Soldering iron chord cubby

Ever since I moved in to this pristine new work area, the natural state of soldering iron chords has bothered me. I know they’re just being their natural selves, and you can hardly blame them, but the tangled mess was unsightly! As I was battening down the hatches (they’re still battened until the Girl has […]

Flat car ends finished

Please excuse the dreadful iPhone photo. It’s been one of those nights. One of those nights when I should have just stayed upstairs. As expected, I wound up shaving off the outer-most nut bolt washer (NBW) castings so I could centre them relative to the side sills. This also made it easier to add the […]

Batten the hatches!

We’re back in birthday party season chez Gourley. Both kids are having sleepovers in the train room. I’d wager that Nerf war and pillow fights are something that most finescale layouts don’t have to contend with. With the roundhouse in the line of fire, I thought it best to get a little protection up. Fortunately […]

Towards loco wheels

As the workshop project rounds up, I will soon have no reason to hold off on starting work on 622. The first major stumbling block is of course wheels. If I can’t make those, then I may as well abandon the project; and by that, I don’t just mean the engine, I mean Pembroke itself. […]

Workshop cabinets get topped

There is nothing quite like a mitre joint in a countertop to reveal how out of square your house is. Because the saws and sander are all out in the garage on the other side of the house and up a flight of stairs, the countertops were like an exercise class without so much rewarding […]

No-measure flat car ends and stringers

Measure once cut twice. These are words to live by. Reasoning that there are only two truss rods on these 20-ton, 33-foot cars, and given the number of bolt heads on the ends, I felt six stringers were in order. That makes 18 in total, which would be a disagreeable amount of fiddling to get […]

Integral weights for flat cars

Okay, so the approach of welding the sides to the ends didn’t work so well. The weights themselves pose a much larger gluing surface, however, and so, I made them integral to the cars. To do this, I first coloured up some paper to look like the bottoms of the deck boards, and spray-glued it […]

The last hobby shop

I confess: even though it was less than two kilometres away, I rarely stopped in at Mr Hobby. They catered to the radio control and plastic modellers, and rarely had anything for me. Occasionally I dipped into their K&S metal rack; they may have sold me a bottle or two of paint. The owner (I […]

Summons

Thanks to my friend, Mark Dance, we remembered to drag the kids to the Monet exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery this weekend. I hold Monet in the same regard as Mozart: he made some good stuff, but it gets repetitive after a while. Having said that, I’ve always liked his paintings of trains. After […]

Flat cars teach a Lean lesson

The Toyota Production System — Lean Manufacturing here in North America — will tell you that batch-building is bonkers. Lean suggests that we should limit work in progress, and build things one at a time. By building in batches, we build batches of blunders. Maybe they’re right. As I started assembling the flat car sides […]