WIP Sunday(?) - Railway Working Weekend

We have had a lot of finished objects over the past couple of weeks, so let us mix it up with a WIP. This is not your normal work in progress, but is a little update on the model railway Llyn Fach. As many railway modellers know, a railway is never finished, so don't expect this to become a FO any time soon! ;)

For quite a while, not much work at all has happened on the Llyn Fach, and that is largely due to life getting in the way. The Llyn Fach is a small model railway that my Dad and I are building and have been for as long as I can possibly remember. Recently my Dad came to visit for the weekend and we had a great time planning some things out and getting on with building some scenery for our beloved little railway.

I trawled back through some of my old photos and managed to find some from when I last did any work on the railway. To give you an idea of where we started at the beginning of the weekend. The layout is very bare and there isn't a clear idea of what we want to happen. But we do have a mostly working track. There might be a few dodgy track joints that need to be sorted before ballasting happens, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

So when we started on this working party weekend, we had a bridge, a cardboard cut out of a platform and a plastic engine shed that was just placed around as something to look at. Our first port of call was to draw up some ideas as to what buildings we wanted and where. We decided to concentrate our efforts on the left hand corner with the bridge and the main station. This is where we started thinking of our station building and engine shed, and I got a crash course in scratch building buildings from cardboard.

Dad used his delightful drawing skills to create some lovely sketches of what our plan was and we set to work. We had a plan to make a lift out section along the top of the corner tunnel, as I had to cut that bit out to relay some of the track. So we came up with a removable grassy section. I had some foam left over from my old work tool box that made an excellent base for that, along with a retaining wall and a paved road and car park made from a leftover piece of wet and dry! - Terrible for tyre wear. ;)

That corner was most of the first days work, as well as a little tool/brake van for our wagon rolling stock, which would have received a lick of paint if we had the colours that the wagons were originally painted in. That was the result of our confusion as to where the paint had even ended up in the first place.

The second day, a start was made on buildings. We had a lovely morning of drinking tea and building things in our pyjamas. The station building started to come into existence, and I made a water column - my first ever scratch build! - It still needs finishing off, with some pipes and some water, but I need to have a good think about how to do that one.

Road with removable section.

The new brake van.

Station building in progress.

Arty action shot, water column visible.

 Overall I think we both had a lovely weekend, it was nice and relaxing, and we got a lot of things done. Railway modelling is something we have both done together for a very long time. All photos of the railway after our weekend are courtesy of Dad and hopefully there will be another update before too long.

Lemmon Juicer Podcast Episode 4: WIP City

Welcome to Episode 4 of the Lemmon Juicer Podcast, make yourself at cuppa and settle down!

Instagram: @lemmonjuicer
Ravelry: sockbug97
Blog: www.lemmonjuicer.blogspot.co.uk

Finished Objects:
Winging It Jumper: There is no pattern yet for this! Project on Ravelery: https://www.ravelry.com/projects/Sockbug97/winging-it-jumper

WIPs:
Necker Socks: https://ravelry.com/patterns/library/necker
BreatheMAL: https://ravelry.com/groups/knit3together-podcast
Mam's Hat:https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/gridiron-hat (Previous Hat: https://lemmonjuicer.blogspot.com/2018/02/snowball-beanie.html)
Charlotte Hat: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/charlotte-59 (Walrus Hat: https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5842376568911170247&pli=1#editor/target=post;postID=6914927989642395713;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=20;src=postname)


Aquisitions:
Gamer Crafting: https://gamercrafting.com/product/kind-hufflepuff-themed-yarn-geeky-yarn-indie-dyed-yarn-variegated-yarn-speckled-yarn-harry-potter-themed-yarn-knitting-kit/

In The Shed:
Spitfire: https://www.airfix.com/uk-en/shop/themes/spitfire/supermarine-spitfire-mkia-starter-set-1-72.html


Knit3Together Podcast:
Ravelry: https://ravelry.com/groups/knit3together-podcast
Instagram: @knit3togethertts
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt4eBPnJdIDk36qgNC70QfA

Music:
"Inspired" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Llyn Fach

For a long time I have had a 009 gauge model railway. It is small enough to fit inside a cabinet bookcase, and I used to spend time working on it with my Dad. The past few years the railway has sat inside the bookcase, looking half finished and a little bit sorry for itself.

