2015_03_21 Yackandandah Festival W/End

2015_03_21

So I finally got the inside "office" stocked with all my sound gear (Loksound and tools anyway)

So you would think the output would be improving?

I have worked on three engines The first an X Class in VR is running sounds great but the body is under tension and keeps unclipping. So I will have to dismantle it and make some changes. But I will make the changes in the second one to make sure they work.

The second one is causing me grief as I have difficulty adding marker lights. Not enough room, and my adhesives are just not holding Thanks to James who posts on VR Enthusiasts, I have come up with a fix. So here are some pictures of the engine, which I seem to have found enough space to get the top down flush. I had to leave a circuit board out and use tiny resistors to find more room.

The Last two shots are of the old Powerline 830 which now boasts kd's marker lights and a silent decoder. The problem with it is that it has an open frame motor, has not run for 15 years and corrosion had stopped the pickups from working. The slightly smaller flanges on this model, do clear the Code75 dog spikes, just!!

So not a lot to show for a few weeks work, but progress never the less!

hmm wonder where the headlight dropped out/?  You know how bad your eyes are when you only see things in pictures.

Lens glued in with Krystal Kleer  So I need to wash down the front to clean up spills.

Headlights and Marker lights, buffer filled in. Just a few steps and I think I will leave it as is. I have found some hose bags. They will be added, too bare isn't it?

Found the whistles,and wondering how I would go about thinning and adding to handrails.
Cheers
Rod

2015_03_20 I now walk every day, out with the trees!

2015_03_20

Trees!!  Trees and more trees :D

Still waiting on some leaves and deciding how I am going to do the trunks. I have great ideas from many of my friends, but I am not convinced that I can't find a quicker and better way to make them.
When the material I ordered arrives I will take a break and spend some time on trees :)
(Click on pictures for larger image)

Cheers
Rod

2015 March St Patricks Day for sure! for sure!

2015_03_17

Working on sound
Tried fitting out an old Powerline 830. 4 hours in and nothing works, and I have no idea why. The motor spins on a 9 volt battery Every wire connects to the right decoder wire and I get an LED flash and power goes down on Decoder Pro. Decoder tests just fine, disconnected :(

Got two X Class fitted with speakers and Loksound 4.0 DCC sounds decoders and having trouble getting body to fit on one. Pictures later.

The 930, 44 Class sounds?   Used an older engine because the correct one sounds awful, almost like an EMD :(

Cheers
Rod Young

2015_03_10 Home Sweet Home.

2015_03_10

Disappointment with Sandown turned into a nice day at Kyneton.
Stayed the night at Tony's place in Bendigo and called in to PC Hobbies on the way home.
Took little out of Sandown, more out of Kyneton, and a lot more from PCB Hobbies :)

Now I have to save up for Caulfield :)

Some Pictures!  Claim bragging rights (just remember my store shopping is very limited, and I only get to do this once or twice a year)

Coolum Design Laser cut wood kit Single road small country loco shed for branch terminus
Model Train Buildings  on Face Book

Coolum Laser Design Coolum Beach Laser Design

Walthers Kit

 Corn silo But it will become a wheat silo on the Branch

Walthers Corn shed. Going to use this for Uncle Bens Wodonga.

Couple of nice books. Gerald was not only an Elite Engineman with the VR, he was a gentleman and a fine Boss to boot. We really loved this fellow, and I was very happy to be the first cleaner to sit a Drivers exam with him when he took on the job as Examining Officer at Dynon. We spent three hours under R707 at Spotswood servicing the Loco whilst I had a verbal Drivers exam. Talk about putting a cleaner at ease. Even so I failed a safe working question and had to return later to finally get my ticket :(

Ian Wilson sold this one to me at a nice price.  Can't resist a T :D

Ian was also selling TrainBuilder stuff, and it looks like I might have been lucky to find this one, as they have been sold out for a month.

Coolum Beach Laser Design, made this wood kit. It is the original  Station Building at Bullarto
http://modeltrainbuildings.com.au/

 Brass cast signal gates from Broad Gauge Models at Kyneton See their adds in Australian Railway Modeller.

Tri Axle bogies for my US and European trucks.

