Going Japanese!!!

[Pauljag900]

Hi,anyone wanting to do some cheap scenic work may want to take a look at this link,it was sent to me by a friend of mine and is from the marklin users forum,funny as hell!

 

 

 

http://www.marklin-users.net/forum/posts/t35547findunread-Funny-video-about-scenery-work

[cteno4]

We have been using that for about 5 years, but have run out of cats in the club with fur remaining... Annoying, it was reported to be a renewable resource!

 

We did find a significant modification to the process as the washing step had lead to the loss of one member's eye and several disfiguring scars on some others. To curtail these injuries we employed a horizontal clothes washing machine for the washing step. This provided a very thurough washing and had the added benefit of calming the cats down considerably. If you are fast you can get two cats in at once and if really fast at times three. The use of the horizontal clothes washer also allows the dying step can be combined with the washing step by adding the dye to the rinse cycle in the fabric softener receptacle.

 

Excellent narrator, spot on!

 

Jeff

 

Ps I love cats and have had many and none dyed green!

Edited April 1, 2016 by cteno4

[Pauljag900]

Ha ha,just tickled me Jeff so thought I d share it!

[Pauljag900]

Four trains arrived today courtesy of serotta 1972 which now completes my initial collection of 13 trains and leaves me free to concentrate on the layout itself.I can swop and change the trains in the future.

[Pauljag900]

One upside down,sorry Nico! Lol

[TheNicofabi]

One upside down,sorry Nico! Lol

*shakes head in dissapointment* XD i am laughing way to much that you already considered me pointing that out haha...

[Pauljag900]

Ha ha,oh I remembered! Lol

[Pauljag900]

Having spoken to jr500 after he commented that his station lighting was a bit bright I did a little experiment and came up with the idea of instead of using bright white LEDs I tried using warm white but twice as many.I d previously ordered these for large buildings and had some left over,I hot glued them to the roof,not very pretty I know,but effective, and passed a single feed down through one of the kiosks,

 

The pictures are nt brilliant but the effect is pretty good,just takes the glare away but plenty of light.

I was actually one light strip short for the last one so used a singe three led instead.

[JR 500系]

OOhhh they look great now! Good idea to separate the lights to reduce the glare! I might adopt this for my ground level station,.. My overhead station is already fixed and i'm too lazy to remove that one ~  :)

 

Great job! Thanks for sharing!

[Pauljag900]

Sammy, I would be too!!!

[cteno4]

More, smaller lights turned down lower alway gives a much better model lighting effect than a few mini Suns! You can start to see subtle washes of light which is the thing the minds eye says real.

 

It's also hard as we rarely look at night lit scenes from the distance and angle we usually look our layouts, so that another difficult thing to deal with in both what the minds eye will expect and what to even shoot for.

 

Jeff'

[Pauljag900]

Hi Jeff,

Part of the problem I think is that for modern day lighting everything is bright white but it's just a bit too much for the station platforms and the fact the distance between floor and roof is only small makes the light bounce back thus giving the glare,it was only Jr500 comments that made me look at it a bit closer,had I not read it I would have made the same mistake,that said it always looks worse in a photo than it actually is, so I experimented with what I had and the double density warm white spaced out slightly

was the best solution in my opinion, well for me anyway.hoping to get the last of the four platforms finished this weekend then I ve somehow got to find the holes I drilled under the station floor so I can feed the wires through! I ve only used cheap figures to fill up the platforms but have left enough space for the office workers to be added later!

Paul

[cteno4]

Paul,

 

Yeah the high intensity of the LEDs is what makes all that glare! A single standard 20ma white led in a model room looks like a 5000w of incandescent light from a single source! That's like >10x what we usually have in a room and that's usually distributed amung several sources. That why I'm the preacher of more LEDs turned down to help out of this. Glare is something we usually associate with bright sunlight, not night lit scenes (except for oncoming headlights, really lit up down towns, and construction sites with arc lamps!).

 

Maybe try putting an LED strip on a strip of stryene and suspending it a few mm below the platform roof and point the LEDs up at the roof to bounce lite some with a strip of white paper (or even a bit off white if you want to try to color the light a little). Maybe curve the strip of paper so to spreads the light some toward the center of the platform.

 

Also the 12v led items you have (they all have resistors in them to limit the current usually to aroun the max output you can get from the LEDs.o harming it) you can also reduce the voltage some to them to get them dimmer if too bright. Easy to experiment with just hook up your kato power pack to some to experiment!

 

If any particular ones are too bright you can also just wire in another resistor to that particular led circuit to dim it. Try like 100, 220, 430 ohm resistors. You can experiment by putting resistors in series as their values are additive in series to bump it up to what looks good. You can then just add the appropriate resistor to the your terminal strip by having input wire and one end of the resistor in one terminal and bend the resistor over to the terminal next to it and put it in there with the wire off to the led.

 

Cheers

 

Jeff

[railsquid]

Also the 12v led items you have (they all have resistors in them to limit the current usually to aroun the max output you can get from the LEDs.o harming it) you can also reduce the voltage some to them to get them dimmer if too bright. Easy to experiment with just hook up your kato power pack to some to experiment!

 

Yeah, that was what suprised me with the nominally 12v rated LEDs I acquired - even at 5v (from an old phone transformer - thanks for the tip BTW) they were way too bright, almost painfully so, glad I ordered a selection of resistors so I could experiment with various additional resistances.

 

A far cry from the days of wheat grain bulbs...

