MODELING It's Monday, December 7th 2020: Weekend Modeling Accomplishments

This weekend as I thought was mostly Christmas decorating and college football. I did, however, get some semi-decent modeling time in.
1. Started work on more ground cover the HW Myers building project. Kind of hard to make much progress starting/stopping something like that due to side projects.
2. Cleaned the wheels on several engines, split up some long trains that had been "in service" for too long. Yesterday afternoon and last night "ran trains". Here's a shot of a coal drag meeting a peddler freight.

 

This was a pretty good weekend. The plan was to work on a stack of structure kits for the modules.

Friday- the day was spent painting the parts for several kits. Didn’t get them all painted.

Saturday- continued to paint the kits, started to build the kits. Got one grain elevator kit built, started on oil tanks. Started to build grain bins an found the 30’ bins to be too short for the ethanol plant I want to build so I need to order the extension parts. This will give each bin 11 more scale feet.

Sunday- more paint. Built the farm supply building and finished the oil tanks. These were scratch built. Now they are all painted needing a decal on at least one.

Still have a bunch to build. Once built I will touch up the paint, decal them (I really don’t like the decals that came with a few kits so I need to order some from Microscale), then weather them.

 

So.... glad this weekend is over - partially

Saturday: - The Wife and were going to go the store at 7:00 am - well -- after 6 years, my truck's battery gave up the ghost. So, Merry Christmas to my truck - by 8:30 I had a new battery installed (By me).
The rest of the day went great. Had my Wife's Nieces, their kids and our Granddaughter over. Put together and decorated ginger bread houses.

Sunday: Recuperated from Saturday -- did nothing but relax. I did work on my F7 project. Went through each class of SP's F7 and wrote down the correct model manufacturer for the specific class and the SP specific details for each. I will have 9 sets. I still need to acquire 4 Intermountain A units. (I sure wish IM would release some more F7's)

Hope Y'all had a great weekend,
Wolf

 

Cold here too this weekend but I was able to spend some time out in my garage train room and got most of what I wanted done. Using small scraps I built up the area where the river will be to be level with the bench work at the front.




Then the hard board river bottom sits flat on those. Also got all of the sub roadbed and cork roadbed finished up to the door way.

 

Saturday: Completed the assembly of four more IO Boards and completed testing of them. Two were sent out in the mail shortly after testing.

Here are the four boards, two with ESP32 TTGO-T1 boards installed for testing.


Here are how the boards will end up mounted under the layout, the RJ45 jacks at the bottom of the boards will have CAT5 cables connecting them with the last one in the chain having a terminator instead of a cable.

I have three more panels (12 PCBs total) to assemble still and two that need minor rework (swap out the 3v3 LDO) which I'll take care of when time permits.

Also made some a small bit of progress on the CS to improve stability and performance after testing a few updates on the above IO Boards. The CS PCB is going to be updated and very likely a bit of a redesign to fit the footprint of the SnapTrak used for the IO Boards above (max height of the board needs to be 80mm and the current PCB is 100mm).

 

Remember Pearl Harbor! "Side projects", I can relate. Good progress all around. Me, I printed the reporting marks for the Mogul a short while ago. These and side steps seem to be the last pieces of the puzzle. Then it is "shakedown" time. All be well and safe.

 

Didn't get around to any modeling this past weekend. I did get to run a few trains with my neighbor. I may have enticed him into joining me for a future operating session. I'll have to work on updating my control panels. I've tagged my block switches by the track numbers, since I no longer have access to Autocad to update the control panel graphics. I'm looking for a substitute. I have Rail Cad but it doesn't scale well for printing and line weights are difficult to size accurately. I also spent much of Sunday going through my inventory of track and turnouts. I had a bunch of turnouts that I removed from the layout during the several modifications to the layout, plus several new or nearly new items I had plans for but will no longer need. Look for a swap meet posting here in the near future.

 

Saturday we finished the Christmas decorating while my daughter made several batches of cookies. I used to do the cookies but I turned it over to her several years ago.

Sunday the wife and I took a trip to Michael's. She wanted to get the materials to make a wreath for her parents' grave. The place looked like a bomb went off. The shelves dedicated to Christmas stuff were almost bare and disorganized. She was able to find just enough stuff to make the wreath. While she looked I went and checked out the paint department. There almost no bottles of craft paints. There was no Krylon flat sealer or Dullcoat.

Since the decorating and running around kept from the workbench no trains got done.

 

Had a bunch of stuff to do with the wife on Saturday. My knee was already hurting by Saturday morning and by Sunday morning, it was done so that killed any modeling. I did get caught up on a couple of current issues of model magazines though.

 

I have been using Microsoft Visio for my control panels and am quite happy with the results.

http://palisadecanyonrr.blogspot.com/2020/09/updated-control-panel.html

 

Had some running around to do Saturday, but finally got downstairs that night. Found a decouple spot, will spackle this week. The crabby J is still finicky, refuses to talk with a long address, but sounds great as #3. Wish I could get just a little more speed tho.

The ACS-64 still won't track over a certain spot; front wheel still lifts in the middle of the transition curve. If it didn't mean tearing out the incline, I'd toss the superelevated track in favor of regular Unitrack. Can't quite figure out how to do that 90-degree turn in the same space.

SceneIt cut some more of the mountain base contours so the concept has a little more definition now. Got some running in with the new SP and UP stock, and ran the BLI heavy Mike for the first time. It's good at finding dicey track.

Sent from my SM-T837A using Tapatalk

 

I went to hobby shop in Owasso Thursday afternoon and they were out of stock for the HO brick styrene so ordered one. It should be here Tuesday and will be used to scratch build the Ft. Scott Depot for Ft. Scott and Beyond Layout.

Joe

 

It was a good weekend. We returned home on Saturday, stopping along the way to pick up a few goodies from Hallmark. That evening I found my SPROG and reattached it to the test track. Downloaded the software to the laptop and reprogrammed Thomas. Happily I put the SPROG way with the other test track electronics so finding it was more a matter of looking in the proper place for a change. I had to straighten up the test track and clean up the rails, but all in a day's work.

Sunday morning we enjoyed a soccer game together over a plate of bacon and eggs. Must have been the weekend for bacon. Then off to the storage unit to retrieve the holiday decorations. Needed a few groceries as well. Got a solid start on decorating. Later I found time to do a decoder install, so objective two taken care of. I also started pulling together the parts and materials to drill some small holes. While I did not make much progress on the last project, my objective was to get started. Job done!

Stay safe,

 

Not really to show, but a good productive trip (among other family related businesses), to a craft store nearby to get some material in order to scratchbuild the houses flats I will need for the layout.
Saturday was gone due to bringing my older kid to Saarbrucken to get an English language certification. ( Saarbrucken is the only major German city that does not have a train shop!). Sunday time was shared with family.
I nevertheless managed to get some work here and there but mostly glued the platforms and put some ground texture on.
Hopefully more to come next week.

 

Decaled a couple of cars this weekend, now on to the dull coat and final assembly. Also built an IMRC 40' PS1 Boxcar kit and modified it to match the rebuilt ones from Evans, also started on a Tangent 4740CF Covered Hopper kit. Painted a pair of underframes in grimy black, a boxcar roof in silver and the frame stripe on GP35 in white. The major project was picking everything up and organizing the workbench again, seems to be a monthly occurance.

Ordered a pair of Tangent 86' Boxcars for my auto parts train, got a L&N and WP, missed out on the PC's.

Rick Jesionowski

 

Kitbash, how do you clean your loco wheels -- I have several that need it badly

TIM