Sawmill progress

Just some progress on the sawmill diorama. No “clever” comments this time….

The walls are now attatched to the newly finished floor. Quite a challenge to get everything lined up for gluing together. The walls are over a 30 cm long (1´), and quite flimsy. All the 28 floor beams needed to be aligned up correctly. It might have been easier to build the floor as a subassembly like the walls.

Next step is to build the roof. Subroof made of wood, then corrugated aluminium roofing. Good tutorials for painting corrugated siding wanted!

The mill part of a pretty large diorama/testtrack

The project was started before discovering the famous Silverwood stain, so all wood is stained using A-west-Weather-it straight from the bottle.
No further weathering yet, suggestions for how to proceed is much welcomed!

Even if the protoype was small, it was served by rail. I really like the simple timber loading dock. No logs longer than 24´need apply!

Blades for the saw. Chemical blackening, then polished with ground pencil graphite. Need a bit more shine as the model will represent an operating mill. But research has shown that this type of sawmills have pretty dark blades, even if they are still in operation. Suggestions for getting a bit lighter and shinier finish, anyone?

The interior of the mill. My saw will be somewhat generic, as the parts I have obtained is for a slightly different saw,

I am taking some other liberties with the prototype as well, I want a rusty roof instead the wooden roofing, and I will probably use an stationary steam engine to power the saw. My model is going to be set in the thirties, so the prototype´s electric motor is not very appropriate.

I promised no clever remarks this time, but you have to suffer a little soapbox rant here at the end:

Don´t postphone taking all the pictures and measurements you need! I came back for some more pictures and measurments, and this is what I found:

This picture is taken from almost the exact same spot as the exterior shot above.
Grab that camera and yardstick *now*!

Childs Play

I guess most model railroaders at some time have tried to explain “The Others” that model building is really a hobby for adults.
Well,this picture is not a good choice to back up the argument:

It was just meant to be another “work in progress” picture of a sawmill project in 0-scale, I discovered later that it had sort of an infantile quality!

Here are some more mature pictures of the project:

It was by no means childs play to get the tops of the pillars really level. I ended up making a separate board with the holes drilled with a drillpress. The holes “on site” was drilled slighly larger with a hand drill than the dowels.

Code 83 rail was spiked to the pillars after predrilling holes for the spikes. The wood in the dowels is suprisingly hard, and even spiking into endwood was impossible without predrilling. In any case, predrilling avoids the risk of splitting.

The sawmill is just a small affair, but very common in the countryside in my part of Norway:

On a side note, it is so typical of my non-systematic approch to modelling that my first industry for my *mining* railroad is a sawmill. You would think that an ore bin or something would be a more logical choice. But as they say, common sense ain´t all that common.

By the way, here is a picture of the ore bin I will choose for my *next* project:

It is gold in them thar hills!

This weekend it was time for another out of town experince. Some friends have a cabin in the mountains very close to the mainline between Oslo and Trondheim.

A bonus in addition to the great food, wine, company and general scenery is that that the area is very interesting from a modellers point of view. It might in fact be one of the most spectacular stretches on the Norwegian railway network. A lot of classic images like this have been taken in this mountain pass:

The locations around the actual railroad are very familier to me, but I have never drifted very far from the railroad tracks.

So I was totally taken by suprise when we came by this old roadbridge when we went for a little hike today:

Sort of looks like a Colorado narrow gauge railroad bridge!

You can´t carve this, individual stones is the only route to go, me thinks.

The other abutement is cast concrete for variety, the builders knew how to please a modeller!

Nice bridge, but would we like it even better with a set of rusty, narrow gauge tracks? Oh, yes we would.

It´s time to check the drawers for Grandt Line NBWs!

This bridge of course cries out to be modelled. Fortunately, the local Model Railroad club has a large scene that is based on this area. Maybe I will pass this one on to a fellow clubmember, but then maybe I will not…

Another project started

I have the attention span of a gnat, so I launch new projects at an alarming rate. Of course, few of them are ever finished.
One of my future projects is a saloon coach in 0m gauge:

Since the main focus will be on the fantastic interior of the coach, the mechanism must be strictly under the floor.

