3D fashions...

Over on a forum I shan't bother with any more is this:-

Now clearly the person who did this on CAD knows his stuff, but he seems to think that people should be prepared to shell out £50 or more for it!!

Of course if you have a view of a Teak coach as something very close to a rough cast platelayer's hut, then I'm sure you'll snap one up if you have more money than sense, but how about stopping for a time to assess what you are being offered.  If you wanted a GNR saloon, with all its fine square cornered mouldings and beadings, you will be, MUST be, surely, woefully disappointed.  OR, will you be a fashion victim and accept this lousy finish in the name of being down with da kids and  up with modern techniques?

I don't care what they say about painting it with hi-build filler and sanding back, blah, blah...why the Hell SHOULD you?  I'll tell you why.  Because if you ever want a 3D printed item with anything like a surface finish that is acceptable, you'd better re-mortgage the house, for the only way 3D will ever give you the kind of surface finish that you would rightly expect on, say, a resin kit or even a white metal one, is if you shell out a massive wad of cash for the high resolution option.

To prove that I know exactly what CAN be done at a huge price, here is a picture of the Ryan PT-22 from Fisher Models and Patterns. I know Paul Fisher. He is a superb modelmaker, but he tried out a 3D print to get the incredibly fine detail on the cylinders of the Kinner 5 cylinder radial. He reckoned that he couldn't do that level of detail by hand, neither could I!

BUT...he described the cost of having JUST ONE of those cylinders 3D printed as "almost ruinously expensive".  For a £150 kit it was worth the financial punt.  He had just one 3D printed and then copied them as a stick of 5 which were cast in resin.  Yes, you can have all the bolt heads that hold the cylinder head on, every tiny fin and even the word "KINNER" on one of those tiny rocker covers, but don't forget..."almost ruinously expensive".

Let's get real and stop believing all the crap shoved at us by the techie press.  If you like your Gresley teaks looking like they were painted and then dipped in caster sugar from 15 paces, you go ahead and swallow all the garbage trotted out about 3D printing.  If you want quality surface finishes, be prepared to put yer money where yer mouth is for at least the next 5 years and stop flogging rough cast crap until then...

Blog-only days begin...

That's it, I've had enough.  I've just removed the last forum from my lists and will soon forget the passwords, knowing me.
I have had enough of the whingers, and apologists for crap models, crap methods and crap attitudes.  The lazy devils who won't even try, yet trumpet rubbish like 3 D printed items that all appear to be so much rough cast concrete in scale at massive prices.
I've had enough of those who criticise the last little detail of an off the shelf piece of overpriced Chinky plastic, yet if you so much as dare to suggest they have a shot at making it themselves they all cry about it being a hobby, so lighten up.  Well, it ain't a hobby for me, it's a living and I always try to do the very best I can for my customers, partly because they deserve it, but partly because my craft has always been important enough to me to do a bloody good job out of self-respect, satisfaction and fulfilment.
If the world is going away from those perfectly achievable and worthy aims then it can go and shove itself up it's own antarctic orifice.

Come the glorious powercut brothers and sisters..............

Dragon Rapide...some more done...

Amazing isn't it?  A bit of sunshine coming through the window and Bingo!  The camera behaves.  I couldn't do it outside as it would have blown clean away, but this is as good as I can expect and after an "auto-correct" seems just fine.

The lower wings are now done with the engine nacelles which attach so intimately to it.  Some parts are handed, some aren't so what you see is what will appear in the kit.  The fine masking tape on the starb'd tailplane is to make a depth of detail under the final surface where a stress bar is built in to the structure, over the ribs.  These have already been masked and painted.  The port tailplane needs final section shaping.  And by the way, they are tailplanes, NOT horizontal stabilisers and it's a fin, NOT a vertical stabilizer.  Why the Hell anyone should use two words where one correct one is understood as standard, I don't know.

Despite today's wonderful sunshine, it's just too windy to put the final self-etch paint on the parts.  The ailerons are separate, naturally as people like to pose them up and down, although most aircraft are left with the stick central, but the fact is, there are huge gaps between aileron edges and wings, so it was always best to make them separate.  In fact so many and large are the gaps in this airframe that it's a wonder it ever flew!

True greats of modelmaking

I was just musing upon the really great modelmakers that were all around in my lifetime.  Mainly when I was a lad and into my teens.
I was thinking of that true gentleman, Geoff Pember.  He was an authority on the Great Eastern Railway and a most complete modelmaker.  So prodigious was he that every rivet on his superb 7mm scale model locomotives was a separate entomological pin, soldered into a Number 70 hole all made with not a minidrill, but a pin chuck, by hand.  He made his own wheels too, spoke by spoke.  Not only that, but he was equally good at scenic work, coaches and wagons.
He spent a long time once at a London exhibition describing to me, a 14 year old, his intricate methods and impressed me so much I bought a box of butterfly pins which I still have, 48 years later.

Ross Pochin, who made models of Furness Railway locos, all by hand, of course.  He also made his own wheels on, if I remember correctly, a Taylor Hobson Model H pantograh engraver, two examples of which I have owned in the past.  Most remarkable with Mr. Pochin was that he made his own motors with integral flywheels, long before most used that essential aid to smooth running.

