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chris

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Posts posted by chris

  1. Mick, if I've missed read the situation and this suggestions is stupid then please ignore, but any chance you could organise a mini open day on the SGR so we can give it a send off. Ian and I are relatively local and I wouldn't be surprised if there are people on here who would travel a bit further to give their stock a run out in your garden.

    If the weather we are having wants to continue through October then it would be perfect.

    It would also be nice to meet up with some of you guys.

  2. Great weather at the moment. I've managed to get out for an hour or two this week and I'm making good progress with the clear roofing I'm putting up between my shed and my neighbours. Had to describe, so I may just have to take a photo when it's up.

  3.  

    mick said:

    I guess after the delay getting them onto the market that it's only to be expected that they'd soon be offered at discount prices. Hattons have them reduced to £15 already!

    so your advice to snap one up quick before they sell out wasn't one of your best tips ;)

  4. They do rust, but I've recently removed staples from a 12 year old shed roof and they were in better condition that the felt. They are also easy to remove when you have the right tool, so replacement after 5 years or so wouldn't be a massive chore, as long as you can get at them.

  5. There is a sods law of train travel in the UK, it goes like this...

    When you have to purchase an eye wateringly expensive ticket for your journey, the train is never delayed enough for you to be able to claim any money back. When you are delayed by 2+ hours your traveling between Glasgow and York for £5 on a super advanced single and it ain't worth claiming :roll:

    The very last journey we made on our rover was late on Friday evening home from Durham. Oliver Cromwell had disgraced himself by setting fire to the line side and the East Coast was in complete mess. We were delayed by over 100 minutes. This was the only delay we had on the 27 trains we caught that week. I claimed for the delay and East Coast repaid 100% of the cost of the tickets, yep all £92 (twice) for the full week because of one delay.

    I'm not sure they understanmd what a rover is at East Coast. :D

  6. I purchased my staple gun when I needed to redo the shed roof. The original installers had used staples and they had coped far better than the felt :!: so I decided it was worth the investment of £5 to buy a gun.

    The speed you can work at is amazing. On a recent evening I heard my neighbour hammering away for an hour or so, it was only the next day when I saw a new patch of felt on his shed that I realised what he had been doing. He'd have had the job done in ten minutes if I'd seen him at it and lent him the gun.

    You can also produce very neat results with a staple gun, but only if you have a good staple removal tool as well.

  7. Finally found the extra coach in Model Zone, Manchester. Was very tempted to buy it (I could always sell it) seen as Rails still have the pack. But don't have the cash at the moment so left it on the shelf.

  8. Dave said:

    Whilst I use felt adhesive on the wood to stick it down, I also overlapped the felt by about two inches (the depth of the batons underneath at the edges) and used short (3/4") clout nails to secure it in place. I never thought about just applying the felt to the top and trimming to size. Perhaps because my only previous experience with roofing felt was on sheds, where I did it exactly the same as I've done on my layout.

    Dave, the stuff I did last year I used adhesive and trimmed to the edges. Earlier in the Summer I refeltted my shed and lipped it over, using a staple gun to tack it down.

    The staple gun made the job super quick and it's a one-handed tool so I hand a hand free to pull the felt tight.

    The trimmed edges look great, but they need extra maintenance so I'm going to try lapping the felt over the edge and stapling it in place.

  9. I've used nails. I've also started drilling holes in the ties, using a 1mm bit in an archimedes drill. The hoIes allow me to use larger nails which would normally split the ties. I use a punch and a small hammer, in fact I can usually push the nails in with the punch without the hammer, although my hands start to get sore quite quickly and I go back to the hammer.

  10. Looking at peoples galleries I can see a split between those of us who use widths of felt and those who use lengths.

    I buy 8m long by 1m wide (10 year) felt. I unroll the whole thing and then cut strips long enough to cover the run of baseboard. And yes, I copied Ian. In working this way so far I only have one place where I've had to join the felt. Some of you have cut the roll across it's width to produce 1m lengths which then need a lot more joins. May way is a lot more cumbersome (getting 6m by 20cm of felt smooth ain't easy) but I'm scared of water ingress in joints. I'm hoping to be ready to lay some more felt in the next few weeks so feed back on the how all those joints have held up would be timely.

  11. OK, time for a topic on tips on roofing felt.

    Possible discussion points...

