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February 8th. 2012
Reports about progress have been very thin on the ground recently but things have been happening, nevertheless.
Frecclesham has been put up in the main layout room. As you can see, the fascia is finished, there’s blobs of filler covering the screw holes and there’s even a mock-up of a BR Totem with Frecclesham on it.
We’ve decided to alter the lighting system. Instead of having detachable light boxes we’ve gone for lightweight fluorescent lighting. These tubes simply clip together to form a long strip light. They are rated at 30W each, and really I think we need just one more making five in total.
We are also adding more reflective material to get even more light where it matters.
You can also see a tubular aluminium frame. Not only is this part of the support system for the fascia but also a frame over which lightweight material will be draped, so that even at a show the layout will be protected against dust etc .
Rob Foot’s a P4 modeller but has been seduced to the Dark Side enough to make the Station Building for Frecclesham. Since it’s the first time he’s ventured into 7mm he’s made a mock-up. This is it. No further comment!
I couldn’t resist this photo. You’ve seen this crack express before.
Finally a view of the completed Tandem and Double Slip. I gave up counting the hours taken to build this but chairing it up takes an inordinate amount of time. Thank goodness the outside single slip is the last turnout for the layout and shouldn’t take so long. And there's not a straight piece of track on Frecclesham. It's all on a gentle curve.
December 18th. 2011
Thought I'd put these two snaps in to show that things are still in progress. 31.2mm gauge, 1.25mm clearances.
By the way. The coach bogie used for testing is just a scaled up version of the Mike Trice 4mm design but using more robust materials.This one still doesn't work successfully as a coach bogie because even with 1mm torsion wire it bends because of the extra 7mm weight. It could be fixed though with appropriate thickness of wire.
The file is an ignition file from Squires, and guess what? It's 1.25mm thick. How convenient!
November 26th. 2011
Just because there have been no recent reports doesn't mean that nothing has been happening on Frecclesham. Firstly, the x-over has been finished. However, the tie bar arrangement was thought to be a bit too unprototypical and has been scrapped. A new underbaseboard system utilising Tortoise Point Motor baseplates with sliding whizzbangs will be used. This will still allow the blades to swivel. Tortoise Point Motors won't be used, though.
So, what have we been doing? This!
It's a B8/B6 Tandem with a protecting Catch Point running into a Double Slip and it's all on a curve. I've been keeping tabs on the time taken to build this and up to now it's about 15 hours. There's nearly 110 cut sleepers with well over 500 marked, drilled and rivetted 'oles. We even have to drill plain sleepers, for its 31.2mm gauge, not 32mm.
At any rate, there's a problem.
See it?
The two Tie Bars (Tie Bars again!) occupy the same physical space.
Thought needed. As Bluebottle, the East Finchley Boy Scout, would say " By the Power of my Brain, dit, dit, dit" etc, etc. Although I suspect that a couple of club members will chip in with suggestions, some of which will be do-able and not at all spurious or downright rude.
And talking of spurious here is a photograph of one of the new crack trains built for Frecclesham. I can't begin to imagine why it wasn't acclaimed and welcomed on Friday evening by everyone. Pity Rowland Emmett wasn't a club member!
Sorry the photo isn't up to scratch but it was taken with my phone camera (Now there's something. TFC with a mobile!) not my trusty old Olympus.
October 15th.2011
Another update.
Firstly, the crossover is now soldered up and mechanically capable of running stock, but this photo shows that the switch blades haven't yet been made operable or the chairs put into place.
You can see that it's built on a very subtle curve, following Rod's drawing.
Obviously one side of the x-over has now been chaired.
This job takes forever. The chairs are by C&L and have to be individually split into two parts. The parts are then stuck onto the sleeper using solvent. This sticking bit isn’t usually a problem. MEK is powerful enough to slightly melt the plastic chair into the wood of the sleeper and form a firm joint. However, on this occasion cleaning the rails of flux remnants and other bits has actually slightly dissolved the Tacky Wax holding the sleepers down and left a film on the top of the sleeper and guess what? It appears to be non-MEK soluble. So a much more aggressive solvent than usual has been used, namely Plastic Weld. This does the business.
Now I wonder if paint will take on the sleepers when the time comes?
Tie Bars. I do know what a Tie Bar looks like so I know that the tie bars on this and other turnouts are awfully wrong. No excuses. However I do know that they have to be robust enough to take a bit of mechanical welly, ranging from over-enthusiastic throw on a point operating mech to, heaven forbid, one of Steve’s Osmium fitted locos derailing at a completely inappropriate moment and walloping it. In this case the Tie Bar is between sleepers 3&4.