Another couple of signals for the SG

Here is the scrap roads :)   Some bought as spare parts but all work just fine. So they need sound decoders as they are all still DC

I have a pretty low tolerance when I find I have acquired junk. You know that of course. This is a cheap KMart /Big W vacuum cleaner. It required two empties to vac out the Rover. Both times little rubbish but blocked filters. Now my house is tiny and has carpet in two 3m square bedrooms, rest is tiled.    I need to empty this three times to complete the house. I have asthma and hay fever and each time is a real effort as dust explodes out of the filters. The damn thing sounds powerful and yet 5 minutes after you start using it the red light comes on, as it loads up and stops sucking.
Well this does suck. So the third time I ever used it I failed to vac the House despite cleaning the filters out twice. So I put it through the Rod Young fail test. Holding the

hose I swung the thing around in the air three times and bounced it off the wall. I did this twice and could not break it. But although it passed this test with flying (helicopter??) colours it goes in the skip tomorrow..mumble ...mumble....  grumble.....

Cheers
Rod Young

2015_03_09 Sandown Exhibition

2015_03_09     Gee what a mild summer we have this year :)

Little things are happening. I finally got sick of spreading all my work out on Coal Siding as if it was a work bench. And packed it all up and moved it inside and set it up in my Office.
Its easier to work in there and I dont get distracted all the time and "play" trains. Now I can install sound in peace in an air conditioned room.  When I do go in the shed, I can operate without working around all the clutter as well.
Have 2 C Class and 3 X Class being fitted with sound. The first X Class sounds great, but the body will not sit down, its about 1.5 mm too high. Looks like I will have to take it apart and machine out about 2mm in the weight to sit the decoder a little lower.  But at least I can prepare the rest and know they will sit down. So next job.
I can machine the C Class at the same time.
I made a jig for the fuel tank lid which really speeds up placement of the speaker The Loksound is really nice sound.  DCC sounds

Went to Sandown on Saturday, drove down leaving about 3.15 am, but got there too early. Got taken in my the Auscision HooHaa, and was bitterly disappointed. Anyway as usual arrived with money to spend, and left with most of it intact.
Every year its the same. I promise never to go to that Exhibition again. and go anyway. Someone please remind me next year?. 

On the way home I attended the Exhibition at Kyneton and had a great time. Nice job fellas I will come again, and you got all my money, which surprised me too :)
Cheers
Rod Young

2015_02_15

2015_02_15 Rained yesterday
Very Humid today.
At 8.30 am I had breakfast whilst checking my mail and my groups. At 1830 I went for dinner with the family and nothing got done.
The work bench was all set up for sound installs. Two pristine C Class were ready to start!
5 Auscision A and B Class were laid out, stripped ready to file and fit speakers.
And if that was not enough a heap of T's Y's and X's were in need of.... eh? mo...sound ;)

But nothing much happened :(

My sugars are rising and yesterday I did walk nearly 6 km with two serious "gasping" hills along the way. It was 7.00 in the morning when I left and I did beat the rain. Along the way I found lots of blue gum trees in our area. As you would have noticed, I did not think we had any around here.
In fact about one in 10 are blue. Fancy that?  But stand back and take a group shot (tree groupie?) and they all look decidedly green.
So I learned something. The main thing for me, though is railway lines in the North East do look as if they have green gum trees :D
Cheers
Rod Young

2015_02_12 Gum Trees

2015_02_12  ah!! now its hot :)

Went on line and tried to fast track some gum trees, but unfortunately Queensland gum trees are not like our gum trees at all :)

With apologies to this E-Bayer whose photo I have stolen, and pointing out too, that he is an example of every tree manufacturer I have found so far, even Auscision!
Auscision Trees
These are by far the best I have found but still not dense enough and at $16 to $30 a tree much beyond what I can afford.

So what do Gum Trees look like?

They certainly are not this colour from Scenery express.com

But outside my home, all I can see is real Aussie gum trees :) They are not blue!
Why do Mountains look blue in the distance as seen in these pictures?

"The Blue Mountains, given that name due to the blue haze that hovers above them, is an area renowned for spectacular scenery, plant and wildlife and densely populated forests of oil bearing Eucalyptus trees. Thus, it is commonly believed that the blue haze blanketing the mountains is created by the atmosphere whereby dispersed droplets of Eucalypt oil combine with dust particles and water vapour to scatter refracted rays of light which are largely blue in colour.

