Control Panels and Buildings - October 2020 Update - Chandwell N Gauge Layout

welcome to chandwell i'm michael scott and this is a look at what i've been up to in october i finally made a start on the platform tops and i progressed with my industrial works building as part of my inkscape series if you watch the way through to the end there's a chance to name that building so please do that if you can i also answer a question from a viewer about how i used inkscape to create my control panel for chandwell so let's get straight into it i decided that before i start on the river and other grand plans that i've mentioned in previous videos i better start finishing off some of the things that have never quite been completed none is more of an example of this than the station platforms i'm using the scale scenes kit and i put the sides of the platforms in years ago a couple of years ago before i even started the youtube channel i had a couple of bits to finish off and that's just the end bits here so i already had these bits half completed i just never got around to gluing them down so started by gluing these into position and then i needed to work out how to put the platform tops on the scale scenes kit is quite clear in this it's quite a simple method really um but i did find it difficult to get it accurate um and i'll show you how i mean in a second so with the platform edging in place i essentially sellotaped enough bits of strips of a4 paper together to match the full length of the platforms so here we are it's then just a case of pinning that on top of the platform edges all the way along both sides so it should be fairly simple to do got some pins let's give it a go so i found putting them on to the top of the platform edges was quite straightforward and it fit quite nicely the pins go into the cardboard edging quite nicely so that bit was fairly straightforward didn't struggle with that the next bit is interesting it's how do you get the actual edges into the right place and it's quite a nice technique actually if you went to school and you ever did rubbings of things you'll remember what you do and you get a pencil and you gradually gently rub all the way along the platform edges i folded the paper a little bit just to make it obvious where i was going and then just using the edge of the pencil just gradually sketched along both platforms both sides so overall that went well um although to be honest i'm not entirely sure what i'm going to do down this end yet um i think it's going to depend on where i'm going to put the station buildings and things so for now i'm just taking the platforms down as far as the buffer stops and i'll work out this bit later so we have our platforms shaped um and the next thing to do is cut some strips of one millimeter grey board and sell it those together as well so we've got a full length um piece of card and what i'll do is using my usual technique for buildings i'm just going to use glue stick and i'm going to stick the strips of the paper along these and let that glue dry before i then cut them out so let's give that a go as ever i'm using cheap blue sticks that get off ebay and took me a while to get them down the platforms curve a little bit so it was sometimes a little bit difficult to get them lined up properly on the card but i got there in the end and then after leaving it for a few hours to dry and it's a simple case of beginning to cut this out and this is where the problem started really because the sketched line wasn't as well defined as i hoped it would be it was difficult to tell where the actual edge should be and i was also not quite sure whether i should overhang the edge a little bit so i did my best um when cutting and when i get them actually into place it's not that far off but it's not perfect and so maybe it overhangs the platform edge a little bit and that's okay because i can trim that back but in others it doesn't quite doesn't quite reach far enough so i'm not really sure that i've done this right or not but i'm going to progress anyway so i've got some scale scenes tarmac texture here and i'm just putting it on top of the um on top of the card platforms i'm trimming it like this and i'm blacking the edges with a gray marker i'm just to remove the obvious white line where the join and i'm using my usual technique again just brit stick equivalent and then stick it on make sure there's no bubbles and things and i'm although i'm going to put edging stones or something around the edges of the platforms i still decided to wrap the edges of the tarmac texture around the platform and my idea was there just to make it stick out that little bit further so that when the extra layer is put on as well then the platform does overhang the the upright parts a little bit and although i'm not finished yet um i think it is going in the right direction it looks a little bit scruffy but like i said there's going to be another edging piece wrapped around the edge there so it'll look a lot less scruffy later on it fits quite nicely it looks so much better than when it was just the raw uprights and it looks okay i'm not overly happy however with how i've done the joins here i know you can't see a white line because i darkened it with the pen um but you can see a very definitive straight line so i'm not sure whether i'm happy with that or not it looks okay on the whole um but that line i just need to think about this is chandwell where i'm scratch building a city viaduct layout in engage if you want to follow along please subscribe saw me put part three of my inkscape based industrial building um series onto youtube and i got a nice comment from trevor ward who was asking about using inkscape for creating his control panel on his double or gauge layout and trevor the answer is yes you can use inkscape to use to make control panels in fact i used inkscape to make this which is chandwell's control panel it's a dc layout as you might know so there's lots of switches for the sections and also the point motors which i haven't installed yet and i also use handheld controllers which i plug into the control panel as well i'm going to show you how i did chandwell's control panel i'll give you some tips but i thought you might like to see some other ideas this is a very simple one from a double or gear shunting layout pig hill yard just a few lines three switches and four