I recently had cause to reflect on the ultimate questions, and got little further than ’42’, or Leonard Cohen’s ‘do dah dum…’.  The root of this reflection was a decision to quit my long-standing remunerative employment for a ‘sabbatical’ of uncertain duration. Essentially I was jaded and in need of a change.  Ironically, in the couple of months since this change of circumstances, I have been too busy to do much blogging!

What I have been able to do is to attack the large list of ‘one day’ and ‘must get around to that’ projects, which has been great.

One of these is the 9mm scale bracket semaphore signal below.  This little job has been on the work bench far too long, but is now complete and I’m pretty pleased with it.  The photo has shown up one or two required paint touch ups and I need some better images, but other than that it is finished.

The signal is built from the NZF range of 9mm kits and parts (email us if you want to know more about these as they are not currently listed in the Emporium), although I did add a few 3D printed parts to speed things up a bit and gild the lily. The casting patterns here pre-date rapid prototyping by a few years though. Not obvious in the photo is that the counterweights are marked McKenzie & Holland, Melbourne. Not that this would be visible 99% of the time, but it was a bit of fun.  All the lamps are lit and the signals operate in the same way as the prototype.

Other than the signals, there has been a lot of activity on new products, custom work for other modellers and progress on my own projects. In short, plenty of stuff bubbling away that will doubtless appear here in due course.