eoin? Just so it fits inside the body?

I enquired about this with my German house insurer and was told (in writing) that a collection is a "normal" part of the contents of a house and did not need to be declared separately. I would strongly recommend everyone to maintain a spreadsheet with everything in their collection, including what it is, when it was bought, from whom and for how much. It's easy to forget stuff.

It might be worth a try but I wouldn't expect too much from adding filters simply because these model train "bass" speakers aren't comparable to a woofer etc. in your home audio setup. The travel of the speaker diaphragm is what determines its frequency response. The more travel, the lower the frequency, the more the bass. To get more travel, the speaker cone needs to get bigger. But these speakers are hemmed in by our models so in reality they are at best all mid-range/tweeters speakers or even pure tweeters. The other thing to note is that for some folks, me included, the sound should not be overpowering. If you have a few sound equipped locos running simultaneously you may well not want to hear the one on the other side of the room to where you are standing. It's not realistic to me to be able to hear a loco that is a scale 2 miles away at almost the same volume as the one I'm right beside. I want the sound to fade in as a loco approaches and fade out as it moves away from me. But this part is entirely subjective. If you want huge volume from your locos all the time that's fine too. Mounting a bare speaker is always going to be a bad idea as the sound waves coming from each face of the diaphragm are 180 degrees out of phase (ie when the diaphragm moves forward and creates a positive pressure wave towards your ear, an equal in amplitude negative pressure wave is created from the rear face of the diaphragm and this pressure wave follows very closely behind the first one, largely cancelling out the total sound. That's why speakers have enclosures, to capture that negative pressure wave. They work very poorly without one. A speaker mounted tightly to the inside of the model body however is effectively mounted in an enclosure, though almost certainly not a very good one as they should have some relation to the speaker size which I forget now.

Nice seeing the PKP stuff. I've taken the Berlin-Warszawa-Express a couple of times now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Warszawa-Express

Even the €235 was the cheapest I've seen one for a while. They are getting that and more in sterling.

It's the DC Kits one Noel. I distinctly remembered reading your posts about that so I washed them in Isopropyl alcohol and gave the primer coat a good scratch with a toothpick when it was dry to make sure it had taken properly before I started masking etc so I'm sure you saved me from making that mistake as I doubt I would have considered it. Probably would have given them a quick wipe to degrease them but I wouldn't have completely submerged and really washed them. Need to do the transfers next, when I get a chance. Busy digging holes outside this week lol: I would recommend using a grey primer on these resin models. It's kind of hard to see where you have primed when the primer is almost the same colour as the bare resin, which was the case with these. I used white and it was a bit of a pain.

I had a change of heart in the end and sprayed them black with the sides

Yeah I'm gonna weather these too at some stage The grey is actually quite dark, but it's lit up very brightly in the spray booth in the above pic.

Hi Jonathan, yeah I've seen other models painted black but I have seen a pic in a book where the roof looks dark grey, definitely not the same black as the sides and ends anyway. It may be that the black just faded over time to this grey look, in which case it's ok as I'm not modelling these vans new, but already several years old with faded, sun bleached roofs.

I went with the Revell granite grey number 69 on the roofs of the rebuilt Dutch vans. I doubt anyone would have a code for the "correct" shade and this looks ok to me. Just the black to do now