New Railway Modellers Forums

They seem to be going about it all wrong, in 1968 an English University mounted a summer campaign to spot Nessie, there were lots of reports from the team all over TV (that wasn't hard with only three channels to cover) and lots of "experts" brought in to theorise on what Nessie could be. ...

If these are settrack points the rail joiners may be spot welded to the rail, in which case they will put up a lot of resistance to being pulled off. Fortunately settrack has cut out slots in the sleepers below the railjoiners(fishplates). If this is the case this is the method of last resort. You w...

That sounds like the helpful gentleman at the DWP who says his job is to tell you if you can have what you have claimed, not to tell you to what you are entitled. Get someone to put in a freedom of information request without saying it's for you. FofI usually stirs then into action as they have to g...

I made an "electric tea strainer" for just over £2 by buying the bits from Pounland. It's a bit slow compared to the full price sugar shaker designs, but if you only have small grassed areas it's all you need. Two tips drop a ball bearing or small marble in the sieve to keep the fibres sep...

I'll echo Flashbang's comment on making sure that the point is dead flat. Lay a flat edge across it at various angles. You may find that the place where it needs to be held down is in the vicinity of the frog. In which case it will need a really thin pin. I use the Peco track pins creating a hole fo...

I think there's a clue in the Rovex banana coach roofs in the model shop window, if some of the plasticiser hangs around in the finished product and will have a small slow acting effect, wouldn't subjecting it to strong sunlight step up the rate at which it happens.

: ROFL

Wouldn't the Benzin have melted the tank and left a sticky mess on the track

If there's not enough coupling to grab onto to pull it out, use a pair of very fine pointed tweezers to squeeze together the two protruding pips at inner end of the NEM pocket and push them in. Then you should be able to pull them through the pocket.

The facility for running one DC loco on a DCC system has a rather large downside. It's acheived by unbalancing the DCC supply with respect to zero, that is making either more consistently positive or negative to drive the DC loco. When you drive the DC loco and bring it to a stand the DCC power is o...

Early Rovex products were extremely sensitive to daylight. Any modelshop which put a circle of Triang(Rovex) track in the window would in a very short time have an example of the banana shaped cab roof. I'm not talking of the kind of bowing which would only be noticeable against a straight edge, thi...

The apparently unprotected wires are probably insulated with varnish. You may have accidentally scraped of some varnish. Coat them with fresh varnish, or silicone sealant to find out if that's the cause of the crackling. If everything works but the sound is broken up any fault is likely to be in the...

Amongst our membership do we have anyone from the plastics industry who can tell us what happens to ageing plastic? As they are oil derived products, is it a very slow evaporation of a chemical which gives the plastic its plasticity, would repainting aged plastic with a particular kind of primer res...

I notice your failed print has the dreaded raft curl which I spent ages trying to cure until I discovered it's not down to failure of the raft to stick to the bed. I've come to the conclusion it's due to arithmetic errors in the slicing software. I found I could sometimes improve the performance by ...

At cracking on for half a century it's both a testament to the Lima tool makers and a condemnation of the penny pinching importers who wouldn't fund a purpose made chassis, the wheel spacing didn't even match the body. It's mainly the cab and bunker where Lima has poorer detail the refinement in the...

The Lima model is really past it's sell by date, the plastic is becoming brittle, the two bits I cut off the ends of the Lima chassis, and are fitted onto the Bachmann replacement take its weight whenever it's lifted so I prefer to leave it in the cabinet. The new boy will get to do a fair few shutt...