People painting.
Lorry painting.
Signal electrics installation.
Geoff had painted the baseboard framework and the reverse faces of the backscene panels in the standard dark grey, which looked wonderful.
We discussed the next stage of the front-of-house backscene. We still favoured a matt white emulsion base with either sprayed or daubed grey tones, but a bit closer to actually doing it, we decided to prepare some board off-cuts to practice on. Geoff will prepare these before next week.
Geoff continued painting people. He'd carried out some research on typical dress code in the early 60's and had decided that one or two figures didn't fit in. However, he was able to confirm that hot-pants were definitely around at the time. Laurence continued to spray paint the coal lorry. Stephen had completed the assembly of the signal components (see below) and started to install them, fitting the switch panel and connector block. However, the problem of how to get two sets of wires for the frame signal light and the sound unit across to the platform board raised its head again. We have no spare pins on the 20-way connector and had already resorted to an extra 2-pin plug to supply the 19v ancillary feed. Stephen and Geoff had another session searching for a suitable plug and socket sets online, with little success. Geoff did have some 7-pin din plugs and sockets that would work nicely if a little more research failed to come up with anything.
The previous week, Stephen had drilled mounting holes through the baseboard and switch panel, and glued two nuts captured in plasticard blocks to the base. A V-cut had been made on the back edge of the switch base to make fitting the switch easier. At home, a small version of the LED flasher unit had been made that fitted neatly under the rotary switches. Coloured wires had been attached to the switches and the details recorded.
The schematic:
A free, short, bell .mp3 file had been downloaded and then transferred to the sound unit (on left). It required playing on 'repeat' to get a decent length, but it wasn't working well. However, the sound unit has various playing options, and the best solution was to set it to single play. The sound clip was then duplicated to increase it to 20 seconds. Finally, to start the playback, a 5v relay (yellow block at bottom) was inserted to replicate the on-board switch. In operation, when a train arrives and stops at its signal, the operator switches to 'Frame', the bell sounds and the frame light flashes. When the bell stops (or earlier), switching to 'Signal' cancels the frame light and activates the signal flashing light, which can be switched off once the train has moved through.