In the past we have tried to make the Tie Bar as inconspicuous as possible and used 2mm wide (N gauge sleepers?) PCB strip soldered to the switch blades, even though we all knew that there was one inherently wrong outcome. The result of simple geometry, Watson! If you think about the point blades, tie bar and rigid fixed position of the switch rails further into the turnout as making a quadrilateral, then the soldering of a tie bar into place is fine for one direction of travel through the turnout only. ‘Cos if you switch the turnout, the angles of the blades relative to the tie bar should alter slightly. Marginally, I know. But what this means is that switching the turnout does a couple of things:
- The soldered joint is rigid so the now open blade takes up an incorrect “set”.
- This means that the whole tiebar/blade arrangement is now under stress.
- A breakdown of the soldered joints, which are also under stress, is possible.
- The wider the tie bar the worse the problem.
To try to lessen this problem the blades are usually soldered up in the mid-throw position.
Now I know that this system works and it may be that someone who may read this uses this system and has no problems with it.
As I said, we used this system before, on Hazelhurst. It did work, but we replaced several tie bars because adjustments etc inevitably destroyed the copper/paxolin bond. The stresses also lifted the copper. Also some of the turnouts were “tight” to operate, again not because of mechanical friction but by the resistance of nickel silver rail being forced into position.
Now if you’ve ploughed through all this waffle we come to the outcome – at last.
What to do? Simples!. Make the blades swivel on the tie bar. However doing this with any degree of finesse is beyond me and my shaky hands. So my somewhat inelegant solution is shown below. It doesn’t look like a prototypical tie bar but it works.
I said it was inelegant and wasn’t prototypical didn’t I? It also shows what a dreadful job I made of the joggles.
It’s just a Slater’s ply sleeper that’s had a couple of their track rivets in it and then narrowed by rubbing on some glasspaper. The distance apart of these rivets depends on whether the stock rails are straight (2mm throw on a straight cut stock rail) or joggled but even so a bit of measuring will soon give the correct distance apart. However, the point is that the rivets have been put in with a punch with a 90degree end so that the rivets have spread in the correct fashion so will swivel without falling out. They are then filed away for half their width. The blade is then soldered to the filed side of the rivet, not to its top. The rivet can of course swivel the tiny, but necessary amount (it could be freed up a bit before soldering), so the rails don't take up a stressed set.
In this photo a Slater's crankpin bush has also been superglued in. This is takes a 12BA bolt as a sliding fit and forms part of the operating linkage.
October 5th. 2011
Time for another update. It would seem that not much has been happening on the Frecclesham front, and although it may be true that little is being done at the club, necessary things have been happening elsewhere. In other words making jigs.
Yes. Well. As you can see the timbers for the crossing have all been laid and rivetted together with all the jigs needed, in this case for a 1:7 crossing angle.
Starting at the top with its sides marked in green and red (only to make it clearer) is the 1:7 jig to align the V's while they are soldered up.The rails to make these V's are filed up in the aluminium filing jig to the left of the flat reel of solder. Ignore the parallel slots. They're from something that didn't work out correctly. It's the angled slot at the top that's important. The rail is slid into it, clamped and filed. Aluminium isn't the most robust material to file against, but I had no harder material to hand.
There's flux, obviously, and a red pot of "Tacky Wax". This holds the rivetted sleepers to the trackplan. Two reels of solder, one 145 degree and one 217 degree. The pink thing is a 31.2 mm track gauge, then two triangular 31.2 mm track gauges and the aluminium block. This is just a little thing to keep the rails vertical when soldering to sleeper rivets. On the wooden crossing angle jig there's also a white flangeway clearance gauge (most useful) and an equally useful tool, a car ignition file. Nice and thin.
Finally, bottom left is the crossing angle jig.
It's pretty obvious how this jig works but put the rails in upside-down. The prepared V is placed in its slot to the left, wing rails are bent up using the drawing as a guide and placed in their slots. Short lengths or wire are then soldered to the upside-down rails using the shallow cross milled slots as a guide. This keeps everyting in place. Remove from jig, turn over, clean up and that's it. The wires are now on the bottom of the rails and can be removed when the crossing unit has been soldered in its correct position
There's a bit more to it than that but this isn't the forum to go into it. Really it's a matter of technique to ensure accuracy.
And just to show that trackwork is underway there's the following. Although one of the crossings has been made and is now in situ obviously it wasn't there when I took the photo.
However, I suppose that we'd best show how far progress has advanced on Frecclesham itself. Here's two photographs I took this evening to show some thoroughly disreputable cardboard engineering. Even so it should be pointed out that this exercise was done to get the proportions of the thing looking OK. We haven't gone to the lengths of trying to utilise the proportions of the Ancient Greek "Golden Rectangle" but it does, in this state, seem relatively pleasing on the eye.
September 2nd. 2011
Well Dave dropped a big enough hint last week about putting up something else about the Frecclesham baseboards, so here we go. This was done last week, of course, because this week was spent making another baseboard for LMJ fiddle yard. All the photos are from Dave.
