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Hogwarts Express, Scratchbuild, 1/48 Scale


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Gidday, I've been wondering how you're both progressing on this. It's good to see that you and BB have been busy. And you have good results to show for it.

 

2 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

Probably when she chooses my retirement home.

That's a threat my son uses against me! Still, on the positive side, at least it means I'm getting one, and not thrown out on the scrap heap.

 

The build's looking very good. 👍 Regards, Jeff.

Edited by ArnoldAmbrose
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Just read this from the beginning.

 

What an excellent progress from lumps of wood to locomotive.

 

For coal, I'd recommend coal. It breaks down into smaller pieces that continue to look 'scale'. That's unless BBS is set on using little bits of rubble.. :)

 

Matt

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10 hours ago, hendie said:

 

Looking great so far - adding the details bits is really going to make it pop

We don’t want it to ‘pop’ we want it to go ‘Choo Choo’

 

My understanding is that when boilers go ‘pop’ it’s generally a bad thing.

 

9 hours ago, bentwaters81tfw said:

you will have the ghost of Charles Collett, and the Great Western society after you.

Ghosts are both commonplace and (generally) friendly at Hogwarts, so no worries there!

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8 hours ago, Mattlow said:

For coal, I'd recommend coal. It breaks down into smaller pieces that continue to look 'scale'. 

Absolutely! I’m after some good quality anthracite, but in Western Australia it’s about the only resource that’s not readily available. I could go to the West coast of New Zealand but travelling all that way for a lump of coal might raise eyebrows.

 

8 hours ago, Gorby said:

 

Excellent idea about the knitting needles and splitting the MDF.

 

It is possible that this is the first time in history that this particular sentence has ever been composed! 🤔

 

 

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6 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

Absolutely! I’m after some good quality anthracite, but in Western Australia it’s about the only resource that’s not readily available. I could go to the West coast of New Zealand but travelling all that way for a lump of coal might raise eyebrows.

I had exactly that problem with my Robey steamer. I used a cork (you should be able to find one somewhere down there) and ripped small bits off with a pair of small pliers:

Coal+1.JPG

 

Glued in with PVA and once it was primed, it painted really well (Matt black with gloss black dry-brushing) :

Coal+2.JPG

 

People have admired my lumps. :blush:

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That looks great! 

I’ll show this to Baby Bandsaw, for some unknown reason she’s dying to ‘do the coal.’ 

 

I’m sure there’s a couple of small underground cork mines just North of Kalgoorlie so we should be able to get some. 

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5 minutes ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

I’ll show this to Baby Bandsaw, for some unknown reason she’s dying to ‘do the coal.’

Child labour exploitation that is.

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That 'corkoal' does look very good indeed.

 

All I'd add is that real coal has a degree of ... well, I can't think of the word I want. It has the look of an oily surface the way it reflects light with blues and greens etc.

 

Yours, Gorby, is the best non-coal coal I've seen.. :)

 

Matt

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13 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

I’m sure there’s a couple of small underground cork mines just North of Kalgoorlie

Gidday, I think you can buy cork in specialist stores in 750ml bottles. The bottles usually contain some sort of liquid to stop the cork drying out while in storage. 🤪 HTH

 

13 hours ago, Gorby said:

Child labour exploitation that is.

And the problem is .  .  .  ?       😁 

 

I'm not usually up at this god-forsaken hour (4.45am). I woke up just before the alarm went off (I often do), thought I'd turn it off and get up now, so as to not disturb SWMBO,  got dressed, had brekkie, turned on the computer to check my 'fan mail', and noticed the real time! %&$#!*%$😠     Not worth going back to bed now. Regards, Jeff.

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Sorry to butt into this thread of ambitious scratchbuilding, but I just bobbed in to check how things were progressing, and noticed that the pics were loading slowly.

 

I tested some of the pics, and they were 2mb+ in size, which is huge when posting up on the internet.  You should be aiming to save your files to around 200kb optimally, give or take a bit.  To accomplish this, you can reduce the size of your pics, as anything over the recommended 1024 x 800 maximum we advise, it's wasted bandwidth and storage space useage.  Most people view these pics on phones, tablets and 1080p screens, so huge photos of 4000 x 3000 px will have to be shrunk down by the forum software (load on the server and delay for the user), as well as the extra bandwidth that is uses up (10x what's necessary).

 

The downsides of this from a viewer's point of view is the waiting time before you can view the pics, and some people might get bored and click away.  From the server's point of view, it's wasteful of bandwidth, storage size (we cache images to improve speed), and it's also wasteful of the server's resources, which means a slower experience for all of us.

 

This isn't meant as a "telling off" BTW, more of a bit of useful advice to help you as well as help us.  If you can size your pics to the recommended limits, we'll be really happy, and so will the members :yes:

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@Bandsaw SteveYou could use https://bulkresizephotos.com/ for this, I always do. Drag the lot into the window and resizing 50% usually takes care of business. The resized pics download automatically, and really fast. All client side so your pics are not uploaded to any server.

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Test with Two Little Photos

 

Here's a preview of what the next post will be all about - some brass work and solder.  Anyhow this photo has (I think) been 'downsized' to 184kb.  Is this what we are after @Mike ?

 

eozp1M7.jpg

 

Let me know if this any good or not. I hope it is - I think I've done it right.

 

And here's one resized using @JeroenS 's recommended bulk resizing service. Which I really must say is quite excellent and very easy to use thanks Jeroen (it must be simple if I can work it out).

 

RRaet78.jpg

 

Best Regards,

Steve

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24 minutes ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

(it must be simple if I can work it out).

Don't worry, even though I'm relatively tech-savvy I like simple stuff as much as the next guy 🙂 

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25 minutes ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

Let me know if this any good or not. I hope it is - I think I've done it right.

Yep - spot on :yes:

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Hi @MikeThanks for the confirmation. Will do this from now on and might go back through my back catalogue.

 

Good to know I can help speed up everyone’s access but following this...

12 minutes ago, Gorby said:

Seems good to me Bandwidth Stealer, I mean Bandsaw Steve. :giggle:

I was wondering if I can slow down @Gorby ‘s? Any pain we can inflict will be appreciated.

 

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1 minute ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

Hi @MikeThanks for the confirmation. Will do this from now on and might go back through my back catalogue.

It's good when we can fix one of these little gotchas, and in fairness to you, you probably had no clue you were using up lots of space, time and so forth.  Hopefully with the amount of traffic you're seeing through your thread, we'll inform a few more folks about such things :yes:

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5 minutes ago, Bandsaw Steve said:

I was wondering if I can slow down @Gorby ‘s?

If you want to make life more difficult for me, you'll have to wait you're turn.

The queues longer than at Costco after a bog-roll delivery.

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1 minute ago, Gorby said:

If you want to make life more difficult for me, you'll have to wait you're turn.

The queues longer than at Costco after a bog-roll delivery.

Just run em down with a steam-driven land monitor! 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Only just found this thread Steve - or Baby Bandsaw should I say.  Just to share, this is the one at the UK Harry Potter World a few years back featuring Barside Junior

 

mwtVsdU.jpg

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