fighting procrastination fifteen minutes at a time

Category: Misc (Page 3 of 3)

Temporary Tinkerings

With this new found surge of mojo inducing activity and following on from last nights post I have set up a temporary little work bench that I can leave set up and not have to remove myself from the kitchen table every time I want to do some modelling. Although not shown here I came across a number of points/switches in the boxes that I had completely forgotten I had, but that’s for a future post. But back to the workbench, I also found a small vice cheap and cheerful, well so cheap that the jaws are almost at 45degs so is it worth trying remedial work on it or to bin and look for a new quality item. Well in these days of austerity it may have to be the former.

Also I think a little tray for banging and bashing might be a good idea and also a good mounting point for the vice. In fact I would quite like to build a tool box for my modelling tools and whilst going through my back catalogue of Railway Modellers there are some good articles to inspiration and ideas from. I fact I would love to set some time aside to sit back in the afternoon with a cuppa in a sunny corner and refresh and relive those happy teenage years, so long ago 🙂

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Second up is a pic of an LNER horse box that I will be using on my 2mmFS layout of Leyburn when I start to build it though I think this may be the last big project due to the rate of knots I am currently working at. This was used to take racehorses from Middleham where the racing community had grown and to this day thrives, to Leyburn for transport on to Ripon, York and all points to Newmarket. An Oxford Diecast model that I hadn’t realised I had brought and was thinking that this might be an ideal first 3D printing project but then out of Aladdin’s cave this came chugging and smoking, well at least in my mind. I think that a dusting of Tamiya powders will offset the glossiness. One thing I do think detracts a bit from the model are the wheels. But a small matter to paint some detail in and also dirty up. I don’t think that I will be going to the effort of making it more finescale.

And lastly is a 2mmFS wagon kit brought at an exhibition somewhere. I think I must have about 10 of these as I pretty much brought one every time I saw the 2mil stand at shows. But this is an easy to start and finish project and if all completed will give me a nice little rack of mineral wagons.

As part of the tool shop I have been thinking about getting an airbrush and from all I have read and heard that iawata is the way to go, but this is quite a big ticket item with all the necessary compressor etc but again that’s further down the road.

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Micro manna

Mentioned here before in a previous thread I stumbled across a Facebook group a short while ago that has some great pictures on it and yet more opportunity for flights of fancy. I think this and this picture leads me to think that there are loads of micro layout opportunities to be had and the rolling stock is just so diverse. I specially like the fact that railcars can pull along wagons and are also used to shunt them around. I am slowly storing up ideas for various plans but as usual all scrap paper doodlings.

Still getting to grips with CAD and have been temped to use Autodesk’s Fusion 360. This is a year of free use for personal hobbyist use after that I am not too sure about licensing as I haven’t read up in too much detail, yet. I have to say that the interface is much cleaner that Fusion for Mac and I really should plug a mouse in to the laptop but for my needs it seems to fit the bill. I have had quite a few crashes but I think this is more likely due to having base memory of 4Gb in the Laptop. Things seems to run a bit more smoothly when all other apps are quitted but there are still some beach ball of doom spinning moments. I am starting to go through the vidorials and just messing around myself.

As for physical modelling I seem to have hit a bit of modellers block and sit and stare at the #9 point I am building but don’t seem to be able to move on from the basic build.. tomorrow is another day.. well in eight minutes it is 🙂

Virtual builds

Having messed around with Sketchup for more time than I care to remember in fact before Google got its hands on it I have found that the limitations were starting to hinder my learning of CAD. Don’t get me wrong there are many things that Sketchup is great for but for 3D Product modelling it is not, guess one has to remember that originally it was designed for Architectural work and probably never envisaged the proliferation of the types of uses that it gets now. Also the libraries and add-ons have exploded the potential of this humble app.