However, because this is a common phenomena shared by mountain ranges elsewhere in the world, another theory suggests that:

the sky is blue because tiny air molecules of oxygen and nitrogen, water molecules, and dust motes interact with light. The small size of these particles means that high-frequency light (like, blue) is much more likely to interact than low-frequency light (such as red). The interaction scatters blue light in all directions. Consequently, we are more likely to see blue light than any other colour. Thus, the sky looks blue.

Consequently, distant dark mountains reflect little light to our eyes. Our eyes receive much more light from sunlight scattered by tiny molecules between us and the mountain. That scattered sunlight is blue. So, it isn't a scattering of light reflected from the mountain that makes the mountain appear blue, but rather a scattering of light between us and the mountain. (WeatherQuesting Web Site)"

At the distance the long leaves are not noticed. I dont know if anybody can make HO gum leaves?

Almost all the pictures had the sun behind me except the one over the horse float.

So what do we do? I know make our own :(   The colour is three toned to my eyes a mid green and dark green with just a hint of red (brown?) not looking at trunks which can be any colour :

Cheers
Rod
(And you guessed it, I have been distracted by Col, again :D )

2015_02_02 Search Engine :)

2015_02_02

Not a lot of stuff that I could post the last week or so. Mainly because I have been sorting through the temporary wiring, removing Tail light short protectors, and wiring no longer needed and setting up the NCE District circuit breakers.  Time consuming but really necessary, because I need to tidy up the wiring and secure it under the deck, out of sight, before I can install my LED lighting strips.

At the same time I have had a persistant short that trips the DB150 Command station every 30 seconds or so. Trial and error searching. First isolate command station, then add one district at a time till I find the cause. Because the Branch line is already connected to two NCE Circuit breakers and all tail light protection has been removed, I left that till last. After all I had already corrected many wiring errors caused by old wiring left in place after new wiring was added in its new roll as a fixed layout branch line.

However after reconnecting, and repairing all the sections, the persistent short was found to be in the Trentham to Bularto branch sections.
So today I started unplugging and testing all the droppers. I have not finished, however just before I came inside tonight, I have the positive feed connected to the to the Trentham side NCE breaker, without the fault. As soon as I connect the negative feed, I get the short. So I have an unknown connection on the negative return between the top level track and Trentham, or a cross feed between Trentham and Bularto.  Should not take long to find it now.

As well over the last 15 years I have been collecting RUB cars so that I can make my Daylight set. I have found about 6 cars and at least 12 are still missing. And so I started searching for the missing cars, because I have a friend who has found someone to build them for me.  But over all these years, I have no idea where they may be. So earlier today I began opening boxes and searching. Whilst doing that I found stuff I had forgotten I had. So as I need to clear a space for the installation of the branch terminus, I started moving stuff around in the boxes and stacking them up under the layout, to clear some room along the front wall.

Yes not much to show, but I did find 15 Locos that need DCC chips and a few to sell as well.

Mostly empty boxes, but I want to keep them so that in the future, my kids will have them when they sell off my stuff.
I did move about 20% of this pile to here...

Australian Rolling stock not on layout, and others that need work done before commissioning :)

Here is the BG coming up the grade off House Creek. The gradient is too steep for Austrains T Class and the Auscision one as well.  I cut the supports down to soften the gradient and smooth out the climb.

First lifted out the track, removed the screws then using this nifty tool, easily took 2cm out of the bearers to smooth out the grade.

This is as much as I can take out without exasperating the grade to the top of the hill. However  the T Class still stalls. A two dollar coin laid on top of the T was all it needed to climb the hill. I will have to lower the summit over top of the  Albury line, to get it right. But I wanted 10.5 cm clearance and that will mean I will only have 8.2 cm, not enough for Double stacks, which I thought someone might want to run. but not now I guess :(

Under the wayward SG track yet to be laid you can see the track bed heading to Albury. Directly above it just this side of the white wire hanging down the high point of the top level needs to be dropped 2cm or so, you can almost see the hill in the pic?

So nothing stopping me from installing the 46" radius SG track to the Loop points about 3 m around the corner and that completes all the SG track that I can lay at this stage.

Then I need to wire in all the yards and finish installing the circuit breakers and points.

Now I must find a home for all the boxes in the corner and I can start installing bench work for the Branch Terminus that friend Tony donated to the cause.

But that will have to wait for another day :)
Cheers
Rod