Turning Tables (part two)

So the turntable adventure continues. The base section it sits on has been reinforced. It now is strong enough to act as a separate module allowing it to be removed and worked on by itself. I have done my first real chiselling to carve out some of the L beam the ply baseboard sits on so that the turntable pit would sit down. I also used the chisels to cut channels for where I thought the maintenance pits would go, but as it turns out, not quite.

Since I wrote Turntables and things and Turning Tables some of you may have worked out what I had not realised and been laughing at me. I have a turntable from Walthers and a roundhouse from Atlas. According to my 2009 N&Z Walhters catalogue, the Union City roundhouse intended for the Walthers 120' Unions City turntable has a stall angle of 7.5 degrees. The stall angle of the Atlas roundhouse is 15 degrees.

So once I had things set up enough to line up pit tracks to the table, I could see I had a problem. The track had a kink betwixt pit and turntable and not one that was within tolerances and visually quite wrong. So what's a bargain hunter to do? Buy the matching roundhouse? (Buying the Atlas turntable was not an option for me given how un-prototypical it looks, as mentioned in previous postings) The matching roundhouse comes with 6 stalls not three and so would need to be kitbashed to suit regardless of whether it fitted into the space I had. Given I would need to kitbash a new kit, I decided to try my hand at kitbashing what I had instead. With my trusty new saws with many teeth and thin kerfs, it should be simple right?

I have yet to match up the roundhouse walls etc. and I foresee that the doors may require some trickery or adjusting but I am very pleased with how the tracks line up now. Compare the stall/pit to table/bridge transition that appears on the left in the pictures (that lines up pretty well after adjusting) to the stall/pit to table/bridge transition that appears on the left in the pictures (which totally does not line up)

Since those photos were taken, the not matching track has also been adjusted by what seems pretty close to the right amount. So far then I am very happy with the results and look forward to finding the right height to raise the turntable bridge track to line up with the pit/stall tracks. But all that will have to wait for the next instalment pertaining to turning tables, thank you Adele!

October School Holidays

Some time ago I wrote up about some benchwork for a layout and you may be wondering how it is going. Something I have learnt that model railroading encompasses many fields and skills. Also that scale is what you make of it. Smaller scales mean omitting details where it is not possible to model the detail realistically. Larger scales demand more detail as the absence of items is able to be picked up by the eye, luckily material strength and so on allow us to add detail as the scales increase in size. And then there is the ultimate scale, 12 inches = 1 foot, or 1:1. One might think that objects are no longer a model at this size, but models are a representation of the real thing, not the real thing, no matter what the size. So it is that recently I made a model of a clap board. It had to look like a clap board and sound like a clap board, but not be a clap board in other particular.

Over these October school holidays I took some leave from work and the time had come to bite the bullet with doing something with the plywood that had been cut for a baseboard for a future layout. We have a nice corner in our front entry way and we have needed another bookshelf for some time now. All these things came together in a perfect storm as I had time to do something about all these things. And so a bookshelf has been born courtesy of the plywood panels. Add some fancy hard wood trimming with and without detail and it is well on the way. This had to be more than a model but used some of the skills I have learnt about wood as part of railway modelling over the years.

Also mentioned less time ago I am detailing a Dapol Autocoach with the Dart casting kit. After painting the interior of the coach, I have started doing the body detail of the coach. As has been noted by others elsewhere the floor mounted cab controls both look higher than they do in the prototype so I have not affixed them inside just yet. Currently there are handrails, lamp irons and steps now replacing the moulded versions on the front of the cab as below.