Well its happened again, another weekend is in the books. Did you get everything done that you set out to do during this last weekend of July? Not me. Saturday was my day off so I did get some model railroad writing done. I switched gears to go to my old storage unit and get most of my Model Airplanes ready for sale for an event next weekend. The rest of the day was spent with my bride to be, scoping out locations for our wedding. Sunday was my 5:00am to 1:30pm shift so I got home and got ready to paint my CB&Q NW-2 but that was interrupted by family visits and laundry. Oh well, such is life. Today, while I'm off from "work", I still work for my new venture, Wiggin Locomotive Works and the airbrush will be getting a work out today painting an O scale locomotive. Hmm, I might be able to sneak in the NW-2...hmm.. So how about you? How did you fare? Let us know, with pictures if you can. We'll come back, one last time in July of Friday the 31st to start the process all over again. Until then, have a great week, keep it safe and... High Greens!
I started painting the Atlas GP38-2, now primed, painted with the CN red on the ends and Burdakin blue on the rest. Pilots and walkways black, of course. The blue I chose looks very good. Checking it against a prototype photo, it's very close! For me, that's close enough. There's still some work to do (decals, details, etc.). And I ran out of that yellow Tamiya tape. I resorted to standard masking tape in the meantime.
As I had figured, accomplished virtually nothing. Just shuffled a couple of items on my work bench, and looked up some information for a fellow modeler.
Well, this weekend but also just about every available time block for about a year now, I worked on the miniature chassis for my coal mine loco project (that has evolved into a likely product offering). I'm trying to simplify the decoder mounting design for easier servicing and to get any chassis design changes required finalized for a first short production run (10-25?) for final testing. The last year+ of designing, developing, and testing has narrowed most details and components to a few options that have worked well. It's about time to pull it together and run a final test batch of parts, including the few components with options still up in the air, and test the whole thing, parallel, to fairly determine what's going to prove best and final. This is a chassis I started developing about a year ago and has evolved to 10.4 mm off the rails, 33" N scale wheels at 11.4 mm wheelbase, gearings for scale top speeds from as little as 20 or so to as much as 70 N scale MPH, compensation for more reliable power pickup when used as a four wheel power truck, and is running on Z scale track (Nn3 narrow gauge). If it is decided to produce it commercially it will be built for N scale track too, at the same height. And HO??? maybe??? Also did some homework on smaller gears and tooling for hobbing the gears for the next even lower and smaller chassis. It's become an obsession. What preliminary designs suggest and with experience gained in this venture, this one should come in around 8.5 / 8.6 mm off the rails, have 24" N scale wheels with larger sizes available as need might dictate, and then ways to customize wheelbases without making a whole new chassis every time. Looked some more at tungsten for this chassis and the feasibility of laminating the chassis halves and then machining in the same fashion as the solid two piece laminated brass block that I'm currently using for the 10.4 mm unit. These little things NEED all of the weight you can get in them and at this ultra tiny size it seems like it's got to be tungsten or it can't, or at least shouldn't, be done. One problem that's looming, if it can be done at all, is that I'm not sure that it can all be done in a budget that doesn't require full scale price for Z scale parts. We'll see. Meanwhile, the 10.4 mm test unit is running in the background. Runs about every day, as it has for the last year or so. Sometimes for 24 hours, days straight, but at least from the time I get up until I go to bed. These days I usually just run wide open as the throttled back testing is largely done. There's about 700 hours on the motors and still running strong with just some chassis oiling every 100 hours or so and the motor bearings oiled at about 250 hours or so. (Trying to develop data and recommendations for servicing.) Much is done, still months of final details to optimize everything. It's been quite a challenge and also very rewarding as each obstacle was overcome. There were many. Just about everything, matter of fact. Now it is finally coming together and clearly viable. The viability was NOT so clear when I started, which seems like an eternity ago. That's my weekend... EVERY weekend!