However going back to the reason for this post and my niggles at not being able to create curves easily I have been sussing out a number of CAD packages that best fit my methods of use. Now there are millions of people that use CAD that could tell me the best platform to take up but I think it really boils down to how you relate to it. Obviously there are certain process that common across all apps but there are ways of executing them. So looking for something that I would be able to pick up ‘relatively’ easily I had been using Autodesks Sketchbook on my Air and iPhone so when I came across Inventor Fusion for Mac in the App store I thought I would give it a go. The menu system across those apps is the same so learning the workflow on one app will transfer over to the others thus easing the effort to get to grips with the CAD app. Now the benefits to Fusion on the Mac is that it is free, however like with some free software it was a beta and the chances of updates are probably at best unlikely, but they were really using that as a testbed for the Fusion 360. This now available free for students and hobbyists.

Anyway back to the job in hand and below you will see the poking and proddings of a couple of days labour. I will say the help for IFFM is pretty poor and the online presence is limited but having spent some time reading the pdf I am getting the hang of the features. I am modelling at the dimensions of what I am finally going to build and the level of control is far greater than sketchup. So here is my first attempt..

Screen Shot 2014-02-11 at 17.15.21

Fireside

Just a quick note to remind my self more than anything about some pages and links I have come across today firstly I have spent quite some time on the Stadler website pawing over the plans for their metre gauge trams and rapid transit trains. As most of these are very box like I think it will not be too difficult to knock up in CAD although I am still getting my hands dirty and trying to learn via a process of break fix also compound curves are proving a tad difficult, well if first you don’t succeed, try try again etc..

Also I saw a link on Facebook for some neat 3D scanning software that might come in use in the future. I am temped to scan my Bemo stock to see if I can down size it or maybe I can photo it and then maybe use Blender to get the skeleton shape for the wagons. But that’s definitely a task for later.

Still plodding along with the point building and trying to get the wing rails to fit correctly with the frog. The template is way out from Templot but I put that down to me not calibrating the printer before printing out. I should know better.

Back to the extrude tool..

State of the nation

So 2013 was a bad year and lead to little or no modelling due to circumstances and the loss of modelling mojo, however in 2014 I am hoping to break that trend and start off on a positive foot. I realise that doing 15 mins modelling a day may not be completely attainable for most of us and wanted to start off saying that I am in that category myself. However the principle is to do something railway related every day. In the highs and lows, well to be honest mainly the lows of last year it was particularly hard to keep the mojo motivated, and at some points I thought what the hell am I doing playing with toy trains, just get rid of it all and start another hobby like RC planes or motorcycle maintenance.

Well thankfully things have improved and I feel a bit more positive about my life in my hobby and want to produce something that I can ‘play’ with and also be proud of producing. As you can probably tell from the projects post I do have the tendency to wander off the beaten track (pun intended) and get dazzled by shiny new things. If I was to set new years modelling resolutions (which I am not as I have long realised that metaphorically 2 minutes after I set them I am breaking them again) it would be to stick to one task until its completed. That said I do really like opposing interests and so therefore it is going to be a battle of wits with myself this year to produce.

All the projects from last year still stand and I am looking forward to getting stuck into things. I also wish all ‘you’ out there in modelling land a happy year ahead and look forward posting my progress here and to reading about others modelling endeavours.

..and finally the new found mojo came from a Geography project for me niece, a little bit of hand laid nominal Zn2/3 gauge track solder by both myself and once taught my niece with some realistic wobbles.

Down in the valley

Down in the valley

Happy new year and 2014

Grand day out

Yesterday I ventured out to the 2mm Scale Association annual AGM meeting over t’other side ‘o’ pennines in (cough) Lancashire.. I had hoped to have set off in reasonable time but the usual family timekeeping or should that be time-wasting factors construed against me. So off I set for Burnley as I thought.. The routes out of the Dales are two, a long one and and a long one! The weather was rather Autumnally grim and so I op’ed for time over distance. This meant a trek over the moors and as the mist swirled around the slow moving car labouring up and down its way up the Dale I thought of American Werewolf in London.