The railway has a little engine, its a generic saddle tank, and is named Sam, (after Peter Sam in the Rev. Awdry books), Sam also has a few coaches and a couple of trucks, that are shunted here and there around the few sidings.

Loading Gauge Issues

 A couple of years ago, I'd got the layout out and identified where some track needed replacing. Namely around the left side corner, where there was a slight track gauging issue... Some of the little plastic clips which hold in the rail had snapped and the engine would often derail there. I had bought a new length of track to fit there, but that too had been sitting in a box in the corner of the room waiting to be fitted. So I finally decided that I was actually going to do it. And I did.

I got out the layout and set up the controller to see if I could reassess the problem. What I found, instead of having track slightly wider than It should have been, was that actually we had a slight loading gauge issue around the road bridge. In my experience vehicles hitting bridges is never good. So I was faced with two options: move the bridge, OR move the track. Seeing as the bridge scenery was partially done, and I was going to replace the track anyway, I started going about replacing track.

The track around the bridge was also interesting. There is a station just before the bridge, loosely modeled on Wharf Station at the Talyllyn Railway, and so there is a platform and just before a loop. At some point there has been some bodging of track work when the loop was put in, and we were left with a rather untidy few sections of track leading out of the loop and under the bridge. The first of which seemed to be causing problems before.

Untidy Track

My plan,with the length of track I had, was to replace the entire curve up to the loop point, including the little messy piece. This is what I set about doing, pulling the track pins out, and saving the serviceable ones, and just chucking the old bent ones that weren't of any use. There was only one problem I came across, and that was that most of the corner is covered by the road across the top of the bridge...

Ultimately the only thing I could do was to take a knife to the cardboard bridge to get it out of the way. I had devised a way to cut up the bridge so that there was minimal damage.

I cut the bridge along the rear road boundary and completely lifted the back piece out, which gave just enough access to get in and remove the track, as well as lay the new piece.

Taking the two old pieces of track out was an interesting experience, as the track practically fell apart as soon as the track pins were out and it was slid out of the fishplates. I was rather glad I was replacing it.

The bridge coming off

Once the track was in and pinned down, and the bridge loading gauge issue was sorted, I slowly ran the engine around the curve to see how it ran. Unfortunately it did brush up against the wall at part of the curve, but that was solved by cutting out a section of the cardboard wall. The hole cut out is below the line of the top of the bridge, and will also allow some extra access to the curve once the bridge goes back on.

I was pleased with the curve once it had been relayed. The loading gauge problems were solved, and the curve looks a lot better, hopefully the engine will also run nicely too!

Done!

Mini: Engine Building

Lined up after the Eurofighter kit was this lovely Mini Cooper Mk.1 kit. I do like classic cars and the Mini is one of my favourites. This kit is made by Revell and is 1:24 scale. 

The first step is assembling the engine, which is tiny and fiddly, but with thumb nails and a truck load of patience I got it sorted, and painted! 

As you can see from the photos the engine isn't properly completed yet, there is still a piece to sit right on the top, which is why the red stops and there is a rather unsightly lump of unpainted plastic on the very top of my engine.

For the paint I used enamel, black, gray and red. I used red gloss for the main engine block and grey and black for the other parts.

Front.

Back.

The Finished Thing:

The Eurofighter is finished! YAY!

For the first try at painting and finishing properly, I don't think it looks too bad.

The matt varnish gives the effect I was looking for - military aircraft aren't usually shiny! - and if you don't look too closely the paint is okay (only a little wobbly in a few places).