I found some inspiration for how to approach the problem of building powered trucks on the website of the excellent british modelling collective, Clag.
I have a bit more space to play with than these 4mm scale (1/76 ) modellers, so I began toying with the idea of using a somewhat larger Faulhaber precision motor with an integrated gearhead.

I purchased an 15mm X 12mm motor (Including the gear!) from an german company named Lemo Solar to test the concept . The plan is to use up to 4 traction motors just like the prototype.

The size of the motor looks just right besides the wheelset it is supposed to power:

But what about sound? For some reason I suspected that such small gearheads could be real whiners, and I did not want to invest in 4 of the little buggers just to find out that they screamed like a choir of banshees.

So I recorded the sound of the engine and compared it to the engine I used for the mechansm of my Westinghouse engine. That engine is whisper quiet and a really smooth runner.

Here are the results:
Sound recording of 1512 motor (.waw)
Sound rcording of 2224 motor (.waw)

The sound of the geared motor is not that bad, remember that the mtor was placed almost on the top of the microphone. The second recording sounds quite noisy, but in reality, that engine as mentioned above is really quiet.

This might seem a strange subject to make such a fuzz about, but I am planning to run my models “al fresco” with no artificial sound added, so I want the model motors to sound nice on their own. No sound decoder in other words.

But if these tiny babie really work in practice remains to be seen. I will get another 1512 motor, and make a working dummy. Not a lot of parts involved to make a working boggie, really. Four pulley wheels, four teflon bearings and two sideframes.

Sounds like something even I should be able to finish!

Alive and kicking

The 1919 ASEA engine running on the Thamshavnbanen

I have not given up neither the blog or the modelling, but more activity on the modelling front than the blogging one. It might change, but a nice postcard from the Thamshavnbanen is all you get this time.

Myth debunked? (Boy, that was fast…)

Researching my last post, some very alarming material came to my attention. I found a very fine online scratchbuilding tutorial that among other things also shows pictures of wood siding treated with the Greenberg/Nash method. I hate to admit this, but it looks great. I have a sneaky feeling I did not read the NG&SL articles thoroughly enough, since it has escaped me that an over-stain with Flo-stain natural pine is central to the concept.
Hmm… Maybe the biggest myth really is the claim that Driftwood is an overrated product?
The professor is still out on that one, and he will hopefully be back with some research that can settle the dispute.
Check out the tutorial yourself. Even if you are not remotely interested in these Driftwood matters, the tutorial offer some very good building and painting tips. Among them –surprise, surprise, an alternative to the techniques involving flo-stains. The results look every bit as good.

The biggest myth in model railroading?

A very bleak start on the year

No, this post is not a comment on the current financial crisis, it ia an followup to the post weathering wood .
One of the challenges when you use real wood and want that silvery, almost boney look is that untreated wood has a base color that is more yellow than white.
In a very rare inspired moment it struck met that maybe the thing is to bleach the wood before you stain it?

It´s alive!

There has at least been some progress since the “Paralysis by analysis” post.
The engine is now actually in running condition!
A great milepost for the project.

Those raw brass parts in the PBA post looked quite difficult to get together, but in the end I was able to assemble them into a functioning mechanism. As a self-trained model engineer I had to go real slowly. But even then I was not able to achieve standards anywhere close to professional engineers. But the rubber band drive is quite a good idea for amateurs. In theory, this is a very crude concept. But it is very forgiving to engineering sloppiness, so I think the engine runs far better than it would have done with a gear tower transmission.

Where are all the Model Railroad blogs?

The blogsphere is supposedly full of blogs of all kinds.
So why is it that I find so few MR-related blogs when I search for them on Google?

I would like to get tips on good (or even bad) MR-blogs. They just have to be out there somewhere, right?

Thinking about it, I would like tips on blogs dealing with all kinds of scale modelling.
Some oft the best modelling I have seen is by military modellers.
For instance, check out this site:
Missing Links

To balance thing out, here is a link to a photo-gallery of some of the greatest civilian modelling I have seen:
Chuck Doan´s photoalbum

Never mind that the greatest diorama on that site contains a barn and a fordson tractor. No trains…

Well, “modelling racism” is not my thing!

But here is a great model railroad link:
Railroad Line Forums is the best US discussion forum when it comes to MR.

But what do you think?