[cteno4]

Squid,

 

all the little leds we use for lighting the layouts are 20ma and around 3.6v. any sold as 12v already have a resistor in there. The value of the resistor is to control the current and this drops the voltage the difference between the 3.6 and 12 or 8.4v. so usually a resistor of 420 ohms (or a bit higher to be safe) to run the LED at its maximum 20ma and forward voltage. Any yes this is blindly bright! even bounced it can be intense.

 

Simpler than having to figure out what resistor to put into the circuit to dim it more you can always use a variable resistor (potentiometer or trim pot). these little guys will give you a lot of variable adjustment of 0-1000ohm with 20 turns on the little screw. Nice way to "tune" your lights!

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/best-10pcs-3296W-102-3296-W-1K-ohm-Trim-Pot-Trimmer-Potentiometer-good-/172150695464?hash=item2814fb2628:g:JUAAAOSwJQdW-pWj

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Pauljag900]

I ve no idea how many times I ve moved these buildings around but with a couple of valued opinions and the rough idea of whereI wanted them I think I ve settled on this arrangement.The black area to the right is where the school will be and the two white pieces of paper are the tomix shrine kit and festival tower,I ll fill it up with street stalls or something.It s the first time I ve bought stuff and had nt planned where I was going to put them!A lesson learnt I think.

Just need a few more for the left hand side.

Edited May 7, 2016 by Pauljag900

[JR 500系]

The road material looks great Paul! Really nice!

 

I loved how the idea of a layout in front of a mirror. The mirrored effect made the layout look bigger! Nice!

[Pauljag900]

Thanks Sammy,the road is the foam I used to fill in around the tram track and in the middle to bring it up to ground level,I ve just left it as it was,hence why I asked you about the roads,ha ha.The mirror serves a purpose as I could nt find a back scene poster I liked,the only problem is it also shows things you do nt want to see,ME!!! Ha ha

Thanks for the comments mate,

Paul

[cteno4]

Coming along nicely Paul!

 

Jeff

[Pauljag900]

Cheers jeff

[Pauljag900]

Gents,

I encountered a problem at the weekend and thought I d share it just to warn anyone that it could happen to.

I knew that in the summer it would get pretty warm in the shed and would cause plastic to expand so I put plenty of thought in to things before I started,tho obviously not enough.Very little is actually fixed on my layout as most of the track is viaduct,the kato rd plates are also nt fixed down,this means that everything can expand and contract with the weather.No problems all last year but on Sunday it was a particularly hot day and I went in at 3pm to measure something and was greeted with this sight,

 

These were the two worse areas but is affected all along the plates.At first I could nt quite work out why they d buckled and not just moved,then I realised,I drilled the holes for the street lights the exact size so I would nt have to glue them so they ve acted as pegs and prevented the plates from moving! What an idiot,more annoyed with myself for not thinking about it.

The road plates have a small void under them so my first option is to try and pull them up slightly so the light sits in the plastic but not the baseboard,the down side being they ll probs look a bit high but a compromise I m prepared to make,another option is to wait for a cool day and just screw the plates down so they do nt move and hide the screws under buildings etc or the option is to remove the lights and back drill from under the board but not the plastic to a size of about 6mm which will allow movement.Either way it s going to be a complete nightmare.ha ha

Anyway just thought I d share this to try and stop it happening to anyone else,

Paul

[cteno4]

Paul,

 

Ouch! Yep that's always the issue with a shed or garage layout that gets big temp and humidity swings! Wood and cardboard will get hit with the humidity changes... Allowing things to float is what you have to do with a skoch of room to move when needed... Hopefully not fatal to the pieces. Soaking the plates in close to boiling water may let you bend them back to shape easier.

 

Best of luck, sorry for the disaster!

 

Jeff

[Pauljag900]

Jeff,

When they cool they go back flat no problem,fixing them is nt a problem,just a pain in the ass! Just annoyed with myself really,I m normally pretty thorough in my planning,it s the execution I have problems with! Ha ha,

The other problem is that it never normally gets that hot,I had no issues with them last year,anyway that's another weeks work sorted! Ha ha

Thanks Jeff,

Paul

Edited May 11, 2016 by Pauljag900

[Pauljag900]

Hi,

I returned home this afternoon from a short break at the seaside hoping by some magic that fairies had been in and repaired my road plates,no such luck I m afraid. I got underneath the base board and cut all the clips holding the wiring in place so I had enough slack to pull them up slightly.My hope was to free up the plates by pulling the lights back up through the hole in the baseboard and plate,

I did this on all of them an edged the plates along until they fell in to place and were flat.I Then replaced the lights into the original hole in the plate but not the baseboard so now they re not acting as a peg and stopping the plates from moving.I just need to glue them into position now.I broke the wiring on two and will need to replace them and also need to do a bit of tidying up to the traffic lights and utility poles etc,and with a few stratigically placed figures I may just get away with it.The compromise being that the lights look a bit high now,but it's one I can live with for now.I ll keep looking and if I find a suitable alternative I ll change them all but at the moment I m in no rush to do it.

 

[cteno4]

Paul,

 

Fast recovery from the heat wave!

 

It would be a little work, but if you pull the lights out you could use a mini tube cutter to shorten the poles some. This should work to scribe the tubing well enough to snap off without cutting into the wires.

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-Tube-Cutter-Cutting-Tool-For-3mm-22mm-Copper-Brass-Aluminium-Plastic-Pipes-/401046306942?hash=item5d6039007e:g:OosAAOSwoudW4mHg

 

Cheers

 

Jeff