Search This Blog

Sunday, October 27, 2013

New OO Gauge Terraced House


I have just completed a new addition to my 3DK product range. The red brick terraced house is the most detailed and time consuming kit I have designed yet. It took so much longer to design than I anticipated, but this was very much a labour of love as I think it is also one of my best kits yet.

The reason it is so detailed inside and out is that I wanted a great looking building for my own OO Gauge British layout so hence the extreme high detail.
The kit has a fully detailed interior and comes with detailed photographic instructions. The interior detailing includes wallpaper, hanging pictures, carpets interior walls and doors, fireplaces and curtains.
The dimensions are 11 ½ cm long x 6 ½ cm deep x 10 ½ cm high.


 The building comes weathered and has damp patches where drainpipes are leaking and moss where the building is suffering risings damp. The building also comes with a pavement (Sidewalk) and it also comes with extra pavements so you can add these to other kits on your layout.
As can be seen from the images I have included fully detailed loft and roof trusses which are based on the rear thing.
As the kit comes as a PDF file, you can print the kit out as many times as you want and create a whole street scene from one download. 
The next kit in the pipeline is the barber shop and bakery which is well under way. This kit will have the same interior detailing as the terraced house kit and should be ready by the end of November.


I will give updates on the progress of this kit as I know there are customers waiting for its release. Following the release of the bakery kit will be a range of buildings similar to the terrace house but with different external finishes and I have given you a snap shot of them is semi completion.





If you require any information on any of my kits or have any ideas or suggestions then please get in touch,

Kind regards,

3DK
Calum Faeorin-Cruich
108 App#4 St Andrew Street West
Fergus
Ontario
N1M 1N5
Canada
(001) 226-979-6485
Email: h3dk@live.ca
www.3dk.ca






Sunday, October 6, 2013

www.3dk.ca

H.M. DOCKYARD 2

Hi there blog buddies,

This week has been productive for me as I was super keen to get on and finish the legs of the of the layout so I can get the whole thing up and all bolted together. The main 6 foot section has to take quite a bit of weight as I intend to eventually extend the front, rear and sides of the scenic parts of the layout to create an area for a small dockyard town and the actual dockyard itself at the front which is the reason for the whole layout. 


The layout will be curved across the front and back and will be set within a frame creating something similar to a theatre set where lighting and sound will be fully controlled and the layout will be viewed through opening at the front. So like I said before, the main framed middle section will have to take the brunt of the weight and requires to be solid and ridged.
The legs have a brace across the bottom to stop the legs splaying outwards and two side braces to stop the layout swaying from side to side. As can be seen from the images, I have fashioned a plate at the bottom of the legs that the two foot section legs braces will be bolted onto.
 




Where the two leg braces meet in the middle they are bolted to two 3/4” x 2 1/2” pieces of wood sandwiched between the box plywood.  The two foot ends of the layout are piggybacked onto the centre 6 foot section as seen in the image. Again, I use braces to stop any lateral movement of the 2 foot sections.  I also use a small horizontal brace to stop the ends splaying.








So there we have it, the completed baseboards and legs. I’m not the best joiner in the world but I think I have built a fairly strong and stable platform for whatever comes next. I now have to go out and purchase all the track and points or switches as they are called in North America but being a Scotsman living now in Canada I think I will stick to what I know and points it is.

Thanks for joining me in my rambles.

The thought for the day is:

 “In wine there is wisdom,
In beer there is freedom,
In water there is bacteria.”

Now off to have a wine.

Thanks,

Calum 3DK


Wednesday, October 2, 2013

HM Dockyard
And so it begins.

There was one layout that inspired me to finally after 30 years of looking at model railway layouts start to build my own.

  







This small wonderful layout above all inspired me to start the planning, scribbling on bits of paper my ideas as they came to me during the day. I wanted a small shunting layout that had lots of potential. I also wanted it on various levels and constricted by the difficult terrain and hemmed in by various styles of engineering buildings. It also has to have a through running line that will be added later, but in the meantime it was to be strictly for shunting wagons.


The planning begins.



After lots of ideas came and went, I settled on a shunting or switching style layout where its all about setting shunting challenges.  The idea is that full wagons are brought in on the main line and dispersed to all the factories and works on the layout. Empties are brought back to the main line and assembled for dispersal back to where they came from. Also materials have to be moved from one workshop to another in railway vans so this adds another dimension to the layout.

I have four Naval factories on the layout that are part of the Naval Dockyard. I will be using downloadable kits from www.3dk.ca as they are highly detailed, come with lots of extras and I can retro fit them to suit my purpose. Also I want the layout to have a uniform level of detail but not to be bogged down with super detailing everything. The layout has to be finished within a year to a level that I can take it to shows in Ontario where I now live.



Now lets get started on the actual building of the baseboards. My biggest fear in constructing the baseboards was humidity as living in Ontario in Canada we tend to get a lot of it. I was worried about the boards warping so I plumped for a system of box assembly where a 3/4” x 2 1/2” piece of dressed wood was sandwiched in between 1/4” plywood. It is simply glued and pined and forms a strong box. I also fixed in place at every corner right angled cuts of  1/2” MDF

The layout was going to have three sections, one 6 foot middle section and two 2 foot end sections. In hind sight I should have made just two five foot sections but as more scenic sections will be bolted onto the front and rear of the layout, I wanted a single strong center section that everything else was bolted onto.
Once the center box section was built I added a further three cross sections with right angled corner supports.

The legs were a sandwich of  the 3/4” x 2 1/2” dressed wood  with cross beams and a base of  1/2” MDF.

I'm not quite sure why this photo has decided to lie sideways but hopefully by my next post I can figure why it is not behaving.

Well! here ends the end of the beginning and the quote for today is:

Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut, that held its ground.

Regards,

Calum 3DK