Midlands MEX 2022

I visited the Midlands Model engineering Exhibition in Warwickshire on Thursday (13th). Arrived around 10AM after a good journey along the M40 and A423. Only slight delay caused by construction work for HS2 just outside Southam. Found something that vaguely resembled coffee and then started off around the show. First thing to be said is, that to me, it appeared smaller than on previous years. Particularly noticeable in Hall 2 where about one third of the space had been set aside for tables and chairs. Outside also looked a bit sparse with only twelve of the Fosse Way Steamers in action. The usual portable rail track was absent as were any other outside displays save two catering wagons.

1. Ashmead @ Lympsham Wharf
1. Ashmead @ Lympsham Wharf
This was my ‘Best in Show’ a diorama of Lympsham Wharf on the River Axe with an impressive model of (1) the Severn trow Ashmead by Anthony Judd. These barges were used for local trade in coal and timber on and around the River Severn. This is a freelance model based on Bridgewater built Norah (c.1868). Ashmead was build as a radio controlled sailing model and is fully operational with servos controlling the rigging and rudder. The diorama was added later. Photo does not do the model justice due to the poor lighting and crowded background. I thought this would make an excellent museum display, when her sailing days are over of course. Gained 3rd place in competition class 10.

Cooch Vertical
2. Cooch Vertical Engine
Practically the first exhibit you see on entry is (2) this large vertical column engine, the label unfortunately described it as a ‘vertical boiler‘, hopefully the label was altered at some point in the show. Cooch & Son were agricultural equipment makers in Nottingham but I am unable to find any mention of steam engines, their speciality was potato sorters, so not much help there. Reminiscent of the Benson vertical column engines but the column appears parallel rather than tapered. Nevertheless a fine model by John Fysh and competition winner in class 5.

For A Larger View – Click On The Image

Vertical boiler and steam plant
3. Vertical Steam Boiler
Just so that there is no misunderstanding this is a vertical boiler!

On the Wolverhampton & District Model Engineering Society was this freelance model of a vertical steam boiler and associated plant (3). The boiler was sized to suit a section of 6.625″ copper tube from a club member. The boiler is based on an Atkinson vertical boiler but with larger fire tubes. At the front of the picture are plastic patterns used to cast the ash pan vent, chimney cap and base. The boiler can be used to steam a Stuart No.4 engine and future projects along with testing injectors. An excellent piece of kit by Dave Bickerton.

For A Larger View – Click On The Image

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3D Printing in Lockdown

Like many this year I have been “mainly staying at home”. As you can tell from the sparsity of posts I have not been doing very much either, a bit of exercise on the bike a couple of times a week, pottering in the garden and tinkering in the workshop. The workshop tinkering was partly targetted at rejuvenating my old 3D printer which has not seen much use recently partly down to a loose print-head. I resolved to fix this by making a new aluminium backplate to get rid of the plastic frame that held the print-head in place. Whilst the printer was in bits I also decided to fit cable chains and “improve” the wiring to make the hot end easier to maintain. The outcome was only partially successful.

Print-Head Mods
Print-Head Mods

The aluminium backplate worked and held the print-head to the X-carriage securely making use of a ready made steel angle bracket from another make of printer. The wiring mod worked by inserting Molex connectors between the hot-end and the main wiring loom from the print-head assembly. Cable chains were a failure the cables not being heavy enough or flexible enough to make them work as intended.

One of the unforeseen problems was that having removed the build plate fans, printing anything small or with small details wouldn’t work. I was going to print new housings for the fans to screw to the sides of the new backplate this proved to be difficult. I am sure I would have got there eventually but being somewhat impatient I opted for a different solution. Buy a new printer!

A New 3D Printer

Prusa i3 Mk3S Printer
Prusa i3 Mk3S

I spent some time researching which printer to buy, not an easy choice. You can pretty much pay anywhere between a couple of hundred to a few thousand pounds for a smallish 3D printer but within my price bracket the Prusa i3 Mk3S consistently had good reviews and I opted for this rather than one of the many short lived strangely named Chinese offerings. At first glance the new printer looks very similar to the old but there are many differences and improvements from old to new.

I opted for the kit version of the printer, it is quite a bit cheaper than the fully assembled one and the kit gives you plenty of insight into how the printer works for future maintenance jobs. I was going to do a write up of the build but there are so many versions on-line including some excellent videos that I decided against it. Not only that, the build manual is so good it really doesn’t need any help. Assembly is quite straightforward just read the manual carefully, and eat the Gummy Bears (Gummibär) as directed. The most difficult part is putting the print head assembly together. The printed parts are made in Prusa’s 500+ printer farm, which uses the same model printer, from PETG. The finish and accuracy of these parts is very good and the files to print replacements are all included on the SD card. The supplied hardware is also of good quality including, at least on mine, Misumi linear bearings. Interestingly as I was writing this Prusa announced an upgrade to the printer, the latest version is now the i3 Mk3S+. Also available (January 2021) is an upgrade to v2.3 of the PrusaSlicer software which makes a few useful changes

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Midlands MEX 2019

EricsArt
Rudyard Kipling
Visited the Warwickshire show on Thursday and the first thing I noticed was that the usual large Warco stand was no longer welcoming visitors by the main entrance having been replaced by a number of smaller trade stands. So this year by the door was Station Road Steam, 17D Miniatures and Keith Robinson Engineering Tools whilst RDG had taken a couple of the spaces to add to their very large sales area.

There were a few new exhibitors this year one of those being Eric’s Railway Art, he had plenty of prints available to buy and was painting a new masterpiece during the show. The image from his flyer is reproduced on the left and his website is worth a look.

