Ongoing projects nearing completion

Here are some pics of a couple of exercises that I have tried. The first was to build something with inspiration from the great Allen Downes. This was in the form of an adaptation of his much published "Wheelrights plan" Below represents the progress so far, however I have not done anything to it for months. I need to do a base for it to enable completion. I used his old method of embossing fire cement to create the stonework. However I did not use a resin embossing tool produced using plasticine, as he ones recommended I believe. Instead I made the tool using thin short stips of brass soldered together so the edges would form the stamp tool to impress into the wet cement. this worked out far better and more precise than when I had tried to develop my own resin embossing tool. the tool I created is very durable and can be used very effectively to emboss foam board if you wish to use Emmanuel Nouilliers`s method of producing stonework. I aim to produce more of these stamps to produce cobbles and other patterns.

Why the Incidental model railway modeller, you may ask! Well, its because I got back into the hobby by chance. My partner happened to bring home some copies of Model Rail that the local library was getting rid of. As I read them, a long forgotten love of mine for the hobby began to bloom once again. I had been so busy in the intervening years with silly mundane things I had completely forgotten the fun I had always gained from it. I also have to confess that at this time I have no real modelling direction, and therefore tend to build whatever inspires me at the moment. So I may seem a bit random as to what I may be working on, but that lets me try out new or experimental  methods.

Dapol BOB modified smokebox

One thing that I will try to do, and explain, is hopefully efficient ways to do things. Personally I am terrible at this when working on something, I end up taking longer because I want too much detail or want to start something else. A good example of me putting far more into a model than is really necessary is in the picture above. This much modified(improved I hope)Dapol Battle of Britain class is part of a small Barry Island inspired scrapyard diorama. Although I love the fact that I recreated the interior of the smoke box as accurately as I could, even down to the full compliment of super-heater pipes, it is wasted because in normal viewing, there is not enough light to see what I have done. Even the photo had to be taken in a certain way just to show it. So in this situation this is probably wasted time. I still had fun building it though, and was very happy with the result. I could always put a micro LED and a person in there I suppose. (a preservationist perhaps filching parts for their pet project)

Just some more pictures of the scrapyard project I mentioned above.