New products

[thebranchline]

Hi All,

I am a hobbyist, and machinest who has been making reproduction signs for G scale (16mm) for the past 6 months,  would there be interest if I scaled up my products slightly? To make it worthwhile I would have to sell 20 items or so to cover costs,

Below are some of the items I have been making, all are moulded in ABS (same as lego bricks) which i feel gives a very authentic cast iron look (better the etched brass)







I have also been considering offereing a customisation service for a fee (£50 but not sure about this yet), although this applies more to (16mm) where people base there railways on fictional names/place.

If I do start manufacturing which would be best Railway to go for GWR, LMS etc?

Thanks for reading and I look forward to being part of the community here,

John Bennetts

[IanT]

Hi John,

A few personal comments on your post which I hope you will find useful.

Some signs are not that scale sensitive and a small sign (in 16mm of say – "Beware of Trains") can be viewed simply as being a slightly larger sized sign from a 'G' scale perspective. I think there is already quite of lot of this 'generic' signage available from the Trade. Also, where signage is concerned, many G3 modellers these days can print coloured images of any prototypical signs they might require and mount them on a suitably sized background.

A better way to understand any G3 "opportunity" would be that most scenic products currently available in "large scale" are often either Continental or US in origin and/or very often grossly overscale and related to narrow gauge practice. What would be useful are more G3 products that are accurate in terms of scale, period and location, especailly given that G3 in the UK (at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious) is very much settled in British standard gauge practice.

Your GWR bench is potentially a very good example of what might be useful (although I've no idea whether it's based on a real GWR bench or not) in that a) when staged with a 'G' scale figure - a bench really does need to look about the right size, b) that it is a 'GWR' bench (i.e. big four/main/branchline) and that c) it would probably be useful on railways spanning quite a long period of time (pre/post grouping, even Western Region BR etc).

So I'd certainly be interested in knowing what else you have (or could produce) that would meet these more specific standard gauge 'G' scale requirements.

This would enable a more focused discussion of your suggestion and might also help you (in turn) to gauge interest in specific items amongst Forum members (and potentially the larger G3 community). That would be a good first step towards establishing whether you have a new market for your models.

Regards,

IanT