    • How to fix it in place
    • Do you trim to the top, wrap round the side or wrap under the baseboard.
    • When two sections meet is it best to overlap or line them up flush.
    • With the benefit of hindsight...
  12. I've yet to have a bond fail, but it is an issue with outdoor railways. One of the arguments against tunnels is "what happens if a bond fails in a tunnel?" Well here's my two suggestions.

    Have just one track joint in the tunnel, if the bond stops conducting then rely on the feed from the other end of the track which is outside the tunnel.Solder two bonds per rail per joint. With two wires in place you have a back up if one fails. It won't look pretty, but its hidden in the tunnel.

    Have long bonding wires that run the length of the tunnel. Rather than bonding a centimetre either side of the join, bond at the tunnel mouth which will remain accessible.

  13. Great work, great photos.

    If you want to take a belt and braces approach to the section in the tunnel then I'd suggest soldering two bonding wires over each rail join so if one fails you have a back up. It may look a bit messy having a couple of wires on both sides of the join, but it's in the tunnel so who is going to see it.

    While I'm mentioning rail joints, if you trim the chairs off the end sleepers then that will make room for the fishplate and you won't get a gap in the sleepers at each joint. I wish I'd twigged on to that before I first started laying track.

  14. I managed to get a good few hours of work in today, on the back of a couple after work yesterday. I've prepped my salvaged aluminium girders, they required a couple of lips sawing off at the ends and plenty of holes drilled so the can be screwed in place. The other main job was painting three 2440mm by 300mm boards, two coats, both sides and all edges. It was going swimmingly until the afternoon delievered rain showers :!:

    Got them all done in the end so I'm quite close to being able to fit them to the shelving brackets that went up yesterday.

  15. mick said:

    You're going to have to be quick with this one Chris.

    I'd got one within a couple of hours of Monk Bar Model Shop receiving their delivery of them. They were quite surprised to get them, they also through Hornby had given up and weren't making them.

  16. There still could be plenty of leg plugging opportunities, just because I've got a new camera, it doesn't mean I know how to use it. Took me ten minutes to workout why I couldn't get the pictures off it and onto my computer—it's a Mac, I'm used to these things just working.

  17. Technically the broken camera is my wife's. The good news is that she'll needed to use a carmera twice this week, so we've decided that I should buy one when pop into York later on.

    The sarga of the Grand Central HST may also finish today :!:

  18. Following Ian's lead I've used Gypframe sections to brace my baseboards between brackets. On the whole I've been very pleased with them. I have learnt that I must do a better job of fixing them to the baseboards at the ends of the Gypframe and that they aren't up to the job of keeping a 30cm wide board from sagging between 200cm spaced shelf brackets. :oops: An additional central support was required.

    Phase 3 of Amblethorpe will be using 30cm wide boards to allow for more scenery around the tracks. I've been trying to work out whether I will need two runs of Gypframe under the boards or place the shelf bracket closer together (tricky when your fence posts are already in place).

    However. I've just done a bit of skip diving, in the hope of getting a couple of lengths of timber, but I came out with four 190cm lengths of Aluminium "T" Girder. These had been part of a conservatory roof and appear to be very strong yet rather lightweight. They could be just what I'm after.

  19. mick said:

    The indoor guys generally don't solder bonding wires across rail joins, preferring instead to run bus wires around or along the length of the layout with seperate feeds from that to each individual track section. Does anyone think that would be a better idea for outdoor layouts? Has anyone done just that? Does either technique hold advantages over the other when used outdoors?

    When I started I had a long roll of Twin and Earth mains cable in the loft so I have used that as a bus cable which runs under the tracks. I do find the cables a bit thick to work with, it's 30amp solid core, but having a continuous run of copper below the track is useful, especially towards the ends as I'm always certain that I have a good signal on the bus. I have several droppers down to the bus in the shed, but only a couple outside. I find it best to keep the number of holes in the baseboard to a minimum, so far I've only put droppers in where they were necessary, ie after a point.

  20. So, lets have your tips on bonding tracks.

    I'm cr*p with a soldering iron and don't like this job at all. Worst part is that it has to be done outdoor and I just can't keep my iron hot enough.

    One tip I picked up recently is to solder a short length of bonding wire to the end of each rail (so four short bond wires per track length) and then once the track has been laid outside you simply solder the bonding wires together, saving you having to solder the track outside. This does mean that there are three solder joints that can fail rather than two, but if the joints are better in the first place this should reduce the risk rather than increase it.

    Next time I'm laying track I'll give it a go and report back.

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