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…
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…
