Look out, its the copse

Freshwater will have more trees than any previous layout I have built, so I wanted to get some planted in time for the Farnham show (and 2mm Scale Association AGM). Previously I have used plastic tree armatures from Heki and Woodland Scenics. These start off as 2D trees, the branches of which need to be bent to produce a not very realistic 3D tree before attaching bits of foliage.

This time, I wanted to try new techniques. I had purchased a tree-making kit from Ceynix many years ago, and I have collected some old mains leads to source copper wire for soldering together. I would build one tree using each technique and decide which I liked best.

The soldered copper method involves stripping mains cable (multi-core) and then twisting, bending and forming branches. The result is then soldered together, requiring a big iron, clips or pegs, or asbestos fingers. I got as far a the second branch before I gave up.

The Ceynix method uses short lengths of florist's wire (a fine stiff wire with green plastic coating) bundled together and bound with florist's green sticky tape. Branches are formed with two or three wires bound together. Branches are then gradually bundled together until a complete tree is formed. The tree then needs to be coated with air drying clay. This is a long slow process. I used a wooden tea stirrer and a pot of water to aid the procedure. When dry, the tree is painted, a quick spray of grey primer and then thin washes of grey-brown shades. The fine twigs and branches are represented by what is called folinet. This is a fine black jumble of synthetic fibres which has to be teased out before gluing in place. I have been told that this is no longer manufactured, so an alternative solution will have to be found soon. To finish off, a spray of aerosol mounting glue is followed by sprinkling with fine foliage.

I found this method much better, and liked the results, and managed to complete 12 trees in time for the show.

No matter what method is used to make trees, a good book of tree pictures is essential to produce realistic trees. Would anyone build and paint a loco, coach, or even a wagon, just from memory? Getting the general shape, density of branches and colour tones right really brings a tree to life.

The first photo shows a sycamore tree, with the taped bundles of florist's wire formed into branches. The last few millimeters of each branch is a single strand of the florist's wire without tape. The oak tree in the background is the real thing,

 The next photo shows the coating of air drying clay on a couple of smaller trees.

And finally, the small copse of 12 trees planted on the layout. The sycamore is in the centre, with a coppiced silver birch to the left, and several small hazel bushes behind. Below the canopy of the main trees, some small alder saplings (single pieces of florist's wire with foliage added)  are poking up through the ground cover.

 So, 12 trees do not go very far on a rural layout. I will be building trees for many weeks to come.

Signal Success for Freshwater

Following general scenic work completed in time for the Basingstoke exhibition, a start has been made on some detailing and buildings. One important detail item is the starting signal. Fortunately there is only the one proper signal on the layout, as it has taken 6 months to build it. The two ground signals required will be another story.

I wanted to build a typical SR rail-built upper quadrant signal, operational of course. I purchased some etched brass signal boards, counterweights, brackets and ladders from MSE. The post would be scratch built, using bullhead rail from the 2mm Scale Association. I laid two longish lengths of rail together, and joined them with a blob of solder at each end. I could then drill through the pair for the joining bolts at the correct intervals, confident that they would line up later when the rails were parted. I found a piece of card of suitable thickness, and cut comb-like teeth into it. With some wire passed through the rail holes at each end, I could then sandwich the two rails either side of the card and solder the joining wires in each hole, with the card keeping the rails the correct distance apart. The comb slots in the card meant the resulting signal post could be slid off the card once complete.

I had some small surface mount gold-white LEDs, and decided to use one as the signal lamp. It is rectangular rather than cylindrical, but is about the right size. I formed a triangular bracket from some unused nickel-silver etch and soldered it to the signal post, and one end of the LED to the top of the bracket. This formed bothan  electrical and a mechanical joint. Some very fine enamelled copper wire was soldered to the topmost terminal of the LED and runs down the post to the lampman's platform. The platform is actually a piece of thin double sided PCB. The lower face is soldered to the post with some more nickel-silver brackets. The top face is insulated from the post, and so the other end of the enamelled copper wire is soldered to it, as is the top end of the ladder. Electrical current for the LED therefore flows up the ladder, through the enamelled copper wire to the LED, and then down the signal post.

I used an old 4mm copper clad sleeper as a base for the signal, with the post passing through a hole drilled in the sleeper, and the lower end of the ladder through two smal holes. Both were soldered to the copper, again for both mechanical and electrical connection, the gap at the centre of the sleeper keeping them electrically separated.

