Weekend Update 8/29/2010

[lock4244]

Pud, that combine is fantastic! Love the scene of it at the grain elevator... I second the notion you should be publishing some of your work in how to articles. As always, great work!

[Packer]

I modded an older Kato/Atlas Century chassis so I wouldn't have to pry the weights off, clean them, than glue the weights back down every time I have to have it apart for maitenence. I wasn't really looking foward for drilling metal through with a pin vise, and using my full-sized drill would be bulky. I had an idea to make a home-made mini-drill though.

Home-made mini drill: I Took a spare athearn motor, took off one of the flywheels and attached my double ended pin vise to the bare shaft. then I stuck my drill bits in the other end. Not nearly as fast as a drill, but better than pin vise my a mile. I used an older DC powerpack for control. It was kind of tricky to use whole holding the pieces in place, but it worked and I had good control of the speed.

In other news I turned 21 on Friday. It kind of stunk since all of the things I planned to do got cancled by something or other. Haven't had any beer yet.

[GaryHinshaw]

Happy Birthday Packer!  Don't worry, there is still plenty of time to enjoy one of life's sublime pleasures (beer).   

It's quite uplifting to see how much young talent graces this board.

-Gary

[mark dance]

Sorry for the late post on a "weekend update"...

Last week I pulled Farron summit out and proceeded to paint the track and "ballast" it with snow.  I tried Mike Danneman's methods using Arizona Rock & Mineral marble dust.  As Mike mentioned in his articles, the stuff does change colour when glued with dilute matte medium...but I sure didn't factor how much!.  It took 4-5 coats of 1:1 dilute gesso to get it back to white.  What a hassle...I find painting around functioning and debugged track nerve-racking at best of times, but doing it 5 times was the worst.

Anyways the tracks have been all cleaned off, trains have been run and everything works fine save a Tortoise which got matte medium in it and now needs to be replaced before I put Farron back.  Good thing I designed and built all 10' of Farron to come out in 1 piece!







Next week, I will hopefully put in the in the scenic lattice (and maybe even some plaster cloth) so that the scene will start to take better shape.

md

[Philip H]

@ Packer - fear not, there are plenty of beverage conesours here to guide you.

@Mark - even if it took 5 coats to get the color, it looks great from the pics.  Can't wait to see it as the scene progresses.

[tehachapifan]

Great stuff! Really dig the snow scene!

Russ

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Mark, that's really cool.

[SirTainly]

Mark, that's nice work, too bad it was so much extra to get ti back to white. I found that the Noch snow looked pretty good, but it was hard to make it stick to the scenery.

Simon