A Couple of Things I have been Battling Against

OK, the title is just to catch your eye, no life dramas.

Firstly, I have been working with a Shapeways Service Team member over the brass signal situation and after about a dozen or so emails back and forth and a few more designs it looks like I have made a breakthrough. There is a trial brass signal currently on its way from New York. There are actually four of the same design coming, three for a friend who helped out as I wanted to test the print success rate and one for me.

The breakthrough came when I removed the rectangular base from the brass signal design. I finally worked out that the Shapeways production team for brass don't really like the designer to have sprues as a badly placed sprue to a part can cause the process to fail.

So the signal will comprise a brass post with platform, lamp, signal arm pivot, counterweight lever pivot and a counterweight lever attached by a very short sprue to a small square flange near the base of the post. This flange retains the post when it is pushed into the White Strong and Flexible mechanism that just happens to also have a rectangular base for mounting.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to include the signal arm, cast iron ladder base, lamp top and signal arm rear blind.The good thing is that the counterweight lever is brass so it will be stronger than the Frosted Ultra Detail (FUD) acrylic version although

These extra detail parts will have to be ordered in FUD from the existing range of FUD parts. One advantage of this is that the appropriate signal arm can be chosen whereas if it is in brass I would have to decide which arm to include on the brass signal.

A ladder will be needed and I have a sprue of two (without cast iron ladder bases) or a sprue of ten ladders with the cast iron bases. Of course an etched brass ladder can be used instead.

So the brass signal got cheaper without the rectangular base but the addition of the FUD parts took the price back up to about the same price as an all brass signal post and parts.

Here are some computer renders of the various items:

HO Scale 23 Foot Brass Signal Post

WSF Brass Base and Signal Mechanism

HO FUD 2 x 36 inch Signal Arms and Detail Parts

HO FUD 2 x Ladders (No Cast Iron Base)

HO FUD 10 x Ladders with Cast Iron Bases

The signal and others will be available once I make the coming signal, I will announce this at the appropriate time.

I will be doing a demo/clinic about making my signals, etc. at the coming Modelling the Railways of NSW Convention at Loftus on Saturday 20 May 2017.


Short Circuit!

The second thing I have been struggling with is a short circuit in my layout that seemed to start at the time of the 40 degree Centigrade days here in Sydney a month or so ago.

I did all the usual things such as looking for rails that had closed up around points, etc. to no avail. I then began disconnecting the DCC track bus wiring to various parts of the layout, still no luck.

Part of the problem was that I was supposed to have two track power districts but didn't! I had a sneak path between the districts that was confusing things. After a few weeks I eventually found the sneak path which was up behind the fascia at Coxs Gap at the dividing point of the two 'districts', it was some original wiring that went from one end of Coxs Gap loop to the other.

After many discussions with Marcus Ammann I tracked the problem down to one section but the short had degraded to a power drain and has now become intermittent.

I now have three power districts with NCE EB1 circuit breakers on each district and the problem is restricted to one of the districts.

The layout was turned on for most of today without any issues.

Now I wait and see if it will raise its ugly head again.