A piece of nickel-silver was added to the top of the post for its cap, and some small backets from the MSE etch soldered to each side of a rail for the signal arm pivot wire to pass through. An MSE counterweight and bracket were made up and attached just below where the signal arm fits.

A pivot wire was soldered to a signal arm from the etch, and the arm and post were painted, sprayed with white primer, and then brush painted black and colour details. Some red and blue-green paint was mixed in some Krystal Klear PVA which was then added to form the spectacle plates in the holes in the signal arm.

The final bit of above ground work was to add the operating wires. This is a very fiddly job, requiring good right-angle bends in the wire and a lot of luck.

Below ground, I created a lever arm from some more PCB, pivoting on a wire pin through the two rails. The lower end of the operating wire passes through a small hole in the PCB. A couple more pins were soldered into holes drilled in the PCB to act as mechanical end stops, so the signal operating wire cannot be pulled or pushed further than required and thus causing damage.

The signal was then carefully glued into a hole in the baseboard, with the base covered with ballast and ground cover. I will probably regret not making it removeable when cleaning the track, but I have not found an unobtrusive detachable mounting method yet.

The final piece of the puzzle was the operating servo. One of the new design, 3D printed, Merg servo mounts was used, with the operating wire bent into a curious form to reach the lever arm below the signal. In the end, the operating movement was not as great as expected, and I could have got away with a smaller lever, but it works.

It is now configured into the Merg CBus system so that a single CBus event will raise the signal arm. This can be generated from a Merg CANCAB controller, or a simple push button on the control box I made to give simpler operation of the uncoupling magnets.

Any of the route setting events will lower the signal arm, so it should not be possible to forget returning the signal to danger before the next movement takes place.

Some buildings for Freshwater

At the Basingstoke show, the only building on the layout was a Ratio SR concrete PW hut. There are only four other major buildings required to complete the layout, but all will need to be scratch built. I started trying to create drawings for the station building, using a 3D drawing package, but the more I did, the more I thought about 3D printing the building instead of using plasticard and printed paper as I had orginally intended. The complex decorative brickwork would be really difficult to reproduce using the traditional building methods, but should be pretty simple for 3D printing. However, the station building is complex and quite large, and would be an expensive experiment if 3D printing was not up to it. I therefore turned my attention to a smaller building - a corrugated iron shed that stood in the goods yard, and is visible in the background of several photos I have collected.

Corrugated iron has always been a challenge for 2mm/ft scale. The best looking solution, aluminium foil corrugated between a pair of suitable rollers, is extremely delicate and easily flattened or distorted. Creating it in 3D is also not straightforward, but I thought I would give it a try. I found details on the Internet about the 'standard' size (or possibly the most standard of the sizes), and an image of a typical profile. The sheet width is pretty standard, but was available in various lengths up to 12 feet. I used the profile image to create a 3D object of a standard sized panel, corrugated on one side, and flat on the other, about 0.7mm thick, so that it would exceed the minimum wall thickness for 3D printing. I then built the shed model by cloning and resizing these panels as required. I varied the panel positions to accentuate the overlaps and joins of the original building, and added doors and eaves to suit. I knew that the window frames would be too small to print, but I found some Ratio etched brass window frames which were close enough in size and style, and I made window apertures in the model of the right size to fit these frames. For my first attempt, I had made an error in sizing the hut from the photos and created what would have been an enormous building. However, I was very pleased by the representation of the corrugated iron panels, so I had another go, and produced a much more modest sized building. Here it is painted up and just sitting on my test diorama.

Whilst waiting for Shapeways to print my model, I stumbled across a model uploded by someone else, presumeably a wargamer, of a wartime pillbox. Now, there was a pillbox in the goods yard of Freshwater, and, in fact, it is the only railway building still standing in its original position, albeit now in the middle of a garden centre carpark. Strictly speaking, the pillbox should be located just off the front of the layout, but I thought I would buy a reprint of the model anyway. It turned out to be a really nice looking model, and painted up, the brickwork looks really good. This gives me confidence to press on with the station building.

Freshwater at the Basingstoke Show 2014

I love the sound of deadlines flying by. Having a deadline certainly provides a bit of impetus to get things done, even if not enough things actually get done in time.

