A Milestone

We usually have a few of them on life's journey (isn't that profound!?) Getting married, having kids, first house (and usually first mortgage), first car, first kiss, first time your kid's ignore you completely, etc, etc, you know what I'm talking about.

I had a sort of a milestone recently, I discovered that I'm the youngest member of our modeling 'group' ! I turn 47 in a bit over a week and I'll be honest, I never expected to be the youngest member of anything ever again! It was a pleasant surprise, mind you the two guys who I thought were younger than me definately look like they have a lot less k's on the the clock!

I had another genuine milestone a few days ago, I submitted a DA to council for my first shed! A backyard haven, a retreat, a colourbond cave, manland (apparently-not real sure about the conclusions one could draw from referring to it as "manland"), what ever you call it, it's 48.75 sqm (7.5M x 6.5M) of space to build a layout in. Now unlike council who said "about 6 weeks" when I enquired how long should it take to be approved, just after asking me for $670 in lodgement fees, my good wife approved this after the first request with the only condition being that some of the 'under layout' space be used for general storage of stuff. I can live with that!

So now the saga starts. I don't imagine this will go smoothly, I live in a "bush fire prone area" which generated about another 5 pages of paperwork and want to build pretty well on the boundary because I have a small back yard. It's going to be interesting. I will keep you posted.














Future site of the Colourbond Cave !

32 class update #1

Following on from the "marker light" post I actually got in a bit of work shop time today and fitted the marker lights and associated electrical conduit/junction box in 0.4 mm brass wire, the boiler handrail/smoke box brackets and the cab roof. The hand rail is formed from a single length of 0.5 wire and takes about 1/2 an hour of judicious bending to get it right. I actually got the bends in the right places the first time which is unusual - for me.

I also had a go at filing the marker light handles a bit smaller to get them in scale, but you would never notice!

The head light is in the milling shop getting bored out to accept a yellow gold LED from Gwydir Valley Models and should pretty much be the last visible part to go on. Uncharted territory from now on so it should be interesting. Any tips from anyone who has done this before would be much appreciated! The front buffers and coupling, painted separately, will come later after the buffer beam is painted red, this makes a huge difference to the appearance of this area on the finished product.

The whole loco was looking a bit ordinary as I had given it an overnight bath in white vinegar to arrest the corrosion being caused by the soldering process/flux. Using white vinegar neutralises the flux but leaves an inert, dark, kacky (?) film on the surface of the metals, so I have given it a clean up with a fibre glass burnishing brush (pen). These are and invaluable tool when working with white metal and brass and nothing else does a cleaning job like it. A spinning metal wire brush is, in my opinion, way to brutal when working with plug in detail parts. These are available from Casula Hobbies at Liverpool and Tom's Hobbies at West Ryde. Don't forget to buy some refills at the same time as they do a great job but don't last very long.