Thanks, Bruce.

Yes - the sub-roofing was a fair amount of work, but will give a nice solid plane for the roofing material. The jigs sure help!

Cheers, Mark.

Mark

Your build is coming along very nice. This morning I emptied a cereal box and decided to make the roof card for my latest build out of it. A tribute to our start in the hobby.

Mark,

Excellent. I need to remember the Woodland Scenics concrete the next time I do a road.

The complexity of tanks, supports, and suspended parts of the building is very appealing.

Mike

Thanks, John. Its good to see you checking in on my progress here while the other site it down.

Talking of roofs, I spent some considerable time yesterday fiddling around with copper colours for the roof for the mine. In the end I think I will go with corrugated iron, as I feel that copper is too expensive a roof for a mine. However I thought I'd make a note here of my findings. Recently I got one of those great deals, when I bought a complete set of 'Army Painter' paints off our local marketplace. The set has 124 paints in it - 96 standard and the other 28 made up of washes and effects. The paints are very good quality and the majority of them have never been opened (you can tell as there are four or five drops of mat medium at the top of each tube). I bought a nice fold out tool box which holds all these along with my collection of Mig paints. The paints have weird names, but apart from this are great. By studying some pictures of copper roofs online, as well as some close up study of our own copper downpipes, I discovered that either 'true copper' of 'wet mud' worked well as a base colour. I then used my fan brush to stipple on 'toxic mist' which is a good patina colour. I lightly stippled, but spent some time building up the colour. I then stippled on some 'fog grey' king of streaking down from the top. I found game color 'verdigris' to also be a good patina colour. I will have to do a copper roof soon to do a proper experiment.





fog grey over toxic mist over wet mud.


fog grey over toxic mist over true copper.


And now its time to start going cross eyed doing those lead headed nails on the corrugated iron!

Cheers, Mark.

Thanks, Mike.

The roads of Tellynott are where I first found that colour combination worked well for concrete. I use a light mix of Waproo black leather dye and isopropyl alcohol over a wash of the concrete.

I agree - all that timber work adds a lot of appeal - and there is plenty more to come... I haven't quite figured out the logistics of how material is moved from one tank to the next - at the moment it all looks extremely labour intensive. It was suggested to me that large pipes with wide curves using water to move material from tank to tank might be logical.

Cheers, Mark.

Hi guys.

Well - my friend Neil and I have taken a little break from our Thursday modelling afternoons and I've taken the opportunity to start on the benchwork for Shadowlands.

Firstly - I had intended to take out the large roller door and replace with a large ranch slider/ set of bifolds/ French doors. These needed to be well insulated (double glazed) and over height. I needed an opening of 1800mm wide and 2380 high to be able to roll my layout modules out the door in the future. I had been keeping an eye out on the second hand market and it soon became obvious that these criteria did not come up that often (actually, in the time I was looking, not at all) and even second hand they were very expensive. I estimated $6,000 at a minimum, by the time i included framing, cladding and new flashings. Alternatively, I could leave the roller door on, build a dummy wall on the inside with a removable section, insulate and line for under $1,000. The downside is that I would lose 150mm (6") to the length of the room - approximately 8' squared. That's $625 a square foot. I spent a Thursday afternoon at Neil's redrawing my plan with the new tighter tolerances to see if my goals for Shadowlands were still possible and they were - so I'm going with the dummy wall and an extra $5,000.

I started work on the section on the flipside of the room division wall from the tail of the peninsula in Tellynott. This is the flipside from where my Graves elevators, tap and die and Thorndike mills are. This new section will feature my Sheepscot limeworks kit, a tall wooden wharf and a scratchbuild based on New Zealand's Wilson's cement works. The main line then goes around the corner back into the room housing Tellynott where it will join up to the benchwork on the back of the Tellynott part of the layout. This is the skinny section I recently uploaded a plan of and elevation, and will feature the flotation mill and Freda mine.

Photo 1 - shows a view from the right corner. The track bed is at a 4% downhill grade from the curved track at back around to the first straight section from where the main line is level. It will start its decent about 250mm before the end of what is installed so far. The Sheepscot lime works is designed (optional) to be built with a 19mm (3/4") step between the front two tracks and the back track. I mocked up the limeworks both ways and decided the change in level - even of only this small amount - added so much interest, that I had to do it that way. There will be two sets of peco right hand curved turnouts to the limeworks, one leaving the main line and then one splitting into the high track and low tracks. Both tracks have a grade, the high track about 8mm up, the low track about 11mm down. On the decent to the low tracks there will be a short straight section to avoid an S-curve, and then a set of Peco's, as yet unreleased, unifrog left hand curved turnouts which have a #2 and #3 radius curve (438mm and 495mm {17 1/4" and 19 1/2"}). This new unifrog set of points will be part of the streamline trackwork, but only come in code 100. I played around endlessly with track designs but could not achieve all that I wanted in a way I found aesthetically pleasing without the use of one of these turnouts. I fear I will also encounter this dilemma in other areas of Shadowlands as well. The alternative is to only have one lower track, shorten the limeworks barn, and use code 75 track. I have used Peco setrack to design the curves. I do so wish Peco would release their setrack in code 75!