Thankfully I realised I wasn’t meant to be going to Burnley and sailed past via the rather ominously numbered A666 to end up in Bolton, apparently pronounced Bo’ton. By this time I was late for the AGM but managed to catch the tail end then it was down to socialising and catching up with friends and meeting new people. Although I missed the last Lancashire and Yorkshire Area Group Meeting I am endeavouring to go to the next which will feature lathes and lathing! woohoo is all I can say. One of the group members is now a dealer for Proxxon and had the lathe and milling machine on show.. drool is not the right word, but German engineering comes at a price, maybe santa will be kind 😉

So after much chatting, making new acquaintances and a slice of very nice Lemon Drizzle Cake and tea I set off back t’Dales invigorated and feeling a bit better about get on with modelling and life.

Here are some pics of the day, not as many as I would have liked as forgot to charge the bats! But a selection of some exquisite modelling. I ♥ 2mmFS 😀

First up Bafferton, a lovely circular layout based on a real location, but adapted. Run by father and son(s)

2mmFS - Brafferton

2mmFS – NER Barberton

2mmFS Micro Layout

2mmFs Micro Layout – Water Lane

Water Lane

Water Lane

Tivotdale Station

Tivotdale Station

Micro Dioramas

Micro Dioramas

Micro 1 - Station name unknown
Micro 1 – Station name unknown

Micro 2 - 1. Station unknown

Micro 2 – 1. Station unknown

Micro 2 - 2. Station unknown

Micro 2 – 2. Station unknown

Corrieshallock

Corrieshallock

Corrieshallock - closeup

Corrieshallock – closeup

and finally 🙂

bits

Bits!

From above..

photo

Following on from the previous post of attic rummagings  I manage to find a in a dark damp corner a carrier bag of my old Railway Modellers from the early 80’s that my mum use to buy me from my pocket money once a month on a Friday when she went to the local market as I was at that point still having to go to what we called Colditz in reality was the local comprehensive school. Wasn’t till I got into the 6th year and they treated us ‘like’ adults that I was able to go down into town and get my own copy along with a quart of sherbert BonBons, ahh happy days.

What might you ask has this to do with fifteen minutes of modelling well I call it research! 🙂 As with most RM’s there are scale plans in most issues and in one of them there are 4mm drawings for a ‘Jinty’ or better known as an LMS Fowler 3F loco. This is something I am planning on looking at building for my S Scale Micro. Being a small branch/yard type loco it will fit in nicely with the locale and also as I plan to do this as a 3D Shapeways print project it should be relatively easy to get going, I say easy but then I remember the opposing force of procrastination slipping in and teaching myself CAD. I have Sketchup but feel it is not suited to 3D modelling and is more aimed at architecture. Anyway more of that story to come later.

In other news I have been thinking and planning a kind of test bed to my plan to build Leyburn on the Wensleydale Line in the 1940’s. This is to get a feel for the scenery and buildings that I am going to need. I would really like to build this as real roundy layout like Brafferton that I really like as it ‘gets’ the feel of its location, but also as I want to actually build something before launching into a full blown proto-based layout.

2mmplan

Basically at the moment it feels like I am treading water until I can get my railway stuff out of storage and back home where I can really start to get cracking, although money is tight at the moment building on a budget can introduce interesting methods and modelling. I think I am going to start to label posts by project so as not to confuse you dear reader as to which I am currently working on.

And finally two events to look forward to firstly the meeting of L&Y 2mmFS group, not sure what to expect but it is a do’ing group rather than a talking one so looking forward to that and secondly the 2mmFS AGM over in Burnley which will be good to go to not just for the socialising. Will report further.

Try again!

After a considerable period of in activity and not following my own goals I have resurrected 15 Minute Modeller, but now on WordPress rather than on Blogger due to having forgotten my login details and the ludicrous lengths I had to go to to try and recover my password. So inevitably I failed at this and so a move over the road to WordPress was successfully completed earlier today.

I decided not to transfer the old content over from Google but will add things as and when they come across the radar. At some point I may get the domain for this but until then I am going to mess around with the customisation of the template I have chosen.

In this blog I will document my rubber scaling and general flightiness. But then variety is the spice of life.

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