Having never put transfers on a model before I can agree with Mr M that they really do add a large amount of detail for not much effort. They give the model a sense of completeness and makes the whole thing look a bit more real, even in miniature!

Even with my dusting mistakes with the varnish, it has given the wanted effect and only in the small cracks where the varnish had pooled was there any discolouration from too much varnish.

All in all this is a nice turn out to this model, and I'm a little proud of it!

Read more about it's progress here:
Putting the transfers on
Varnishing

Starboard Side

Nose Detail

Body Detail

Varnishing The Eurofighter: Enamel versus Acrylic

The time has come for me to varnish my Eurofighter, which I did. But first of all I had to figure out what kind of varnish I would need. This was not as easy as I first thought, as I was confronted with forums upon forums of people arguing that acrylic varnish will ruin everything and enamel is the best and vice versa!

So after a bit of reading up on what is actually in acrylic and enamel varnish, and on how they react with different things I made a decision.

Taped up ready for varnishing

I've painted the Eurofighter with acrylic paint, which is water based. But, most of the other model paint I have is enamel, which is solvent based (why it's more smelly!). So as it turns out the difference between acrylic and enamel varnish is very much the same (Although rumors are there are some varnishes that are labeled as acrylic but are solvent based). The problem comes when the paint under the varnish hasn't dried properly, with acrylic paint you're waiting for the water to evaporate and with enamel the solvent needs to evaporate. So if acrylic varnish has been put over enamel paint before it has had long enough to dry, the solvent will try to evaporate and cannot, and will blister up the varnish layer and then you have to get back to paint stripping and starting all over again. But the same can be said for the opposite way around.

There is a huge camp on either side of the fence here, some people will always use acrylic varnish on EVERYTHING, and the same with enamel varnish. So without being influenced by who is shouting the loudest, it is really down to personal preference. I used enamel varnish, but had waited a few months (not deliberately, but I hadn't got around to it) after painting and a few days after putting the transfers on, to make sure they had dried out properly, before I went putting the first coat of varnish on.

The Eurofighter has now had two lovely coats of matt varnish, and is starting to come together and look quite smart.

Underside with a fresh coat of varnish

One of the things I didn't do before I had taken the varnish to my little aircraft was to clean it of the dust and little bits that had accumulated on it, which Mr M told me wouldn't be a problem - using an aerosol meant that the dust would be blown off. Which sadly wasn't the case for me, and now I seem to have varnished in the dust so it now is permanent, oh well, learn for the future it seems.

Eurofighter Progress

Starting posting about a model most of the way through building it is probably an odd one. But I am proud of this model. It is the first model that I have cared enough to do properly, and it has taken a while to get here.

So for the first time, I've put transfers onto a model, instead of just painting it and hoping for the best. In terms of first tries, I'm pleased, all the transfers came out well, and are positioned in mostly the correct place. I'm currently waiting for the transfers to properly dry out before I go about varnishing the aircraft. Which will be another first. 

I did have to ask for the help of Mr M on this one. The lovely instructions for the transfers simply stated "soak in water and apply to model" which although I understood, wasn't sure of how to go about exactly "soaking in water" and "applying". In my field of work you do everything to the manual, this wasn't helping the perfectionist nature in me!

But with advice from Mr M, who told me in the end everyone has their own way of doing it, and "I guarantee you will mess at least on of them up", which of course I took as a challenge, I did them all. And without hiccup I may add Mr M. 

Cockpit and Canopy with RAF roundel.

Tail, along with serial number and other markings.

Before adding the transfers the pedant in me decided to do the research. I knew that the Eurofighters were flown by Number 29 squadron. One of my lecturers has great joy in telling me the same story over and over again about them. But it was obvious that this roundel was not, Number 29. I soon found out it was Number 17 squadron, which also was a Eurofighter test squadron.

This lead me on to the serial number of the aircraft, ZJ928, and much to my surprise (and enjoyment)  this aircraft was a Eurofighter and had previously been in Number 17 squadron. Very nice.