Another layout change was that the “lecture theatre” had moved to a screened off area of the main hall. Apparently some attending lectures found the noise from outside a bit off-putting. This also made the show area a bit smaller than normal.

Other new trade stands included: CL9UD or Cloud Nine if you prefer selling various phone related gizmos and cables; ExGlo UK demonstrating something to do with power drills; Just the Ticket traction engine and large scale rail model engineering supplies; Large Scale Locomotives and Steam Age Nameplates, were the ones I noticed.

Hall 2, where the majority of the club stands are located, seemed slightly emptier than usual although according to the plan in the show guide the layout was similar to last year but with a small competition stand placed between Wolverhampton MES and the Gas Turbine Association stands.

Working clockwise around the hall I started at the Guild of Model Wheelwrights who had one of there usual fine displays. I am always impressed by the level of detail in these relatively small models. The combination of metalwork, woodwork and other skills is incredible. I was particularly taken with the Kessler Dumping Wagon by Brian Young but the whole display was excellent. A couple of images below to encourage your wagon building and wheelwright ambitions. (Click On An Image To Magnify)

I note from their website that, sadly, the Guild is no more. Closed from October last year due in the main to declining membership. It is to be hoped that the individual members continue to provide an excellent display at the various model engineering shows for a few more years yet.

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Starting Out – Home Workshop

Well at long last I have added some new pages to help anyone who is thinking about starting a “Home Workshop”. Nothing too detailed but there are plenty of pictures and loads of links, a few hints and tips and a couple of ideas to start you in the right direction.

Blacksmith's workshop
Old Blacksmith’s Shop
There are five new pages in all covering:

Good luck with the new workshop and the many successful projects that will emanate from it.

Long Time No See

Well this is the first post in over a year just to let you know that I haven’t gone away. Life has conspired to prevent any modelling activity since the autumn of 2017. I have not been to a show or exhibition since Spalding in April 2017 and it seems unlikely that I will be able to get to any of the shows this year. I was looking forward to Bristol and the Midlands show but maybe I will get to go next year!

I have not even been able to get into the workshop very often and then only to power up the lathe and mill for a short run to keep the oil and bearings in working order. Apparently lathe bearings can distort if not used for long periods of time going slightly oval with the weight of the spindle. The only useful thing I have managed is to make some shelf space by recycling a load of old magazines, mainly MEW which if I need I can see on-line.

I did manage to do a bit of work on my 3D printer in between my “carer” duties though. I have been trying to improve the print head mounting and to install a cable chain. Neither project went very well and I now have a printer that is back in kit form having not been able to finish the work! Oh well, another project for next year. I have also been trying to write another couple of pages for the site but it is very slow going as I can’t spend too long in one session and I lose the thread, some might say I have lost the plot but I lost that years ago…

Workshop Security HTTPS

Not so much about the physical security of the workshop, which is of course important, but about the protocol change I have made to the website. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. Google have for some time been promoting the use of HTTPS and give securely connected sites higher ranking.

The first thing you need is an SSL certificate, this has the encryption keys for the Secure Socket Layer communication setup. Fortunately even the cheapest 1&1 hosting package includes a basic SSL certificate and all I had to do to implement it was to activate it from the 1&1 control panel. The basic certificate is fine for a simple website but if you are implementing a world wide trading empire you will need to pay for something a bit more advanced.

That was the easy bit, getting the website in order is a little more tricky. To start with any internal links need either to be relative or non protocol specific that is they should look like //journeymans-workshop.uk/etc and not http//journeymans-workshop.uk/etc. Once this is done the website .htaccess file needs to redirect any calls to HTTPS this is so that all the old links scattered about the interweb end up in the right place. There are several different ways to do this and I just copied the code from the Apache site, the script conventions for these files is way outside my comfort zone! If you need to do this the code that needs to be added looks like this:-
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
# Begin Force HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule .* https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]
# End Force HTTPS
</ifmodule>

What you should see in your browser
Browser View

With that done the next major job is to update the WordPress database so that the media links are right. WordPress stores all the links to photos as complete hyperlinks including the HTTP bit so these need changing. The easiest way to do this is with a plugin. I used Better Search Replace which is fairly simple to use and does a dry run before it alters the database. The image to the right shows the browser result when everything works but I put it in to test that the new images are stored with the correct protocol – it seems to work!

Next job is to sort out Google, as you can see I use their ads on the site and it just about pays for the hosting and domain fees. I had to re-write the XML sitemap with the new HTTPS addresses but also had to add the HTTPS version as a new site? I only have one set of files but for reasons best known to themselves Google want each version of the site shown separately. So you end up with:-
https://journeymans-workshop.uk/
https://www.journeymans-workshop.uk/
http://journeymans-workshop.uk/
http://www.journeymans-workshop.uk/
Which strikes me as a little odd but it seems to be what they want. Once this is done sit back and wait for Google to crawl everything. It is fairly difficult to check if all is working correctly and you need to keep clearing the browser cache to make sure you are looking at the latest version. Touch wood everything seems to be working. It is interesting to note the number of old links stored on the web, I was going to remove my old cign.org and cign.net sites but there are still loads of places that have these recorded.

Did I really need to do this – probably not but I learned a bit on the way and in theory my Google ranking should go up for what it′s worth.

Just a quick update, a few months after doing this I checked Google and there was absolutely nothing happening on any of the “sites” other than the https://journeymans-workshop.uk/ so I deleted the other three. Whether this was the right thing to do remains to be seen but I thought it was neater.