The last vehicular distraction was self-inflicted, but this one came by email from Mark Andrews asking if a gig kit was a possibility. The answer to which is absolutely, and here are the first images. The original gig (see here: https://nzfinescale.com/cart-before-the-horse/ ) was drawn by Mark based on a gig in the Fielding museum. That drawing was…
Time for a practical post with some tips on soldering up etchings and castings. This is a slightly different exercise than electrical soldering, and the comments here will not be appropriate to rewiring the house. I’ve always rather liked the idea of 4 stages of learning: Unconscious incompetence Conscious incompetence Conscious competence Unconscious competence It…
I’m not sure why that title sprang to mind other than this article is written about a Ruby on Tuesday – and the Rolling Stones song of that name is, apparently, Rolling Stone magazine’s 310th greatest song of all time. Just saying. In case you wondered. Maybe a little bit? In an earlier missive (read…
One of the great things about insomnia is the amount of thinking you can get done. Here’s the outcome of pondering how to achieve fitting the DCC chip into the W bunker in a tidy way that would still allow maintenance. The problems are: There is not a lot of room The Loksound chip comes…
Motivation is an untamed horse. There’s no knowing entirely where it comes from or what it’s going to do next. The drivers behind this little project where many, but certainly not aligned with any modelling big picture of mine. After all, there are no roads at Rewanui, so a car is somewhat surplus to my…
The observant regular visitor may have noted some glitches in the way the Emporium displayed over the last few weeks. Fixing this has been a bit of a distraction, but it’s finally sorted. I should now have time for more interesting things that will be appearing here shortly. Lawrence
The W kit has filled the blog for quite a while. The first batch of kits have been shipped and I fondly imagine a tribe of happy modellers out there building them. Of course, the reason I did the kit in the first place was that I want models of 192 and 238 for Rewanui,…
It has been a little while since the last post, but on the plus side I’ve been spending the time modelling (as well as consuming mince pies). With the first batch of W kits dispatched, I’ve started building my own examples of W192 and W238. Expect to see them featured here, together with any share-worthy…
This year’s resolution is as high as possible! Couldn’t resist that – sorry. In any case, Happy New Year to all and thanks for your support during the year just gone. One of the slightly worrying things about writing a specialist blog, is that you do wonder if you are reaching your audience, and…
I finally had a chance to get out and take some pretty pictures of the signal. So here they are… In the past I have used torsion bars to operate bracket semaphores, but this time around I used cranks. Both are prototypical, but cranks are harder to model. The shunt discs operate in exactly…
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…
As the 1:64 W kits are just about to be released, my thoughts turned back to crew figures to complete the picture. One of the joys of modelling in the digital era is that output from one source can be imported into diverse software to simplify other steps. In this case I was able to…
