It's common to see multiple flat cars go by with 18"-24" pipe stacked. The pipe is about 50' long, green coated, with ends bare probably for welding after installation.
I need to get a new tube of Elmer's Super Glue every so often. If I don't use it up, it gets hard and I still need another little tube. It's inexpensive and I can get it at the supermarket. AND (here is what is relevant to THIS thread) the caps look like N scale concrete box culverts- at least when painted concrete color and seen from one end. Could be used under a road or track as installed culvert opening to a ditch. I once dreamed of a monster huge layout with 50 or 60 industries in a major city, one of which would be a company that made concrete things like box culverts. Could have a stack of them stockpiled. I have since given up on that monster scheme-- but it can live on with shipments coming FROM my planned but unmodeled industries. The gondola load in the above picture is an example of that shipment. I turned the culverts so a viewer cannot see the ends that don't look like a culvert. I captured a photo of an old gas building that dated from the civil war (now demolished) in my prototype city that I can approximate in model form as a city gas and utility facility that can receive water and sewer pipe, culverts, chlorine gas for water purification... In the inset of my culvert photo-- There was another variety of Elmer's Super Glue- I don't know if they still pack it this way- that came in tubes with a funny top. Haven't seen it lately. To me it looked a little stylized castle tower, or like the rook in a game of chess. I can imagine this as a kind of decorative fake tower flanking the entrance of a Kiddy amusement park, or as part of a miniature golf course. I might be able to find a place to fit this in my layout's "Beachfront Amusement District". (Early mockup from several years ago...)
The item shown at left in 2 inset views- not sure what it is, or was. I think it was the cover designed to slide off some device to access the battery compartment. When the device stopped working, I disassembled it and put anything that looked like an interesting possibly-usable (but not necessarily probably) shape into one of my "plastic pieces" junk boxes. While working on my creosote treating plant, I needed something a heavy-duty fork lift to pick up telephone poles, piling, etc and the like. Something considerably heavier than the fork lifts used inside warehouses. In my "not ready for State Safety Inspection" box of construction vehicles, I found an old front-end loader from an inexpensive Bachmann equipment set. Missing its front end bucket. I needed something that looked like the lift part of a fork lift. Looked through my junk box and found several candidates, pieces with a sort of "L" shape. One of them had a kind of rectangular-pattern raised-place on what would be the inside. I simply cut around that on 3 sides, leaving the other side of the "L". That would form -actually just simulate- the vertical track for the lift mechanism. I cut away using the Michaelangelo principle. Michaelangelo found a marble block and simply cut away everything that didn't look like his concept of the "David." That looked moderately good, but I realized a fork-lift operator needed to see through the "track" mechanism to look at his load and his lift platform. So I simply cut away the inside of that rectangular shape. "Simply"? Yeh... This found piece was a tough plastic not made for model building. However, I figured it would be stronger than trying to fabricate a rectangular frame from little plastic sticks, or cutting an open rectangular frame from a chunk of plain styrene. Mounted the lift platform and track on my ex-front-end-loader and we are off moving poles. Shameless commercial plug. I am rehabilitating the creosote plant from my dismantled East Texas piney woods layout to attempt to sell on eBay in a few days. Old picture of the old model I think the rehabilitated model will be an improvement.
At the craft store (Hobby Lobby, Michael's etc): Eyes for attaching to cloth dolls come in a number of sizes. They can be used for the ends of tanks and industrial reactor vessels. I used one for the swing-open end on a creosote treating retort. I wanted to suggest how the treating vessels operate so I modeled one closed, and one open with a tram-load of untreated utility poles being pushed in. The doll eye I was used had a post on the back/inside for attaching to the doll face. That could not show, so I had to saw it off with a razor saw and file down the remainder. NOT an "everyday item": for the 2-foot-gauge N scale disconnect pole trucks (like disconnect log trucks for a logging rr), I used N scale rotary lawn mowers, with the wheels and underbody showing but the engine hidden under the utility poles. Oops, photos shows some details to be fixed...
:cute:On the contrary, cc are very strong laminates and flexible (bendable). Use in buildings to reinforce 90deg angles at wall joints -add floor supports for false floor/ ceilings and reinforce joints or - cement on one wall with CA, then 'pinch' gaps together and cement to other wall. The adhesion and strength only requires a minutes hand pressure to bond and retain positions. dave
To paraphrase an old philosophical riddle: "If a clove falls in a soup and there is no modeler there to see it, does it still look like a tree stump in the woods?" Maybe this is not an everyday item, but a once-a-week one. Every Thursday, I am supposed to put a 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 rump roast in the stew pot, chop up an onion, add water and count out EXACTLY four cloves from a little spice jar. Then it is slow-cooked overnight. In the morning my wife puts the meat in the fridge, and puts in the vegetables and sauce in the stew pot to make soup that lasts us for lunch for most of a week. I find a clove every noon or so in the soup. It has flavored the meat and the soup but too strong to eat by itself, so I take it out...and LOOK at it. Looks an awful lot like an N scale tree stump. Now if I needed to model a logged-over area.... I would just have to keep slurping soup and watching for stumps.