leds but you can use different styles as well so this one for the early version of chandra which i never built it's just quite straightforward straight lines joining up where the points are and things something like this however is also possible this was again something i never actually built but it was for a round and round layout that i was going to use some kind of microprocessor to to control so far fewer switches it's not it's a lot cleaner looking but again it's just straight lines circles and diagonal lines for the for the points and the junctions and things so that's another idea that works nicely one of my favorite ideas though is to actually base your design on a real signal box diagram um so i did a lot of research into what signal box diagrams look like and i came up with this so again this is just using lines but this time they are not just straight this curves in there as well i'm using the colors that you find on real signal box diagrams as well now this something like this takes a lot more effort and a lot more trial and error and you need to know your way around inkscape a lot more but i think it gives you an idea of what you could do with inkscape i think if this was printed really large and had some large leds on it and some switches and things i think it would look really good it would be a centerpiece um to put above you above your layout i never actually made stanley lane junction but if you look closely you'll see that it's more or less the same track plan as what ended up being chandwell whatever you do though i suggest you start with something like this this is just some straight lines and some colors and i started to make some notes as to what worked well so trial and error basically but do that and once you get an actual style in mind do something like this and just make notes on it as to what actually is what so let's take a look at chandwell's control panel i'll start off with a grid and if we look here at the document properties we'll see the size of the grid that i've chosen for chandwell this was chosen to fit the space that i had but i decided a spacing of 1.5 millimeters horizontally and two and a half millimeters vertically and i'd have a major grid line every eight squares so what that what that's giving us is this there's the major grid lines and if we zoom in you'll see the smaller blue ones and what i want is i want the horizontal lines of the that represent the tracks of chandwell to be along the major grid lines so the pink lines now it's good in inkscape because you're you can snap um all the lines to either your drawing to the grid and if we look here i started with the very very basic outline of the track plan um so there's the track plan i'll turn the grid off again so you can see it and what i wanted is every line of every railway line and every point on there and i used the size of the grid to get the angles i wanted um the size of the grid was determined by the amount of space that i had in the layout to put the control panel so you might not use the horizontal lines and vertical lines that space exactly like this but trial and error gets you where you need to in the end so once you've got the basic outline it's time to start putting the actual tracks on themselves so here are channels tracks essentially it's just colored lines that i've drawn directly over the black outlines in a separate layer so what i'm going to do is i'm going to zoom in on this and show you how i did this so essentially each line is just a line drawn by itself and it's got curved edges rather than straight edges just to give it that kind of like more flowing shape and you'll see here that that's just a simple line constructed in inkscape so how did i do that let's put this back and i will show you so i'm going to turn the grid back on using the line tool i'm just going to draw a simple line click click click click we've now got a line which is which is the piece of track that we're wanting to color in what we do is when i use the node tool i'm going to double click at this point just before the transition of the of the angle and this point so that gives us an extra node there you can see we can move it around and i'm going to double click here as well to add one in the center i'm going to delete this one by selecting it and choosing the remove node button and then this one as well so what that does that gives us those nice curves and we can then drag these handles which alter the shape of the curve into the point where the transition should be from one angle to the next we'll do the same there as well and it's as simple as that to get that nice sweeping curve so you don't need to worry about anything else and because everything snaps to the grid it's all nice we can then select that line and make it i don't know say five millimeters thick all right and that's now got five millimeter wide line and it follows quite nicely we can then duplicate that line if we wanted by pressing ctrl d so press ctrl d and you'll see that it puts a copy of the line on top of the original line so there it is we can then put that back and change its color and then decrease the width a little bit so that gives a nice black outline so it's not really a black outline outside the orange line it's just a black a thick black line underneath a slightly narrower white line we can do that again ctrl d to duplicate and this time make it a lot thicker so if we make that line um thicker and then move it to the back so it's at the back and then change its color what we've got then is we've got a different colored line at the bottom now i'm going to drag that on top of that blue line underneath and bring it to the top and then make the gray line white and that is a good way of making it look like one line goes over under another one and i use that where the points deviate so that you can see the the normal root of the points and that's a nice technique to use and i use that all over the place you'll see that shortly so some other tips if you're going to do something like this yourself um here this dotted square and that is the actual measurements of the back of the switches that i was using um so i measured that accurately and put those on there and that just ensured that as i was making the control panel i wasn't putting switches in places where they wouldn't physically fit um so that works quite nicely and you can