Fortunately & unfortunately I’m at the end of my roadbed construction. Some guys here do concrete road beds.
I just saw this YouTube NZ product promotion. @Neil_Wiggins might have an opinion.
@Hines That concreting does make it look really easy.
@Cliff_Jennings A slow response but I figured it was easier to show you than try and explain it.
The bucket is a single piece:
The main frame, now slightly edited looks like this. The piece in the middle is a spacer that will go between the side rails, against the buffer plate and below the top plate.
Now that I’ve looked at the axles I’ve seen ways I can make those more simple too
Hmm… maybe I should work in an instruction factory 
Oh, I almost forgot, for Rooster. I started collecting the star wars lego a while back but kids got expensive. Apparently now all I collect is dust 
Happy railroading
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Michael,
Just a warning they get more expensive as they age!
Had a quick look, seems pricey at$15 per m for the former plus steel and concrete. Definitely a timesaver tho. Might be an Au version on your side of the ditch, and most likely less cost (volume and all).
In a previous life I did a trench in tamped dirt with crusher dust slurry as the roadbed. Seemed to hold up fine. YMMV…
Cheers
N
Well, thanks to some generous donations of dirt I’ve pretty much got the first garden bed done. That’s up to the gap to the “through the wall” tunnel in the photos above. Need a good soaking rain before I finish forming it. Sigh. No rain on the horizon…
In the meantime, bolstered by my recent success drawing/printing the ore wagon, I decided to get crazy and try something to pull it. While I’m more a fan of tender locos, I decided to temper my enthusiasm and try a tank loco.
This is the beginning of my 285 class loco, built approx. 1882. These were later re-numbered as a z18. I can draw this but the mechanical is currently beyond me. I’ll cross that bridge when I get the drawings closer to finished. I figure a blunami chip with battery and speaker but that’s open to debate.
Lastly, I think I finally decided what I will call my railway. Given that the general impression in the banking sector is “Who On Earth Would Invest Seriously in Micmic Enterprise’s?” I figured I’d run with that and call it the WOE(W)ISME Railway.
Patent pending
Well, say what you will about Canberra being the (self) centre(d) of Australian politics, we are definitely a generous people.
I don’t know if it’s caught on world wide or even outside Canberra yet but we’ve setup local Facebook groups called Buy Nothing. Basically they’re organised into a couple of suburbs worth of people and everyone advertises things the can’t be bothered or can’t sell. There is no postage as everything is local.
Given I’m building my garden on a shoe string (But only if I can find that shoe string for free), it’s been great to see the donations I’ve been getting lately. In the last month my trailer (6x4) has done 1 load of rocks and 8 loads of top soil. And if that didn’t sound exhausting enough I’ve been putting it to good use.
I might actually get this almost finished this year. For the eagle eyed of you, yes, the dept of transport and planning did cut down on the size . It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
That big dark gap right in the middle of the photo on top of the red rock. I’m tempted to put a fake waterfall in there will the tail end of a tumbler flying through it…
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Well, so much for getting it done last year. Apparently that much moving of materials your body reacts and now I’m on waiting lists for a hernia operation. Nothing important is spilling so no pain currently. Just (mostly) pulling back on what I’m doing and that means the garden has to take a bit of a back seat for now or until I can con others into doing things for me.
One of my favorite quotes from x-wing novels is “Shooting me down hasn’t made me less dangerous, it just changes the direction I’ll be coming from”"
So changing direction, and also fitting in with Mik, I’ve done some more on my 285.
I need to find a picture of the internal workings which will finish most of the detailing parts. That leaves the mechanicals, something I haven’t done before.
So, to that end, I’m after suggestions for what type of motor I should put in it? I’d like to go battery but I’ll do a bit more research on that when I’ve finalised the motor placement and work out how much space I have left.
Micmic
First test print of the loco. Bear in mind this was done on a FDM printer (Not resin).
Having said that, I’m pretty impressed with the level of detail that came out. I will make some changes though, which isn’t surprising but they are more around printing capability.
Now to work out how I’m going t motorize it…
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Ahh there’s the rub. Printing offers the potential of being able to create any model in any scale IF you can find the right motor block or drive mechanism, which in G is a woefully short list these days. All the other scales have a plethora of new and old drives readily available. But for us, if the shear trouble of finding the right drive unit isn’t enough, its also probably from a model thats worth a great deal more as is, than any potential bash would be.
So on ebay you can find reasonably priced LGB Stainz engines, For a larger drive search LGB Mogul, some of those also for a good price.
Rooster , I would say a Thomas Locomotive and remove the center set of wheels might be a better fit.