When I accepted the invitation before Christmas, I had just about got all the electrical and mechanical gubbins beneath the layout working as required (see umpteen previous posts) and so, 4 years after the initial deadline for the 2mm Scale Association Golden Jubilee Expo in Oxford, I thought the time was right to start some scenic work. After all, with just one baseboard to cover, and four buildings to make, there was plenty of time. Then I started to make the starter signal. After a promising start, weeks turned to months, and with the above ground parts completed and working, I had to put it aside and start on the terraforming instead of trying to connect up a minute linear servo underneath.

So, after carving the layers of foamboard using a ceramic kitchen knife to produce a smooth land surface, and then covering with simple paper maché sprayed with brown and grey aerosol paints, I started laying the reed beds alongside the river, and along the tributary. This was plumbers hemp planted in glue and later trimmed with scissors and brushed roughly with green paint. The river water was Deluxe Solid Water resin which has produced the desired effect.

The rough ground cover was formed using a new product, which is basically a cooker hood filter that has been spray painted. I think it is quite effective as an initial layer. Shorter grass was static fibres, but the application was not as successful as on my test piece, with very little of it standing up properly.

Lots of fencing was added, mostly etched nickel-silver, but with plastic strip added to the uprights to give them more body. Lots more needs to be added, but I think I wiped out the stocks of County Rolling Stock's N'Tastic online shop.

Roads and platform surfaces are fine wet-and-dry emery paper, and the 3D printed trestle platform (see earlier blog) completes the platform. Various scatter materials, and a little plaster, completed the ground cover. Again, this is just the initial layer which will be toned down and added to later.

So that is how far it progressed before the exhibition. The layout behaved itself admirably over the two days, the main problems being with the DG couplings on some of the wagons which will have to be worked on before the next outing. Apart from that, it was a pleasure to shunt for an hour or two at a time. The 'to do' list now reads: Buildings, Trees, Signals, more fences, appropriate rolling stock.

Spectators. So it did have some interest from the visitors.

Some inappropriate rolling stock (except for the road van)

Station building is missing (amongst other things)

River Yar

The complete exhibit, with cantilevered fiddle yard floating to the right.

Freshwater gets Cup-Holders, er, I mean CAB-Holders

If you have ever used hand held controllers to operate a layout, you will know that you need somewhere to put them when you need to deal with a derailment, or drink some tea. Often this means hanging it over the backscene, or letting it dangle down to the floor.

On previous layouts, I have used Velcro to allow the controller to be stuck at various places at the back of the layout. This is very handy, but removing the controller from the Velcro can cause some fairly major earthquakes on the layout.

However, I have been given a pre-production kit from Merg to try out, which has been designed by Howard Watkins specifically to hold the Merg CANCAB controllers. The kit consists of 8 laser cut pieces of MDF. The instructions advise fitting them together dry at first to be sure how they assemble, and this is a good idea. The laser cutting is so accurate that the pieces fit together perfectly, and it will hold together very well without gluing. Having satisfied myself that I had got it right, I then reassembled it using a bare minimum of white PVA woodworking glue. The pieces fit together so well, there is just no room for excess glue. Once the glue was set, it appears to be very strong.

I have now given it a quick spray of Halfords grey primer to protect the wood from moisture.

With the optional 8th piece fitted, the CANCAB locates in such a way that all the buttons and speed control knob are accessible without having to remove the controller. This can be a useful feature.

There are various screw holes for fitting to the layout, but I opted for self-adhesive Velcro. This will allow me to remove the holders and keep them safe in a box when transporting the layout, without having to resort to a screw driver.

Unfortunately, at this point, I do not know when the kit will be generally available, or what the cost will be, but I think it will be a 'must have' for all CANCAB users, and I will definitely be ordering more.

My First Dabble With 3D Printing

Freshwater station only has one platform, but it was extended at various times over the years. The first section by the buffers where the locomotive would stand is very low with plain brick facing. It then ramps up to a more normal height. The next section is typical Southern Railway concrete panels from the Exmouth Junction concrete works, while the latest extension used the Southern Railway lightweight concrete trestles, more standard components from Exmouth Junction.

Modelling the brick faced platform should be fairly simple using plastic and printed paper. I bought some Peco concrete platform facing for the next section, but it needed cutting down to the correct height, and it appears to be absolutely nothing like typical Southern Railway platforms. It might be based on a foreign prototype, or possibly just the imagination of somebody at Peco. I added some Milliput to fill the vertical channels and add the curved supports at the top of each column. It might have been better to completely scratchbuild some instead.