These proprietary boards have all the hard bits done for you and really do make up into tidy things. I’ll not put any photos of the basic construction because that was done last week. Suffice it to say that Bona Glue did the business for some substantial corner braces, too.
There's part of the trackplan for LMJ there, too.
However, before the boards were actually assembled the pattern makers dowels were put in when it was still possible to get the end pieces under the vertical drill. Obviously, they were drilled as pairs and the larger hole then drilled out with a suitable spade bit. This photo shows just the male half of the dowel.
One of the most important features of these boards for gentlemen of a certain age is that they are light. The manufacturers have managed to get lots of circular holes and then carefully and skilfully surrounded them with plywood thus introducing the lightness. Clever!
No mention has been made yet of the legs for this venture. We are using three of the legs which support Hazelhurst. Here they are place in an approx. position to show where they'll go, but as yet we haven't made the pockets for them to slot into. Not exactly a difficult job.
And finally, just to show how big 7mm is, here’s a picture of a tank loco and six wagons. It’s practically as long as the 7’ Baseboard, and on this layout there’s only one more 7’ board to finish the scenic part. After that it’s all fiddle yard. You can see that we still have to trim off a little bit of baseboard top which is ply from the B&Q 6mm Banana tree, not the 4mm one as Dave suggested last week. It's a comfort to know that bananas notwithstanding, the top is still flat!
July 2011
It's a long time since this part of the site was updated. Simples! Holidays and work on Little MIll. This has been documented elsewhere. However, we can now turn a little bit of attention to Frecclesham, so I enclose the following photographs to show that the little dear hasn't been too neglected.
Rod has finalised the design and is drawing it out on Templot. He's handed over the 1:7 crossover (yes, it's back to 1:7) and it's been double-sided stickied to a piece of board.
You can just make out the subtle curve of the X-over.
The next step is to cut Slater's Sleeper Strip to length and mark out the positions where the rail crosses it. You can see that one has been cut to length and the position of the rails marked. They are accurate marks even though they seem a bit off in this photo.
Next the strip has to be drilled. A simple jig is used for this and my trusty Milling Machine is being used as a Vertical Drill. Ignore the Dremel vertical drill in the background. The Milling Machine is used because it allows accurate registration of the holes because of the adjustable table. The vice comes in handy at times like this, too. The sleeper strip has been deliberately skewed so that the way the jig works is obvious. In practice it's flat.
Having put the holes in (1.8 mm) it's time to put in the rivets.
In this not-too-good photo you can see a couple of rivets scattered in front of the steel block. The best way to do this tedious job is to put the rivets on their heads and push the drilled holes over them. Then they have to be rivetted. Accepted wisdom for this is to wallop a punch into the back of them with a hammer. Good as it may sound, there is no guarantee that the hammer blows are consistent. This means that the face of the rivets can be depressed into the plywood by differing amounts, so that when you solder the rail to them the surface of the rail can undulate. This is even more of a problem in 4mm. So use an automatic punch. The business end should already be ground to a 90 degree point so is the ideal tool for the job. Set it to a suitable value and all your rivets receive the same "hammer" blow. Keep it vertical though and get a proper grip on it, not like bloke in the picture.
And the end result is a rivetted sleeper. Obviously a mock up for there's an 'ole without a rivet in it.
Repeat this procedure for about 130 or so sleepers/crossing timbers and we're ready for the next step. I haven't dealt with 130 bits of wood yet so am not ready for this next step!
June 17th. 2011
Well, this is what we’ve finally come up with.
Notice the name change? Friar’s Balsam is now Frecclesham. Pronounced Freccles-ham, or so I’m told. As from next week the web site page’s name will be changed.
This diagram will be the last of these interminable planning drawings, because everybody has had the opportunity to have their say. Rod has been busy Templotting introducing the curves and Steve has put in some scenic outlines.
It’s not quite the finished thing because there is a slight adjustment to be made to the curved platform roads and the crossover will be a B6 not B7 and moved slightly. The slips aren’t drawn correctly, either. Indeed the alignment of the double slip is wrong, unfortunately. And in any case Rod is going to try to draw both slips as being outside, not inside, slips. You don’t see too many of those modelled. However the layout still has a graceful flow to it and the finished drawing will allow track construction to start. The Slater's wooden ply sleeper strip and rivets are all present and correct, as is the C&L rail and plastic chairs. From this you may infer that trackwork is built by the Brook-Smith method.
We are still trying to sort out the canal dimensions and paraphernalia. Those shown on the drawing are ones trawled (hardly, in a canal) from both our local canal and the internet. If anyone who should be reading this is a canal aficionado please excuse any fundamental mistakes.
So there it is, Frecclesham, The Home of the Alternative Eccles Cake. Moriarty Wharf to the front, The Blue Bottle Inn, Crun Rovin, Bannister's Mini Bakery and I do see that Boy Scout with a smoking bomb full of dynamite ready to dead him on the end of the platform. I wonder if there's a theme going on here? I wonder what the boat's name will be?
