A snapshot in time. A glimpse of the Plettenberger Kleinbahn in 1/22.5 scale.

[TRAINS1941]

Exceptional work as always.

Jerry

[finescalerr]

The extent of your skills is truly disturbing. -- Russ

[Ray Dunakin]

A very attractive lamp, expertly modeled!

[Hydrostat]

Allan, Bill, Jerry, Russ and Ray, thanks for the flowers.

Back to hardware:

The pole had a maintenance flap housing a winch to lower the lights. This lowest pole segment has 8 mm diameter at the model. I filed an opening with rounded edges into it and added a flap made from 0.2 mm brass sheet, which I annealed and bent over some tubing. For the triangular lock a 1 mm steel rod at about 1.5 mm length was filed, well: triangular, inserted to a brass tube and both parts brazed to a prebored hole in the bent flap. The flap then was soldered to the pole opening.





The 'Toiletten' sign is made from 0.2 mm annealed brass sheet, too. With a big glass marmel (some 5 or 6 cm diameter) and an eraser it's easy to give it the typical vaulted shape of old enameled signs. I needed two of them for both sides. The clamps are made from scissor cut bent, filed and bored brass sheet, too. Some 0.4 mm shaft screw imitations serve as fixtures.



The sign itself was printed on some inkjet white waterproof vinyl, which Ray generously sent to me from the States. Thank you very much Ray! I found out that even cleaning the sign four times under running water with a brush did neither let color fade nor affect adhesion of the material. Now that's amazing! The sign had to be fixed to the pole before burnishing and spraypainting it. I had to do this four times, because the spray can wasn't matte color what it was supposed to be, and I didn't like the following two results with the now matte tone.





Pole is closed with a little removable cap at the upper end to give access to the enameled copper wires. Weathering was done by brushing heavily diluted blackich/brownish/greyish gouache to the lacquered pole. Again it takes a lot of brush rubbing to get the then drying color adhering but I don't get to any comparable results using resin varnishes or enamels. Once it's dry it's sticky enough to touch it with bare fingers without rubbing color off.



To be continued.

Cheers,
Volker

[Ray Dunakin]

Fantastic! Great job!

[finescalerr]

Another perfect job. -- Russ

[Hauk]

Back to hardware:

The pole had a maintenance flap housing a winch to lower the lights. This lowest pole segment has 8 mm diameter at the model. I filed an opening with rounded edges into it and added a flap made from 0.2 mm brass sheet, which I annealed and bent over some tubing. For the triangular lock a 1 mm steel rod at about 1.5 mm length was filed, well: triangular, inserted to a brass tube and both parts brazed to a prebored hole in the bent flap. The flap then was soldered to the pole opening.

Sometimes "Museum quality" is used as a compliment for excellent modelling.
But this is far better than what you see in most museums.

Fantastic work.

[Bill Gill]

I worked at a museum, and Hauk is correct, your work is much better. That sign and maintenance cover are mind bogglingly good. Nice to hear Ray's printable vinyl works so well for you too.

[Barney]

A triangular lock !!! Mind blowing detail - I feel I should give in now and take up knitting myself a new hat to match my anorak !! 
Barney

[Hydrostat]

Ray, Russ, Hauk, Bill and Barney: thanks again.

I worked at a museum, and Hauk is correct, your work is much better. That sign and maintenance cover are mind bogglingly good. Nice to hear Ray's printable vinyl works so well for you too.

I don't know. It's not more but up to the usual finescalerr standard. If you were right I even more had to ask myself what it is good for at all.

It was a bit difficult to gain information about the lamp. This is a cutout of the very best picture available and one can see some jpg artifacts which make it difficult to recognize details.



Howsoever I got a hint from a street lamp collector about the brand of the lamp - and even some drawings (link opens a pdf): westdeutschestrassenleuchten.npage.de/get_file.php?id=19400904&vnr=150408. It is a Siemens Al2sza. First step for modeling was a CAD drawing. As already mentioned the brass castings didn't work and so I had the body printed in FXD at Shapeways:



I was shocked when I got the shipment because I thought I'd mistaken with scale. It looked like some H0 scale parts, but checking all measurements showed that they were at correct size. The bulbs would be visible and so I had them FXD printed, too. Half of them are hollow, half of them have a 0.8 mm bore because I wanted to find out which influence this would have on light impression.



I started with an led positioned inside the lamp body behind shade and bulb like I did at the desk lamps at quiet earth, but both bulb and shade took away too much brightness. I had to separate the bulbs at the thickest point, insert a led and glue another fitting bulb part to it (I had enough parts to get two bulbs done). So now theres a 'glowing' bulb. Unfortunately I didn't take to many pictures this time to show that in detail.

Lampshade was cut out from annealed and bent 0.2 mm brass sheet. A difficult part was the frosted glass ring. I didn't find any material at right size or diametre and the ps tubing I finally bought seemed much to opaque. Helmut had a very good idea, which finally led to a reasonable result: a strip of tracing paper winded around a brass rod and drenched with ca. Chucked to the drill it's easy to round it to get rid of the visible cut. Warming the brass rod a bit with an solder iron allows to push the part with a next size tube down from the rod.  



Dust traces from the often for brass and tin used fine sandpaper came handy at this time.



Upper suspension is brazed from some 0.8 and 1 mm brass tubing. The wye was bored up inside to house both the 0.15 mm enameld copper wires and the 0.1 mm steel wires representing the steel ropes to lower the lamp with a winch.



At the prototype picture there's to divine one more cable at the cylindrical rounded green part's upper end, but even the experts didn't have a clue what it was good for at that place. So I decided to omit it.



To be continued.

Cheers,
Volker

[Ray Dunakin]

Wow!!

[TRAINS1941]

Wow!!

That's a double Wow!!

Jerry

[finescalerr]

Adequate. -- Russ

[Design-HSB]

Hello Volker,

masterfully implemented and actually quite simply with the paper strip.

[Bill Gill]

...and then there was light!