That leaves the trestle platforms. Nobody manufactures it in 2mm scale, so I had to make it myself. I could have formed each pair of legs separately, but would probably have given up through boredom before completing them all. Also, I knew they would vary too much and would not produce the neat, regimented rows that are such a feature of this type of platform. I had dabbled with resin moulding some years ago, so I filed a trestle from perspex and formed Plasticine moulds with it, and filled them with epoxy resin glue. This experiment was not a great success, the results being too fragile and varying in quality. I decided it was not worth trying with rubber moulds and polyurethane resin.

My next option was to try etching in fairly thick brass. This would still have required sweating two layers together to get the right thickness, but would produce a very strong result. However, I decided to try my third option - 3D printing - instead. Many people have been trying out 3D printing with varying success. However, the technology seems to be improving daily, and I figured a simple scenic item might turn out better than some of the more ambitious projects some people were attempting.

I had previously done quite a bit of 3D modelling on the computer, producing models for use in Microsoft Train Simulator that I made available on uktrainsim.com, so creating the 3D models for printing did not seem too daunting. However, the software I used to use appears to be no longer supported, and did not create files of the required format, so I downloaded the free 3D model editing software called Blender. I know some people swear by Google Sketchup, but I had tinkered with it once and found it confusingly different to what I had used before. Blender is open source, supported by lots of programmers and contributors, and there are lots of tutorials available for it on the Internet.

A 3D model is made up from a series of points, each of which has an X, Y and Z coordinate specifying its position in 3D space. A pair of points can be joined by a line, or an 'edge' and the edges joining three or more points can form a 'face'. A face can be double-sided, but usually only has one side. It cannot be seen from the other side. A simple cube has six faces and eight points - one at each corner - and twelve edges. Spheres, cylinders and circles are not actually possible to create faithfully in this type of 3D model. Instead, a circle is formed from a large number of points, each linked by a straight edge. With enough points, the resulting polygon can start to resemble a circle. Similarly, cylinders and spheres can be portrayed using lots of small, flat faces.

This is where creating models for use in a real-time computer game differs from creating models for 3D printing. In order for a computer to create the displayed images of the game fast enough for smooth, realistic animated motion, the models need the minimum number of points and faces possible. You can play with things called 'normals' on the faces to create the illusion of curved faces, but you would also leave out any unnecessary faces, such as the underside of vehicles which would not normally be seen. However, for 3D printing, we want lots of faces to produce fine curved surfaces, and most important, the models must be 'watertight'. That is, there should be no missing faces, or inward facing surfaces. So, a cube must have all six faces, and all must face outward.

Having grasped these basic premises, model making is rather like modelling in clay. You can grab a bit and pull it out (called extrusion) or you can add more bits of clay. Most software allows you add cubes, cylinders, spheres or toroids (ring donuts). You then deform these objects, divide faces and edges, and extrude parts to get to the required shape. There are other useful tools that can be employed, such as the lathing tool. This can be used to transform a set of lines drawing the outline of one side of, say, a vase, for example, and spin it round to create a 3D vase shape. It is also possible to merge shapes, and use logical unions, intersections or differences to add or subtract shapes from each other. Subtracting a small cylinder from a large cube is like drilling a hole in the cube, for instance.

For my first 3D print model, I used the drawings of Southern Railway trestle platform components from the useful book 'Southern Nouveau - an essay in Concrete'. I converted all the measurements from inches to millimeters, and divided by 152 for the correct scale. Blender uses unspecified measurement units, so I chose to use 1 unit = 1mm in Blender. I then created models of a pair of legs, and a platform section, starting each from a cube, deforming, dividing and extruding until the correct shape and dimensions were achieved. I also 'drilled' holes in the rear posts for the hand rail and fence wires.

 I then duplicated these shapes thirty or so times, stacked up close to each other, but not touching, and then exported the complete set to a single .stl format file.

3D printers are improving in quality, and the cost is falling rapidly, but the affordable ones are still limited in quality and ability. Although they may be fun to experiment with, for now, it makes more economic sense to make use of online 3D printing services, such as Shapeways, to do the 3D printing. Having registered as a user, I uploaded the .stl file, specifying that 1 measurement unit represents 1mm. Some automated checks are carried out on the file, and a few minutes later, I received an email telling me that my file should probably print OK. I was then able to choose what material should be used for the printing, and the price for printing my model in each material could then be seen. Shapeways have a simple pricing scheme, you pay for the volume of material used, each material type having a cost per cubic measure. Therefore, a hollow model will cost less than a solid model of the same size.

