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Warehouse Wednesday: Stone warehouse, Port St Mary
"Hooray, a real warehouse on a Wednesday", I hear you cry. It's true, this stone building is the first for a while, but finding genuine warehouses isn't easy. I really need to get out and bag a few...
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Garden Rail December 2018
It's funny how themes develop when putting a magazine together. Purely by chance, I found myself with a couple of articles where the writers talk about garden railways for youngsters. One of these is a...
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York Show 1985 - The Trade
So what could you buy in 1985, and from whom?The first advert is from Ratio and features their Provender Store (then £5.45 inc. VAT, now £18.95) and Water tower (£2.50 to £9.30) both still with us...
View ArticleSaturday Film Club: Classic car scrapage
Nooooo. Those are classic cars being scrapped!Scrapyard action from the days when anti-rust protection was pretty much non-existant. You could even find tin-worm on a brand new car!Still, it's good to...
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Commemorating Splodge
Last week, one of our cats, Splodge, died. At 17 years old, he'd enjoyed a reasonable innings and certainly lived a comfortable and loved life. Found curled up in a corner one morning, he'd died in his...
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Bricking it
I had a little preparation to do before some filming last week, and part of this was a build a small diorama for one of those "Here's one I did earlier" shots. My materials all came from...
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Plastic noodling
With a mockup I'm happy with, the next job on the tug was to reproduce this in plastic. It's the bit of the job I really enjoy, messing around with bits of plastic sheet. The work is pretty simple -...
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Warehouse Wednesday: Classic tin garage
Spotted in a local garden, this is a pretty classic corrugated iron garage that probably dates from the 1970s or even earlier. It wouldn't look out of place in the 1950s setting. Today, it's a rare...
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Glazed cabin
Modern boat designs tend to need large areas of glazing. Providing the operator with the best field of vision properly is essential so no more peering out of tiny windows! My material of choice is some...
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Off to Warley
It's Warley time at the NEC and if you are reading this after lunch, that's where I'll be.For me, this is a 3-day event. The Friday set-up day is an excellent chance to do a bit of "networking" and...
View ArticleJapanese track machine
OK, I don't know much about this, other than it is an ingeneous track machine. According to the YouTube comments, the device it tows is a rail lubricator, but that's not the exciting bit. The truck (is...
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Exeter Garden Railway show 2018
Off to the cattle market for Exeter show. The new development this year is that the massive "Bring and Buy" stand just inside the door doesn't open until half an hour after the show starts, A good move...
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LGB tanker clean-up
I'm a big fan of the LGB Toy-Train range. Reasonably priced, rugged and colour ful rolling stock that looks nice in the garden and will take the odd spill when you are testing the railway after a long...
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Fitting the motor and servo
Happy with the superstructure, I'm fitting the working parts in the tugboat hull. There didn't seem to be much point in doing this any earlier as I wasn't convinced the kit was going to sail anywhere...
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Warehouse Wednesday: The building vanishes
This isn't the first time, this building has appeared on the blog. Back in 2016, I showed an old tin shed that was on my route to school every day. It was a fixture in my life for decades.Now, it's...
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Make me a battery and go for a sail
Mohan needs a battery. Plan A involved using a 6 C-cell lump like the one shown on the plan that came with the kit.It didn't fit. Maybe if I hadn't put a propshaft in then it would, but looking at the...
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Grinding Machime
A few months ago, I bunged a "U Star Grinding Machime" (sic) into a larger order from Hobbyking. It only cost £3.77 at the time so I was curious to see how good such a cheap tool could be.Well, after...
View ArticleSaturday Film Club: BRatt tugboat in action
Posting on Facebook that my tugboat Mohan is very loosely based on the BRatttug, I was surprised my comment was followed Ron Burchatt who designed the prototype!This was then followed by a post with a...
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Warley 2018
Warley was big and tiring. When I posted "The post-Warley fatigue is really kicking in today..." on Wednesday evening, 13 people replied with similar feelings!Friday to Sunday was spent running around...
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Thinning acrylic paint
Martin asks:I am trying to be ‘green’ in my modelling. I plan to use acrylics with my airbrush but Ideally do not want to use any chemical thinners. This might sound odd, but can I use good old...
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