Meeting 11th August

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Winander
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Meeting 11th August

Postby Winander » Tue Aug 03, 2021 3:06 pm

The next meeting will be on the above date at 7:00pm
Richard Hodgson
Organiser Scalefour Virtual Group. Our meeting invitation is here.

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Winander
Posts: 842
Joined: Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:19 pm

Re: Meeting Report

Postby Winander » Thu Aug 12, 2021 11:58 am

Six assembled for the meeting and the first discussion was regarding beer, so a good start.

Progress was made by those who attended the first meeting:
Andrew Nummelin had successfully turned a flared cap for his chimney that had been 3D printed but decided to disintegrate. It looked to be an excellent job and Andrew was justifiably pleased he had bitten the bullet following encouragement from Jeremy Suter at the last meeting.

Andrew Jones had wheeled the chassis on his pannier that he was converting from EM gauge and had decided to remove the splashers on the whitemetal body altogether and fabricate plastic replacements. The next task is to construct the coupling rods, check running and offer the chassis up to the body. There was discussion on pinning wheels to axles and the conclusion was that it would be best avoided as the wheels were already fitted, making pinning difficult.

I had obtained a suitable inside motion from Brassmasters and started assembling it. A discussion ensued on split axles and if there would be sufficient room as the cranks and eccentrics were 11.5mm wide, the High Level slimliner blocks intrude 2mm each leaving little room. Bryan showed us a very useful spreadsheet he had developed that accepted various such dimensions and produced a frame width. He pointed out that split axle shorting strips were another dimension to consider being 0.2mm thick from the EM Society stores, and 0.3mm from Brassmasters, something I definitely hadn't factored in.

Jeremy had been producing tiny components for casting masters.

A new attendee, Bryan Johnson, offered sound advice on chassis construction aided by another spreadsheet that calculated suitable gear ratios for a target speed based on revolutions and wheel diameters - more sophisticated than is usually offered. He advised us that he is waiting for Jeremy to complete lining etc. of his locos and will be weathering them when returned. After showing some of the prototypes his models are based on, it was clear who would be the busiest of the two of them. Both of Bryan's spreadsheets are available from the download section of his website http://www.thurstastonp4.uk.

It was Matthew Harris' first attendance and he advised he had a long held aim to build a Scalescenes layout in a box file for his 16x10 foot railway loft room! It would, however, jog him out of the modelling doldrums, something I need also.

I had asked Andrew Nummelin to demonstrate his test track detailed here https://www.scalefour.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=6035&p=64826&hilit=test#p64826 and he had observed that one of the DCC Concepts rolling road rollers was not conducting power. He had employed the cunning plan of wiring each set of (now insulated) rollers separately that would individually test each set of pickups. On further examination a meter revealed some high resistance values in working units - not encouraging given the expense of the product and something that would be missed in normal usage where the rollers all pick up power from the track.

The next meeting will be on 25 August at 7:00pm.
Richard Hodgson
Organiser Scalefour Virtual Group. Our meeting invitation is here.


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