Weekend Update - 3/15/2009

[John]

It's time to see what you have been up to.

[asciibaron]

operated at Jeff Warner's near Harrisburg on Saturday - today i'm planning on taking over the world...

the brain.

[up1950s]

I started to work on the Beaver for awhile . I copied , more or less , the extra detail of what somebody else did to one of these that I bought .
 

[wcfn100]

I wasn't happy with the operation of my Aerotrain, plus I want to try and make her into two halves (with no wires between the halves) for ease of storage and assembly so I popped her open to try and learn the sercrets of the seven wires.


First of all, I know little about electronics so some of this is just based on what I found logical while testing.





The photo shows the tail car and the seven pin socket.

Here's what I found...

The tail lights don't work without the front of the train, the interior lights don't work without the end of the train. So this is what looks like is going on.

The outer two wires are the track power.
The next two wires in from each side are the interior lights.
The inner three wires are for the red/white tail lights (one common) and do nothing in the coach cars.

I believe that the circuit board in tail car is in charge of making sure the polarity of the two interior light wires is always the same regardless of (DC) direction.


I'm going to change this one over to DCC assuming the FL4 is small enought to fit in the tail car. I'm going to use four wires between the cars so I can control the interior lights.  I'm also going to get the cars closer together.  So if the decoders will fit, the biggest hurdle is what to use for new diaphragms.



Jason

[up1950s]

" First of all, I know little about electronics so some of this is just based on what I found logical while testing. "

From your dive in attitude and ability to subdivide and test you have proved that you have more than enough ability in electronics to deal with the task . I wonder if 2 extra boards ( A tail board for the rear of the front section of the train , and a forward board to add the the forward section of the rear half of the train ) can be gotten from CC to add to the fore and aft cars where you want the split . In effect you would then have two complete train ckts .

[atsf_arizona]

Hi, all, the amount of good work that goes on that you all display is great.

For me this week, my humble little contribution:

--------------

1)  Thx to the forums, I discovered Neolube #2 this past month.  Makes the
Santa Fe 2-8-8-2 and any 'shiny rod' steamer look a lot better:



compared to the stock appearance:



What's nice about Neolube, being a easy to apply graphite lubricant
(just 'paint it on the moving parts of the rods, pistons, etc), I think it actually
made my loco run a touch smoother, in addition to looking better:



I found Micro-Mark sells Neolube, among other places.

---------------

2) I was up in Seattle on business and hooked up with Walt Huston:



Had a great time.  One of the great things about this hobby is
the people we get to meet.

-------------

Have a good week, all!

[bobcat]

Wow, the Neolube really makes that steamer look great. I'm going to have to get some and give it a try.

More of the same for me this week. Continuing work on my coal loader, rebuilt the base and surrounding scenery for the club layout city scene and changed road numbers on a few CSX ortner hoppers.

[daniel_leavitt2000]

I did some weathering:


LBF factory clearence gondola. I wish I was able to get some of these babies in Conrail


Walthers GP38-2. I detailed and weathered the engine to depict it in the late 1990's. I added the following: BLMA sight glass, headlight cover, Sunrise nose headlight (with fiber optics), Intermountain etched fan screens.







The IM SD45-2 looks better after weathering and lowering.

[wm3798]

Daniel, you need to hit those horns with something...

Decoder installations a-go-go this week.  And I've got more on the way...  I'm currently stymied by a pesky Atlas Shay.  Evertything works great until I put the shell back on.  Then something goes out of alignment and the main drive worm disengages the back truck...

A few more nips and tucks are going to be necessary...

Then I spent a few minutes to design Steve's new layout benchwork...


Lee

[Chris333]

Working on the concrete wall (primered) for my float bridge out to the carfloat. The float bridge will have a set of turnout points on it.

Supposed to look like the reverse of this when done:
http://members.trainweb.com/bedt/indloco/errhsfb.jpg

[MEC_FAN]

Built seven more chip cars 5 brown and 2 green, need decals for the green ones. The fleet is up to 20 now.





At the papermill

[wendell camp]

 John your layout is come along nicely  wendell

[daniel_leavitt2000]

Not sure what happened to the horns there.... they look fine in person. The only thing I can think of is they became translucent under all that light  ;D

[diezmon]

I finally got the paint booth in place, in the garage, now that the weather broke the freezing mark.   So, I did a bit of painting and decaling.





I had some serious bad luck with spattering white paint.. thank god it covered ok.   No problems with the red though

[Erik W]

I've been busy trying to get the last of the section of scenery done that I've been working on.  My Dad is coming to town in a couple of weeks so I'm under the gun to get things wrapped up and trains running again. 

I managed to finish ballasting yesterday and will tackle fixing my troubled #5 turnout this week.  I've also built a couple of GHQ vehicles and weathered some other ones.

Chris made me up a curved 18" radius turnout which looks like it'll do the trick for the yard realignment.  I'll start that project after my Dad heads home.

Too busy to take photos, but will make up for it when I'm not spending every spare second finishing scenery.

Erik