Train-meet

Today there was an train-meet in Eskilstuna so we went, but only after some "roadside" repair of the car since the seatbelt got stuck in and needed some convincing.

At the event the well pre-planned layout quickly took shape.

Tommy came by train and had collapsed everything nearly into single bricks; he had a lot to do.

Carl was one of the enthusiasts that went almost six hours by car to get here, the enthusiasm did not stop behind the wheel.

Robban on the far right may have surpassed even himself with a stellar old factory.

Overview.

Robbans factory area again.

Robban tearing down one of his other great creations.

There was a second one-man-show layout in another room since DaRePo put up about a third of his planned layout at home as a test. He's in the process of building the house that's going to contain it - that's dedication!

DaRePo on the right, sporting knee protectors, just one of several small details that proves he has put a lot of thought into this test of his.

I thought I had taken an overview shot of the layout but it must have stopped at a thought, here's the major half of it.

Some of the trains.

I brought my ugly 6991 Monorail again, and some technic creations just for kicks. These will end up here at some point.

I brought some extra track, Sebban and Patrik made sure to use it all.

Selander (that planned the layout) on the left and AndersI (that called the event and held with the facilities) discus some technical aspect, Robban listens.

Close to closing time and still all classic smiley faces.

Counting the name list totals to 58 people at today's meeting.

After we went home to AndersI to order pizzas and chat some more. Part of his lair.

Illuwatar opens a box of holy Technic.

Tommy basking in the glow from the holy stuff.

Clone bricks hunting season

It's on!
 

Counting templates

Our LUG had to count some 300.000 bricks into individual orders. To help ease the process I made a bunch of counting templates. First I split a few floor boards into wide and thin strips.

I glued a thin strip along the edge on the wide strips and let it set for a while.

I then cut the strips down but had to reclamp the lot since the glue had not set yet.

After the glue had set I put in another thin strip in the end so that 50 1 x n-bricks would fit in the template.

At the sorting event people could concentrate on how many rows they stacked not having to keep count on the actual bricks.

Once the template was full (or the order amount reached) it was easy to pour the bricks into bags.

This way we could all keep talking to each other only rarely having to do a recount (on occasion the bricks fell outside the bag). It was a lotek solution to the problem. :)

Even faster would be to use very accurate scales but they are expensive. This way I only used material that I had laying around and built 20 of them in an hour or so.

Train photos

Some photos from the trainmeeting we had on Saturday.

Setup.

From the movie Inception?

Tinkering.

I brought my "new" 6991 Monorail Transport Base, good fun!

False fronts, quite clever!

Two classic Swedish engines went head-to-head. Ooops.

This guys windmill has been squeaking for a couple of exhibitions, so I gave him some "flavoured lube". Apparently it did not taste very good. :)

On that note, here's some train porn:

Lot's to see and document, counting all wagons and engines we had 105 rolling units, not bad for a first!

The red train seemed more accident prone than the rest.

Almost the full layout.

In another room one of our club members was busy using all of his track for the first time.

Putting stuff on the Maersk train might have gotten slightly out of hand...

"Oooops", what an "accident". ;)

In case you've missed it, the previous post contains a video from the event.