Good morning, good evening, wherever you may be. Welcome back the the Weekend. Here we are on the last day of July 2020. I hope you have a lot planned going into the first weekend of August. Let's get started. Saturday: My first Saturday off in a while. After the end of today, I will no longer be working at the dealership. I accepted a new job last week that will allow me more time with my fellow model railroaders. More details later when available. So I'll be working on the upstairs layout and home office which means a trip to my favorite toy store, Menards. I'm picking up lumbar to build more brackets for the layout as well as pegboard to organize things. Sunday: Depending on how much I get done on Saturday, I'm hopping to get the last bit of the garage cleaned and organized for a new addition. We'll see. So how about you? What do you have planned for the first weekend of August? Let us know. We'll return on Monday, August 3rd to see how we have done. Until then, be safe, stay healthy and as always... High Greens!
I hope my lower back cooperates this weekend. It is getting better everyday - it is now in the annoying stage. So, I should finish up the SW8 and SW900 project (I hope) - I'll continue to work on downtown Oxnard. Y'all have a great and safe weekend!! Wolf
Maybe, just maybe I can complete my benchwork this weekend, time will tell. Life seems to be too fast to fit in time to get going on my layout this summer.
Congrats on the new job Jim! Best of luck with it! Wolf, I sure hope your back feels better soon. I know that's not fun. Well, I keep saying this but I honestly hope to be painting fascia Saturday! Have more trucks that need the rims painted and a plant office I will be working on. Sunday will probably be the trip to TN that got put off last week but not set in stone. Hope everyone has a great weekend!
This weekend I will divert my attention back to the passenger station. Also plan on finishing the C&C building. Time permitting, I hope to come close to finishing the autocad drawing I have in progress for signaling. I really want to get the signaling system ordered. Ambitious weekend, but that's a good thing. We've sent out a couple of large projects at work this week so I have nothing but modeling and a few "honey-do's" in front of me this weekend! Happy Friday all.
It has finally stopped raining here (!) so Grass Wars episode 398 will commence Saturday morning. My daughter has dress rehersal for her socially distanced dance recital (!!) and the kids start back to virtual school next Thursday, so lots of domestic work to do. I do have two warehouses and a sheet metal shop to complete, and have about 3/4ths of the parts to scratchbuild an N scale crane like this: https://images.app.goo.gl/ybRa5wfBj88D4AdE6 Walthers made this in HO as a complete kit, but thats too big, so a cuttin and a gluin I will go (Maybe).
I've already done a bit of cleaning and rearranging of the work bench. I will be making a template for installing grab irons on a couple of HOn30 critters. Otherwise, we shall see what transpires.
I began removing the hill behind the farm last evening. I hope to continue doing so over the weekend. If there is time I will try to cut the farm scene out from the layout so I can relocate it elsewhere. This is the hill after removing the trees.
My only plans are to clean off a desk that is under the layout so I can move most of my PCB assembly tools over to it since I'm going to be needing it for these two projects: The first one is the ESP32 CS PCB and the second is an updated 32 IO PCB. Both are about to go off to manufacturing with an expectation of receiving them in about a week. The CS PCB has 135 components on it and all but about 20 will be pre-populated when I receive them. The IO board has around 60 components which will all be hand placed with solder paste and stencil (takes about 15min to assemble). If both check out I will move on to the next steps of making these available.
I'm waiting on some decals to start work on twenty cars. Mail has come and gone today so we'll have to see what happens tomorrow. Otherwise I'll be doing the usual cooking and other domestic labor. Enjoy the days
I have had to do some upgrading to the upgraded cars. Not entirely unexpected. On The OSR, that is how we ride. I have started the 0-6-0 (Lil' Steamy) upgrade. Frame assembled and drivers installed. I am running behind due to procrastination committed on Wednesday. Hopefully, Monday we will have more progress.
I hope to get this project started by removing parts from supports and getting a primer coat on them :
I've been working on a few Accurail HO Scale cars this past couple of weeks. I don't know if I'm a fan. The first one went together fairly well, the next two are giving me fits. The frame pieces don't fit properly and the body of one car is so warped, I can't get the frame in. If I get some time, I'm going to try and use a hair dryer to warm it up a bit and see if I can get it in that way. I have one more car to build, and after that I might give these kits a hard pass.
Not that unusual, the Southern Pacific had 500, the Pacific Electric had 50, the Union Pacific had 750 similar cars and the Oregon Short Line had 150 more.
Unusual for N scale, first one I've seen. Like the different pickle cars I built and are hiding in plain site on my pics. Unique to N scale.
I purchased LED lights, paint and a sheet of Masonite this afternoon and going to install the lights in about 30 minutes. Can't wait to be able to see the layout. Joe