see here where i've got the numbers they're just basically text in circles um very simple and everything that i do in inkscape is just made up very very basic shapes um so it looks nice together and it's all aligned to the grids but it's just very basic shapes you can use the same technique with your lines so this nice double arrow here that's just a line on exactly the same grid as the rest i'm just using the minor grid lines here and just to get it all snapped into place so it's just a line the curve works exactly the same way as the main curve on the line that it's on top of now let's use the arrow heads um to add the nice little arrows that shows the direction of travel on that section of track you might not want to put that on there but i thought it looked quite nice i had the correct size um holes and to cut out for the other components that are going to go on there and i always add a nice little signature at the bottom as well these curves here and these elaborate corners they're just circles joined together in a certain way i might go through and do that in a tutorial in future at some point it's a nice thing and then obviously i put the platforms on as well so just have a bit of fun really and put whatever information you want on your control panel but the most important thing is making sure that it's um legible and at the space for your switches here are the points i was talking about again this is just simple lines like this and that sit underneath the main lines so again they were just drawn on the grid and then i use a little tiny line a little white line just to put the across and the transition of the colours that's keeps them separated nicely i think that's only about half a millimeter wide but it looks really nice so i tied it up i changed some of the colors i got rid of the circles where the switches would go i just replaced them with simple up and down lines crosshairs if you like just so that when i get my drill out and i target it it's much easier to get the center of the circles without risking any of the outlines of the circles showing so i tied it up i changed a few of the bits and pieces some of the colors have changed if you like if you can see here but this is the final version of the control panel now it's bigger um than a single sheet of a4 paper so it's not something that i could print out myself not without having to do some kind of joins which might show up so i sent this off to a commercial printers um now they might accept svg files but what i did is i use the export function or the save as function just to change the serving format to pdf and every printer in the world will accept pdf files so exporting or saving your drawing as a pdf file is the best way to get that printed so trevor i hope that answered some of your questions or it has inspired you a little bit i might do a full tutorial about control panels in future in my inkscape series but i need to get the building out of the way with first um so speaking of the building let's have a look at how that's coming on so i spent some time in october working on the building um and i've now got the front um on now well it's not on as you'll see in a minute it's not finished yet i've got a couple of the um frontages frontage parts done got quite a few more to go and it's slow progress um working on this and also um outputting the inkscape series um takes a lot of effort and those videos of the inkscape take a lot of time to put together so this building is going slower than it otherwise would but it's looking okay so let's take a closer look at what i've been up to it's still nice and sturdy um and the front is here the front is put on half millimeter card um because there's going to be a back to it as well i've done some different colored bricks just to add some detail to the front and i'm going to add on some ledges as well and put these bottom bits on i made a mistake i put them too high but it doesn't look too bad when it's against the road so i'm not going to worry about that and i've got those upright buttresses in place as well and there's going to be triangular pieces on top of that you'll see the way that i wrap the card uh i wrap the texture around the apertures for the windows just so there's no export card edges and i've done the same with the with the plinth at the bottom i'm gonna put something along the top of the windows here like what's on the real building um eventually that's my next step so it's a long way all finished but i think it's coming on i'm quite pleased with how it's looking now in the middle there above the arch there's going to be a sign can't quite decide what to call this building so that's where you come in and if you're watching this please give me a suggestion for what my building is going to be called the prototype is called spartan works i want something similar to that but something a bit more inspired and so please offer me a suggestions all the suggestions that i get as long as they're not too rude and i will put to the panel of my children and they can decide what it is going to be called so this is your chance to have this building named after your layout or your dog or your cat or whatever you want so please offer me a suggestion um and we will choose a winner and in my next layout update you'll see what this building is finally called i hope this video has been of interest to you um as ever thank you very much for watching thank you for all the comments that you add on my videos um and also thank you to all my new subscribers i'm now on 825 as of this morning um i couldn't be happier with that that's wonderful if if i have the good fortune to get to a thousand subscribers i'm going to do a question and answers um video um so please if you've got any questions any at all about the layout about the techniques i use about anything that you'd like me to answer please drop a question in the comments and i will do a 1 000 subscriber special where i answer all of your questions so please get that get those coming if that's of interest if you're interested in watching the continued evolution of chandwell please subscribe by pressing that class 47 button just there on screen

Channel: Chandwell

Views: 4,163

Keywords: Model Railway, Control Panel, Inkscape, N Gauge, Scratch Building, Card Modelling, Layout

Id: aop4BF98bEg

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020