It has been a busy couple of weeks here at New Zealand Finescale, and the blog has been quiet as a result.  So this is a bit of a catch up of things that have dropped through the mailbox of late.

First up some nice steel dowels.  I use these for piston rods and the 1.0mm dowels feature in the W kit.  For the F, 0.8mm is more appropriate and a good supply arrived the other day.  These are available on the Emporium too.

Also on the F, the test shots for the strap style cowcatcher casting came in, and very successful they are too.

Things are slowly progressing on wagons as well, which was a good excuse to look at wheel centres for the scale tires that I have on hand.  I’ve done these before, but as my original supplier is no longer in the business, I needed to look again.  Samples look quite a bit better than injection moulded versions, and as they are 0.8mm thinner than RP25-110 it is just a case of fitting to the tire and axle rather than having to thin down the centre.  If you are interested in scale wheels talk to us!

Back on to the F, it became very clear early in the design process that fitting motor, gearbox, decoder, speaker etc into the model with out compromising the detail was going to be quite a fiddle.  That process may well deserve a blog post of its own at a later date, but in the meanwhile I took delivery of a batch of 15 x 11mm ‘sugar cube’ speakers.  Tests with these are very promising and the kit will be engineered so these fit into an integrated soundbox.

In a similar vein, wiring all the bits up on the F was also looking problematic.  The solution is a PC board sub-footplate that carries all the necessary connections and wiring.  These little 1.27mm connectors will make decoder fitting and maintenance a lot easier.

Not really in the mailbox as such are these castings for Cape Foulwind rock wagons as featured in the NZMRJ earlier this year. This was a passion of the late Robin Knight that he was working on shortly before his death. I worked up castings for the distinctive axleboxes, couplers and pivot points to complement Robin’s scratchbuilt bodies.  The castings will be in the Emporium shortly.  these will not be a stock item, but available to order.