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 her sleepover the weekend after next), I generated some likely … Continue reading Soldering iron chord cubby
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 ends of the end sills, which are actually lengths of … Continue reading Flat car ends finished
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 most of the models on the layout are still robust … Continue reading Batten the hatches!
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. Well that got needlessly dark fast. I’ve been thinking about … Continue reading Towards loco wheels
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 Lycra. I don’t know how many trips I made, but … Continue reading Workshop cabinets get topped
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 them all to be straight. So, I spent some time … Continue reading No-measure flat car ends and stringers
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 to the bottoms of the weights. I actually glued this … Continue reading Integral weights for flat cars