Frosted Ultra Detail (FUD) is the plastic most modellers use as it has the finest resolution (0.2mm) but it is far from the cheapest material. My model, enough components for about 12 inches length of platform, cost €23 plus postage. So, not as cheap as a mass produced kit would be (if available), but not prohibitively expensive. I uploaded the file on the Monday evening, and a box with the components in came through my letterbox on the Friday. I was very impressed.

The FUD material is quite transparent, so you can see the surface irregularities on both sides and an initial look gives the impression that they are a bit rough. The legs with the taller rear post will be used to form a lamp post, with a swan neck formed from .3mm wire. This swan neck would have been too fine for 3D printing.

I cleaned the components, removing traces of the wax used in the printing process, most of which has already been removed before delivery. I was not surprised that the .3mm holes for the handrail were not properly formed, but there was enough to guide a drill through in the correct position. I used superglue to fix the components to each other and roughly painted them with a concrete-ish colour and fitted it to a small board with a length of track to see how it looked. The hand rail is formed from 0.3mm nickel silver straight wire.

I have also added some static grass and some bushes, and formed a wire swan-neck lamp. The lamp head was also 3D printed, making good use of the transparency of the FUD for the bowl of the lamp.

I was quite pleased with the results, but gluing all the components together was quite fiddly, and there is quite some uneveness in the platform surface as a result. I therefore went back to the 3D model and started to combine the components so that they would be printed in units of two or three pairs of legs with platforms. I also created the end ramps as single units, and a single unit to include the station nameboard. I kept to smallish units because the platform for Freshwater is curved, not straight. Below you see the duplicated sections in Blender. You can also see some lamp heads underneath the platforms.

And again, a week later, the new components came through my letterbox:

So, now I have no excuse not to get on and create the platform for Freshwater.

Right back where I started from

It is over 12 months since my last posting on this blog. A quick recap of the project so far is in order.

Way back in July 2010, the 2mm Scale Association celebrated its Golden Jubilee with a special Expo in Oxford. Prior to this, a layout building challenge was issued for layouts up to 9.42 square feet to be exhibited at the Expo. I built Freshwater for this challenge. As a change from my normal use of relays to operate points, I decided to try servos for the new layout. I joined Merg to get access to their Servo4 kits. After some teething problems, I managed to get the layout working just in time for the Expo with a temporary control panel with a switch for each point. Although the layout operated nicely all weekend, there had been no time to create any scenery. It was just track on white painted baseboards.

I did want to have route selection and a proper control panel, but there was a problem with the servos that I wanted to fix first. On powering up the layout, one or more servos would decide to move rapidly to one extreme or the other, despite being restricted in their movement by the point mechanisms. Sometimes they would draw so much current, the power supply voltage to the PIC controllers would not rise high enough for the PICs to start operating and get the servos under control. I had to resort to switching the power off and on a few times until things sorted themselves out.

My last posting on this blog describes the introduction of the Merg CBus layout control bus, the introduction of DCC, and a lot of work on power supplies in an effort to resolve the servo startup problems. The problems persisted and I was beginning to lose interest in the layout.

The introduction of a new Merg kit for a servo mounting started me thinking again. I had done everything I could with the electronics - maybe the problem was with how I had mounted the servos. I had them directly driving the point mechanisms which meant they were only using a small segment of their available movement. The new servo mounts are arranged so that the servo can sweep through its entire range while the rod connecting to the point mechanism only moves a few millimeters. It would no longer matter if the servo wanted to move to an extremity on powering up. It could do so quite freely.

So, a start was made removing the existing servos and their mounting blocks and fitting the new mounting kits (with 5mm shaved off their overall height to fit within the hinged cover panels). At the same time, I decided to replace the under-board point tiebars I had originally fitted. Although they had worked OK, they did not have any way to adjust the distance between the point blades. The old ones also had a microswitch to change the frog polarity, whereas the new mounting also has microswitches nicely mounted on them. My new under-board tiebars, therefore, did not require microswitches.

All this work has now been completed with a couple of weeks to spare before this year's 2mm Scale Association Expo in Wallingford. Unfortunately, the viewing side of the baseboard is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 - ballasted trackwork sitting on plain white baseboards. But, like the duck, calm and serene on the surface but peddling like mad underneath.