Welcome back everyone. I hope you all had a great weekend and got some valuable hobby time in to accomplish Friday's goals. Lets get started. Saturday: I got the N scale shadowbox down into the garage and filled in a portion of the back drop with more hardboard and started filling in the holes and scratches, then priming the entire exterior. I also worked on the HO module legs as well as some other shop duties. The day was as predicted, sand, prime, sand, prime and finally before sun down paint. I was also able to attend my local NMRA virtual meet as I now have a regular work schedule. Done by Zoom, it was nice to see new faces and what everyone was working on. I was able to get 80% of the shadow box painted. Sunday: With clear acrylic "glass" in hand from the previous weekend's trip to my toy store, I set out on fixing a window in the 100+ year old farm house we rent. Next was another project I had put off for years and that was my removable exhaust for the spray booth. It's a simple affair of a dryer vent, fan unit and dryer exhaust tubing that is attached to a piece of hardboard the width of the window. It fit in the channel of the storm window and worked well until the weather degraded my " temporary" installation over three years ago. With a hole saw and only a few colorful metaphors, I called this project done. I then added some structural rigidity to my shadowbox and by the end of the day had it back upstairs. I did not get the sky-board painted but I can do that in the shop. All in all, a pretty good weekend with a lot accomplished. So how about you? What did you get accomplished? Let us know. We'll assemble again on Friday the 16th to start the process all over again. Until then, have a great week, stay healthy, stay safe and as always... High Greens!
Weekend went well for me. Friday after I visited a few hobby shops I assembled the last two modules and the legs for all four modules. Saturday I attached the 2” foam board to the four modules and pulled three others I had sitting in the garage and worked on them. Started to attach fascia then the weather turned and got dark. I attended a zoom meeting the Free-moN guys had that evening as well. So I now have seven modules sitting in my garage needing finishing. Sunday was cold and damp so nothing got done.
I had a much better MRRing weekend. Worked on my 2-10-2 - both days. The tender is just about ready. I am not happy with the draw bar. So. I will scrap the one I made and fashion a new one out of square brass tubing. The locomotive received a little attention. Stanchions for the boiler hand rails and the smoke box door hand rail was installed. Hope Y'all had a great weekend!! Wolf
Another weekend that just flew by. Spent some time in the train room but not much accomplished. Put up a new layout sign, did a little roadwork, and started some scenery work around the power sub station. Mainly just kicked back in by chair and watched some trains run for a while. Hope everyone has a great week!
Didn't get everything done I wanted, wound up watching college football for about 4 hours Saturday afternoon. Spent time Saturday AM cutting and test fitting a city scape backdrop. I have it temporarily put up just to see if I like it over time. Sunday spent time putting in Tortoise machines and also went ahead and built up the wiring harnesses for them. I took a photo of the last three I did. Here's a shot of the harnesses and backdrop.
Best laid plans and all that. Discovered that my wiring supplies (Kato 3-way connectors - please don't judge) are on back order. I went to LHS to buy some to start testing polarity and a replacement switch with my dear wife, ended up spending $$$$$ on scenery (mostly Woodland Scenics' LED buildings) and scenery supplies (guess who's in charge of scenery?) Patched all the holes in the table (OK, so I changed the plan a fair bit.) Cleaned off an old laptop for use with JMRI Decoder Pro, and ordered the PR4 for it. No trains running yet, but did clarify the where and what of the mountain feature (instead of a backdrop to separate the "scenes", will be building a contigiuous mountain feature throughout the layout. Ambition has never been our problem. Skill to realize the ambition is quite another question...
My weekend layout work went just about as planned. The yard ladder control board got finished on Friday evening. Saturday I got it installed in the cabinet under the yard and connected the wiring that was already there. It all worked right the first time so started work on loop end where the Tortoise motors are to connect frogs, feeders, etc. This continued on Sunday and by Sunday evening I was able to run an engine through the loop end yard ladder. In between layout work sessions I also did quite a bit of tree and bush pruning. Also as it had been awhile since I had made any contributions to the N Scale database I found some items that I had that did not have any photos in the database so took the photos and added them, example below. Overall a great weekend.
Didn't get in any real work bench time. Spent some time researching then looking around to see about finding a little Roco diesel critter.
No modeling time but plenty of historical exploring. We did the self guided driving tour of State Game Land 12 in Bradford County Pa. I did some poking around the upper end of Long Valley in SGL 36. I found headhouse foundation for the Cash Mountain inclined plane. I also had an long phone conversation with a fellow from the local historical society. He was nice enough to tell me about reamains to be found and thier locations and some of their history. I'll save all that for the thread I've been planning on starting.
Finished wiring and got my ALCO PA testing the tracks and turnouts on the third module. Looks like I got the gremlin on the second (had to replace a distributor box), but also one ot the double slip motors does not go properly. For the moment I just put a red pin on it, later will try to fix. Now I start with scenery.... hurray!
Knee issue much better. Slight discomfort. Got two boxcars repaired. Not much else. On to the Mogul. (I think I hear a 2-10-2 easing out of the erection shop?)
Finally "calling it done" with my N-Scale U18B kit. Now it's time to get this off to a custom builder/painter to make it shine (or grunge)! Cheers -Mike
For some reason, this weekend just slipped by without much modeling getting done. I did get to run some trains. I did some more inventory photos. I managed to get one boxcar weathered. I almost forgot I did scan a few railfan photos.
I managed to install lights on the layout (yes all 27 of them) and then start on the valance: Looking from the entrance to the layout. Aisle where the main yard would possibly be located (to the right). Still gotta fix the light bleeds before I paint outside of the valance.
Saturday spent some time on minor chores and watched a soccer match. Sunday more of the same and watched Sunday Night Football. The temperature has officially dropped here and it seems the rainy season has begun. In the gaps I did get to try out CorelDraw and compare it with Cadrail. At this point I would have to say neither is a complete success for me. First, Corel is completely new to me. Obviously much to be learned. Here is a sample of the drawings I need in the short term, templates for ladders. Corel It was easy to draw the ladders in either actual size or any scale I chose. The print out size was determined by how I scaled the drawing and adjusted the print settings. Both totally in my control, but also totally my responsibility. Cadrail I found it better to set Cadrail's units in inches and draw as if it were a full size model. The print dialog has presets for converting to popular scales or freeform reduction. However, since I was working from an existing model it was necessary to measure the parts and calculate the "prototype" dimensions. Either program was more than capable of producing the templates. I went ahead and messed with drawing some disc/boxpok drivers I will need in the near future. Corel Note that I did not finish the drawing. I took dimensions from a Kato Mikado driver and drew the template on the left. Then I adjusted the spoke centers and was adding details. I went looking for a fillet tool. Having exhausted the manual and the online knowledge base I started a chat with support. It did not go well. As far as I can tell the version I am trialing does not have that capability. These were drawn actual size, about 0.370" diameter, and then I zoomed in for the screen capture. Cadrail I am pretty happy with how these drawings turned out, but I don't know if they could be used to laser cut some discs to overlay on the original drivers. Cadrail can produce a .dxf. I may tray exporting this drawing to Corel and see what happens. Again these are drawn as if full size and then scaled down when printed. This is a screen shot at an indeterminate scale. I am calling it a successful weekend. Try new software. Done. Print ladder templates. Bonus. Learn something. Double bonus.
