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Will the prop fit?
Digging around the box of boat spares, I've found a nice stainless steel prop setup to which I can fit a nice plastic prop. Placing it on the boat side, it looks like a good fit so I join the hull...
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Waterborne Wednesday: No Berth
I was looking to carry on the tugboat theme this week with a suitable boat and digging through my Isle of Man archives, I found this one. This is a tug, or perhaps more a pusher. It works with a...
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Garden Rail - July 2020
Lockdown is the perfect time to dig those old kits out of the cupboard and get them on the workbench. Eric Londesbrough fights a small signal cabin that dates from the 1980s but manages to produce a...
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Shuttles, stone and card modelling in BRM
Back and forth - that's what you get with a shuttle unit and in the latest BRM, I'm fitting one to a test track. It's an unusual project for me as this isn't part of a layout. Needing a suitable...
View ArticleSaturday Film Club: Seaspeed
A lovely promotional film made in 1980 showing the hovercraft operation. Part of the interest comes from seeing the N500 Naviplane in the opening shots. It might have been bigger and faster than the...
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Curating my bookshelves
Coronavirus has changed many things, but who knew it would need me to curate my bookshelves? Behind me in the tiny office I use, is a bookcase full of A5 publications. Normally it's a bit of a dumping...
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Fiddly steering linkage
Lindberg didn't design their kit to have working steering. The rudder clips into place, you set it at an angle to bring the boat back to you and that's it. Plonk the model in the water and off it goes....
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First float
You can't really call a few minutes in the bathroom sink a "sail" so we'll go for "float". However, the float did include dropping all the mechanical bits in the hull, along with some lead weights to...
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Waterborne Wednesday: LTC 6
Last week, I featured a small tugboat and mentioned its job was to push around a dumb barge, well here we have it. LTC 6 is an 80ft long dumb barge with a digger perched on top. According to the...
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A win for hoarding
Every so often, I seriously consider that I need to make dramatic cuts in my stash of bits'n'pieces. And then I realise this would be a bad thing. I'm working on an urgent and very time-consuming...
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Ben
I'm not flush with 16mm scale, 32mm gauge steam engines, but when I suddenly needed one for a photo shoot, it was an opportunity to dig out a model I built well over 25 years ago. Ben came about...
View ArticleSaturday Film Club: The British era at Volkswagen from 1945 to 1949
If you are familiar with motoring history, you know that the origins of Volkswagen were somewhat dark. However, by the end of WW2, the factory, or at least what was left of it, found itself in the...
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Ferness Quay
Apologies if the blog posts recently have been a bit thin - I've been very busy getting ready for the "Virtual Model Railway Exhibition" that will be taking place next weekend. Much of my time has been...
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Waggle that rudder
Not confident my servo setup would work, I put the motor in a blob of Blu-Tack, bent up the connecting wire and tested the set-up. And it worked!The final box holding the servo in isn't pretty - I just...
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On a bed of Milliput
A gutted servo isn't the easiest thing to mount in a model boat hull. Admittedly, I could have removed the motor from the control board, but it wouldn't help that much. Inspiration struck when I...
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Waterborne Wednesday: Falmouth Industry
When I research the boats for this feature, I don't normally head to LinkedIn, but a quick search on this vessel took me to Andrew Baldock, who for 12 years, skippered "Falmouth Industry". According to...
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Oilbrusher
I'm a bit of a tool junkie and have drawers full of stuff that barely see the light of day. A couple of years ago, I picked up this Mig "Oilbrusher". It's a touch-up pen for modellers. If you've ever...
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World of Railways Virtual Exhibition
We can't go to "real" shows at the moment, so the BRM team has put together a virtual event instead. Trying to work out what this should look like has been a bit of a challenge. Obviously we wanted to...
View ArticleApp controlled Hong Kong tram
Since visiting Hong Kong year ago, I've been interested in their trams and every so often a model pops up. This one, with rockin' soundtrack, is one of those "rip-off Lego" sets. Online, the price is...
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I luv playing trains
Questions. Who makes a teddy bear out of MDF? Who buys it at a show while exhibiting his layout? Who thinks it really needs of of our badges? Who feels that a miniature Antex soldering iron would be...
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