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…
Not NZ Labour party marketing, but the sentiment is probably similar to Adern’s. The W kit has been on the go longer than the incumbent government, so I’m in a mood to move on! Over the last few weeks I’ve been putting together the initial batch of kits, writing instructions and other significant, but not…
Today sees another leap forward with the W locomotive kit, mating our coreless motor to a new gearbox. The urge to develop a new box stemmed from my observation a few months ago that many currently available gears were slightly eccentric and that, as a result, any gearbox using them was prone to tight spots.…
With the W kit becoming imminent, one of the final tasks to sort out was the number and maker’s plates. While doing that I also took the opportunity to do the WA, and F class plates as kits for these are on my drawing board. There are also car class plates on the stock list.…
Long time readers of the blog will appreciate that, here at NZ Finescale, recent efforts might be characterised as ‘productive dabbling’. Productive in the sense that we’ve been able to demonstrate some pretty cool items. Dabbling, because this has not so far resulted in many new products that you can actually build. No apologies from…
As the W kits get closer to shipping, I’m focusing on the few remaining details like the number and maker’s plates. That occasioned me to exhume the test shots I did for this a little while ago. Prototype plates were around 1/4″ thick, scaling out to 0.1mm, which is convenient as 0.1mm brass is readily…
Update: New photo of painted backhead – scroll down. I’ve always loved to add as many of the details of the prototype to my models as I can. When I built my North Yard A, I scratchbuilt as much of the gubbins onto the whitemetal backhead as I could. The NZFinescale Baldwins featured etchings and…
Here’s the first of a number of posts on a problem that has vexed me for a long time. Namely how to uncouple scale couplers in a hands off, invisible way. The little video below shows that a) I’m no Peter Jackson, and b) I’m well on the way to having the problem sorted. …
If you are reading this and are a regular visitor to New Zealand Finescale you’ll have already noticed that the website has undergone something of a revamp. Apart from the completely different look, the major change has been implementing online shopping. Not only is the shop new, but we’ve also tried to list things which…
As foreshadowed in the last post, I was struggling with the temptation to do a horse, and like Mark Twain proved unable to resist it. There’s not too much to say about it really other than to remember that it is less than 25mm at the shoulder, so the paint job looks better at less…
