The Year is Coming to a Close

This week I found it hard to get motivated with the lead up to 7 days of holidays.  I still needed to tidy up a few items for the modelling competition.  It started off (I think) Thursday night when I needed to get a bow out of wagon.  The wagon was one of the two end wagons on my 8 car rail carrying set.  I must have used a bit too much glue all those many years ago when I built it and it had a bow like a banana it in.  While the wagon runs quite well and is included in my Operating Sessions, it does look quite poor when a banana shaped wagon runs past.  So I thought I would try and heat the wagon with some steam coming from a boiling jug and waving the wagon over the steam to heat it up and see if I could persuade the wagon back to a straighter outline.  I then tried to bend the wagon back in the reverse banana direction.  It seems to have worked.  I gave it two shots of steam and left the wagon with a slight weight on it over night.  I then gave it another steam the next day and it is almost flat now.  I’m very happy with how much of the bow has been removed.

I then started looking at my scratch built cream shed that needed a roof before it could be classed as finished.  I had already cut two lengths of corrugated card and spray painted them silver many weeks ago.  I grabbed the kids pencils and added a few coloured streaks (rust like).  It is very slight, but it can be seem on the roof.  I then glued these sheets to the roof of the cream shed.  What was missing was the bargeboards around the sides of the irons sheets.  Well I added two to the sides and and the front of the shed.  I used three left over boards from building the shed.  Again a suitable outcome was achieved.

The last task to complete this week was fix an issue with the Walther’s Medusa Cement Silo.  There was a space between the roof and the where the elevator fits in.  I think it was about a 3-4mm gap between the two components.  So, I cut two rectangular tubes of styrene and but joined them into a square.  I then adjusted the height of the square so the elevator joined into the roof perfectly.  I then painted the styrene square and then glued it to the roof structure.  So now I am happy that this structure is also complete.

On Friday I packed up my rail carrying train ready for taking to the Club’s Christmas Modelling Competition next weekend.  I also put my now completed cream shed in the same carrying box.  I have plenty of activities and shopping trips planned this week, so I thought I would get the modelling comp out of my head.

This week with the kids now off school for the year, I plan to sit down and work on my scratch built Murwillumbah Cement Silo.  What better to do when there is cricket on TV on Thursday and Friday this week.  This model has been sitting around for most of the year with very little activity undertaken on it.  This will probably be one of my entries in next years modelling competition.  I will post photos of the entries in the Club Modelling Competition on next week’s blog.