Contemporary with these gents was, of course, George Iliffe Stokes, the finest scenic modeller to this day.
Nobody has come close to his trees or his sense of atmosphere, even though his track wasn't the finest.
He had once been a member of Cody's Flying Circus and it was the multi stranded flying and control cables from his aircraft from which he made his trees.

Jack Nelson, builder of the finest dioramas of the London, North Western Railway, the Premier Line.  These were true dioramas, where they possessed false or forced perspective and could only be viewed from one position.  He was also a protagonist of 3.5mm scale for British outline models, a rare bird indeed.
Jack had a small flat in Ilford, Sth. Park Drive to be exact and ran the Ilford Junior Model Railway Club, a kind of training ground for youngsters with promise who inevitably then went on to join the Ilford and West Essex Model Railway Club, one of the World's oldest, as indeed did I.  Jack gave me my first sheet of nickel silver to make a model of the LNER V1 2-6-2 tank that I was rather fond of at the time.

John H. Ahern, with his trilogy of "bibles" for railway modelling, Miniature Landscape, Building and Locomotive Construction.  I have them all and still use them.  He built the Madder Valley Railway, which is now at Pendon Museum.  It is generally reckoned to be the first truly scenic layout.  The atmosphere he created with brick papers and hand lettering, was an eye opener to me.

Peter Denny, with his magnum opus, Buckingham Central, a layout which I believe still exists.  He showed that if everything was done to a similar high standard it became unnecessary to work to the very highest standards in order to get a large layout built.

And although the layout was largely made from proprietary models, track, etc., Mac Pyrke's Berrow was one of the few Great Western branch lines I could ever look at more than once.  Atmosphere again.

And so, who have we today?
I can only think of Gordon and Maggie Gravett, who come close.  Many would say Martin Welch, but I'm afraid, I'm not impressed.  I once queued for hours to get into the one and only Model Railway Journal exhibition in London and then again, once inside to get onto the stage to see his Hursley layout.  I was so utterly underwhelmed when I got there, I said so and went to look at better work which had been handmade, not weathered and kit bashed proprietary stuff.  The layout had been so completely overhyped previously, but clearly Welch was an MRJ favourite, indeed he had his books published by them and ended up editor.  But Hursley was small, simple, barely scenic and all out of the box.  I could have knocked it up in 3 months without breaking a sweat.
You see, I am damned fussy.  And no, I don't think there are any true greats left.  And with the proliferation of kits and even accurate looking R-T-R, I think there never will be again.

Dragon Rapide

I am currently making a master for a high end multi media 1/32nd scale kit of a De Havilland DH89..
Since I have removed myself from all forums of late due to the propensity for kit bashing and the dearth of any real modelmaking, I have told my customer that I will keep him appraised via the blog.
So, awaiting hi-build  primer between the masking tape to represent slight surface variances and rib tapes, here is the wing prepared.
The other is now ready for marking up and masking as the engine nacelles have been made for both sides.

All aboard the Heather Bell...

Recently I started doing a 7mm scale model of our old boat, Heather Bell.  I'm doing it in steamed pearwood (naturally) and exactly as the real boat is built.
I am so sick of rubbish boats on model railway layouts!  They have no shape, no detail.  You wouldn't tolerate a loco or coach like that, so why a narrow boat?
Anyway, here it is so far.  A bit busy with aircraft for clients now, so nothing more for a while.

Here you can see the transverse bottom boards which were wedge shaped in plan, so they could be knocked in tight, before fixing.
The engine beds are massive baulks of oak 16"x5"x about 18' long.  At the starn end is the counter block, propped up into position, but not yet fixed.  And the stern post.

The stem post can be seen above the kelson, the long plank that runs inside the boat to strengthen it and to which the bottom boards are fixed.

Much more to come.

Is it Christmas or something?...

Anyone would think it's Christmas all of a sudden.

Today, I got a fat Jiffy bag from a chap I don't know, off a facebook O gauge page I've only just joined, full of wagon underframe components in different plastics and even a set of W irons/axleboxes in white metal. Enough for about 8 wagons I would say.  All for the price of postage.  Who needs ridiculously expensive photo-etch?  The axle boxes even have the writing on them!

In the same post came a lovely late model Romford Bulldog 5 pole motor, never used, in its original box as supplied by the wonderful cavern which was W&H, New Cavendish Street, London.  Remember them? They produced a catalogue which was big enough to keep in your pocket and read at every idle moment.
I do like to use as much British stuff as I can.  This motor, which cost very little, will go with 2 Romford Terriers, a Zenith and a couple of K's Mk 2s.  I like my flywheels in a loco. It smoothes out every movement and makes stopping more realistic.  My point being that these were the go-to motors for years for O gauge modellers especially and they worked perfectly then, so why not now?  It's just a case of gearing and a flywheel.

Of course in those days we worked perfectly well with unsprung, uncompensated chassis too. We did, however, make some seriously good track!  I think the most I ever did with "springing" was to elongate the axle holes a little and bung in a bit of phosphur bronze strip to give it a bit of controlled slop, a la John Ahern, in Model Locomotive Construction, my brass basher's Bible back then.
All I need to complete the set of Romfords now is the big ol' Phantom.

Finally, a chap off another forum has sent me 20 veneers from the tubes of his Cuban cigars!  Very useful on coach models.

People can be so kind.

Must be the season, seeping into some souls.