June11th. 2011
I said that I'd let you know when decisions about the new layout have been made, so here it is.
Nobody in the club has gainsaid the idea of a smaller 7mm layout, and this was the amended diagram that all club members present went for. It has good flexibility for shunting, might look a bit different and unlike other layouts under review doesn't have to be scenically totally complete . Both the Urban and Cadbury versions would have to have all their backscene building finished to look convincing. The Dock scene would have looked really good, but it just wouldn't work in 7mm in 14'. Now in 4mm?
The turntable has been done away with on the grounds that most folk thought it didn't look right, and they are correct. However, I'm not sure just how many two-bit tiddly things like this would sport a tandem, a double slip, a single slip and a cross-over, but such are the trials of trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot.
To make sure that it would fit we made some templates on Templot and laid them out on a convenient bit of board. so, quarts into pint pots rule, OK. We only need to see if it can be bent a bit to get rid of all those straight lines.
But, here we have it, Ecclesham, Friars Balsam or whatever. And there is an East Finchley boy scout on the platform!
Rod has drawn out a simplified design of the above on Templot, so I enclose it here. It does show the layout in a straight configuration, as above and with the turnouts in the same relative positions, but now is the time to introduce some curvature. It also shows some interference or pinch points which cuts down the effective length of sidings, so a bit of activity with the little grey cells is necessary.
This is a much reduced print of the actual full sized thing. When Rod draws it properly the three way tandem and slips will be drawn correctly
June 4th. 2011
Getting the favourite scenario for the 7mm project has been occupying minds for a week or two now. Dave has already explained on the "Goings On" page that the club hasn't met as a club because of various factors. However, various schemes have been circulated electronically and I enclose them here, just in case they interest anybody. Dimensions are 14'x3', and except for one idea all the track-layouts are based about a theme.
Scheme 1
Cadbury's: An Industrial environment.
Scheme 2: An Urban Scene
Scheme 3: Original suggestion
Scheme 4: Dockside
By far the most interesting scheme is the Dockside one. This was suggested by Mike Edmunds, a member of the NagNag Group and a 4mm modeller .It is also the most difficult, if not impossible, to turn into a successful, operational club model railway that is both portable and has physical dimensions of 14'x3'. But it would look artistically wonderful and would certainly be eye-catchingly different.
I'll keep you informed as to which scheme is chosen and what additions or subtractions are made from it; also the reasons why it was chosen when the decision is made.
May 14th. 2011
Well, what's this all about? Friars Balsam, indeed. However, the name may change.
Invitations to exhibitions with Hazelhurst are not forthcoming, Little Mill Junction in P4 needs to be worked on and now occupies the top of our 46' long storage rack, so what's to happen to 7mm? It looks as if there will be a grand reorganisation of the club workroom and that Friars Balsam will go along one wall. What happens at the one end of this layout is open to debate with outside agencies. At the moment it involves some small additions (if a hole is an addition) to a Stud Partition wall.
Let's not be precious about this. Although we hope that the standard of modelling will be good and that its operation will be good, too, its primary object will be to act as a big boy's toy and allow us to play trains at any time. No other real justification except that perhaps an exhibition invite might happen. We can't run trains properly at present 'cos we haven't got the space to erect Hazelhurst or LMJ (when in action) except by taking over the Hall in the Community Centre. So Friars Balsam won't be big or complicated and we have enough stock to run it without any real additions, although both Steve and myself have had a long look at Agenoria's products.
We will try to put it in a box, in the same sort of way that "Beechwood Park" was presented and be well lit. ( I wonder if anyone remembers that. It was painted LSWR green and the box was lined out in black and white. It was the sort of thing you wouldn't forget in a hurry if you saw it in a show. The layout inside may not have been up to much, but the box that contained it was noticeable - not'arf!)
Beechwood Park. RIP.
Steve has been looking at a JMRI/Sprog/MERG ( if that means anything) system to replace our SSI Computer Control. This really has left a lot to be desired. To cut a long story short, an LED attached to a MERG decoder unit controlled by a Sprog in turn linked to a computer running JMRI Panel Pro software flashed on and off, both under direct command and as part of a route. A flashing LED doesn't sound or look much, but believe me it proves that such a control system is possible. And what's sauce for the goose is also a control system for a much more complex layout such as Little Mill Junction as well as Friars Balsam.
So to start with, we need three 7' boards, a finalised layout track plan base and me to pull my finger out and build some more 31mm gauge track. Mike's got it wrong. The yard details have been finalised and two turnouts already built. The third, a tandem, is under construction. Copper laminate construction will do for turnouts in the fiddle yard, but the proper chaired stuff is a pre-requisite for the pretty bit.
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