Photo 2 - shows a view from the left end. My farther made me up another 5 sets of 'feet' for my module legs and I bought wheels for them all. I now have 6 sets of both left, enough to put wheels on all the rest of my modules. Timber is 90mmx19mm kiln dried untreated pine, $3.63 NZ per lineal metre. I rip this in half for the 90mmx45mm. The legs are 70mmx45mm. Usually I just buy purlins, but because of the timber shortage I couldn't source any, so I bought a piece of 6"x2" and ripped it in half. I used 16mm MDF for the track bed and intend to cover this with thin cork.


And a view from the other end. I'm thinking the ceiling and pelmet to this module will have to be hung from the ceiling of the room, as I really want a view of the limeworks from the right end and so the supporting end wall will be quite short.


Thanks for checking in on my progress - its been a few years since I've worked on benchwork and I'm really enjoying myself. I was out there 'till midnight last night! Just as well it's a couple of hundred metres to the nearest house - I'm sure I'd be getting complaints about the noise from the neighbours if we were still living in the city!

More soon, cheers, Mark.

That looks good. Regarding your turnout issues: Do you know anyone with experience hand-laying track close enough that they could help? Duplicating the geometry of a commercial turnout in different rail is fairly simple as hand-laying projects go.

I haven't done this, but if you only need to make small adjustment, I have read that cutting the segments between the ties on commercial turnouts allows some tweaking of the turnout's shape.

Also Central Valley turnouts can be adjusted. https://www.cvmw.com/turnouts.htm

And there's Fast Tracks https://www.handlaidtrack.com/fixtures

Mark,

That is some good looking benchwork! My future cookie cutting will be miniscule compared to yours.

Scott

Thanks, James.

Yes - that is definitely a possibility. Thanks for the suggestion. Hopefully, Peco will release them in code 75 as well.

Cheers, Mark.

Thanks, Bill.

I think tweaking a large radius curved turnout into a small radius one would be pushing a bit far - there is a BIG difference. The outside curve is 1500ish versus 595mm. I've looked at the fast track system, but decided not to go that route. I'll be sure to check out the Central Valley turnouts.

Cheers, Mark.

Thanks, Scott.

I was thinking about my central peninsula for Shadowlands with its multi layers of track and huge vertical separation and large number of bridges. It is going to be so complicated to do and I am so looking forward to tackling it!

Cheers, Mark.

Hi guys.

I was out in the barn again last night and got a bit more done. I thought I would share a little trick that I find helps tremendously in getting the riser heights right. Its pretty simple so many of you may have already thought of it. Regardless, I took a series of photos to help explain.

I measure the height of my rises from the bottom of the joist to which they are to be attached. as I set may benchwork up with two L-girders and then a series of factory cut joists, this starting point is constant. I am very careful to chose the straightest timber for my L-girders. I mark out where my track bed is to go and what the height of each riser is to be and cut them as accurately as possible on my drop saw.

Photo 1 - Firstly, I take a piece of scrap timber and add a couple of screws.

Photos 2 & 3 - I then attach this to the bottom of the joist under where the riser is to go using my 12v impact driver, making sure it is pulled in nice and tight.



Photo 4 - I the add glue and place the riser in position. I drill my pilot hole on a downward angle. I clamp the two pieces of timber together with my hand while doing this, making sure not to drill through my hand!

Photo 5 - I then add the screw. As the timber is pulled in tight with the impact driver, the downward angle makes sure the riser is pulled down exactly flush with the bottom of the joist. It also helps when you put your joists fairly close together!

Photo 6 - I remove the scrap piece of timber. I then check the square and swivel on the one screw if needed. A second piolet hole is drilled on an angle upward near the bottom of the riser and a second screw put in diagonally opposite.



Photo 7 - hey presto! Actually - see this is supposed to be photo 6! Anyway - I find this way more accurate and easier than trying to use a clamp. In all the bench work I have done so far I have only had to add tiny packers to two risers.



More soon, cheers, Mark.

Hi guys.

Here is last nights progress. I continued the lower track around the corner to the left. You can see I extended one of the joists (second one in) and added a second one closer to the end which I also made longer to the left. This is to account for the width of the wall, the thickness of the framework and backdrop of this module and two 20mm gaps I allow for between the backdrop framework and the wall lining. This worked out to be 220mm (8.66 inches). I then added the top section. This still needs a small splice to carry on to the edge around the corner. The water level at the front of the module will be 50mm (2") above the joists and this will give 160mm (6 1/2") for the height of the ore wharf. This wharf will come off the high track shown at the right end of photo 3 at the back. It will cross the lower track (at around 100mm {4"}) above it via a timber trestle. I should have cut the exit from the main line a little longer to make flattening out the 4% grade to level easier. I'll have to come up with an alternative plan. The exit from the lower track I left wedge shaped o give me options. I'm not sure of the design of the trackwork around the cement works yet. That will likely involve building some mock ups.

As an aside - I really do love my little 12v AEG combo kit. These are the same as the Rigid brand in the USA. In NZ and Australia AEG have stopped supplying the 12v tools. (I don't know what the logic is behind this - they still seem to be available in the USA and Europe) I recently accidentally left my impact driver out in the rain and of course it stopped working. After much investigating I bought an 18v DeWalt impact driver, charger and battery. I found it the most clumsy and crude tool to operate and utterly useless for my purpose and so returned it the next day. I eventually tracked down a second hand 12v AEG impact driver and am now happy again! The bonus was it came with a 4amp battery so I now have 3 batteries for my two tools.







More soon, cheers, Mark.

Mark,
Thanks for the riser tip. Enjoying your benchwork. The last photo really gives you an idea of the it's overall size.

Scott