The recent warm weather only really reached the east side of Scotland on Thursday and Friday. FCAG members are creatures of habit, so Saturday’s meeting should have been full of ardent modellers swapping the sunshine for the chilly charms of ESME's clubroom. Unaccountably however, numbers were down, so it was left to Alisdair, Alastair, Alasdair, Simon, Jim, Stuart and Graham (and, briefly, Justin) to keep things going.
Jim has been working on lattice-post signals for the Grampian group's "Dunallander" layout. He uses AutoCAD to draw the etch layers (he explained the process to us in detail in November 2017, written up here). This time the signals will be upper-quadrant, so in addition to posts of the correct height he has had to draw new balance weight and backlight blinder parts.
Alastair was working on his 04 chassis 3D print parts, intended to complement the Association chassis kit. The latest stage is shown here.
Simon continues to work on a MERG DCC command station. The printed circuit board of the kit is first populated with passive components and IC sockets; at that point a power supply can be connected to verify correct operation via indicator LEDs before the ICs are inserted. It sounds a very well-thought-out design. Not content with insulating the PCB, Simon had insulated himself as well. He agreed to take off his mittens for the photo.
Simon had also revived his West Highland Extension observation car, a prototype rebuilt by BR from Gresley's beavertail saloon for the pre-war LNER "Coronation" luxury train. The model is from a Rue d'Etropal resin print. It was rather brittle and the roof support pillars broke under handling shortly after he received it. Most of us would have thrown the thing in the bin in disgust at that point, but not Simon: he did a very nice job of adding new roof pillars, then glazed and painted it and added couplings. Here it is on Mearns Shed.
and here it is again (I have a soft spot for this vehicle, having ridden in it in the mid-1960s on the Lochty Private Railway after John Cameron bought it from BR and ran it up and down half a mile of track on Sundays behind his A4 in the remote Fife countryside. How gloriously mad was that ...)
On the other side of the room, Stuart was working on a building for a steeply-rising street on his mill layout. It looks rather nice, and is closely modelled on a real location.
Alisdair was adding sleeper fencing and a large billboard on the approaches to the overbridge on Mearns Shed. The inspiration is from the Glasgow Road bridge at Perth (and there was another similar one at Stirling). His technique is quite interesting. To make the fence robust enough for exhibition use, he decided to mount the sleepers of a continuous strip of clear plastic.
Since the fence is at the edge of the layout (the bridge is the scenic break), the subterfuge is not at all obvious from normal viewing distance.
Alisdair also had a small box of bits which turned out to be the components of his "Big Goods", now that he has rediscovered his modelling mojo. (For anyone concerned for his well-being, it can now be revealed that his mojos for beer-drinking, cold-water swimming, preserved-railway-guarding and several other interests continued through the winter as normal. He's an odd chap even without model railways). Anyway, the Big Goods should be worth waiting for. The prototype's driving wheels had no flanges (in LMS days, reduced flanges) and this can be seen faithfully reproduced on the loose wheel at the bottom of the box, courtesy of his Unimat. Will it stay on 2mm track though?
There was some discussion of "FineN". Stuart (a FineN proponent) expounded on the topic to Alisdair. Make your own mind up about the body language.
Graham had intended to progress various 3D projects but instead spent the day struggling with Fusion 360, which was unable to update itself due to what it termed "Error 13", a problem apparently linked to Windows 10 file permissioning. (For anyone struggling with this, the solution found later at home was to add a new Windows user specifically for Fusion, give this user Admin privileges in Settings, then reinstall Fusion from scratch.)
Back in the Autumn, Alistair was handed the task of producing a backscene for the ESME club's rambling N (coarse N that is) layout which runs round two walls of their large meeting room and is much in demand by the youth of the parish on open days. Alistair decided that the backscene might as well be finescale. Much research in picture books and artistic agonising followed over the winter months. Finally he appeared with an enormous (and heavy) roll of wallpaper which was slowly unrolled for inspection. Just a little bit at first...
Then a bit more...
He became a blur of motion...
It really is an enormous backscene.
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