Mud drum plug

The erection drawing for this engine clearly shows a mud drum hanging like a uvula from the bottom of the boiler. Extending from this appendage, the drawing also shows a two-foot lever. This puzzled me for quite a while: surely you would have to unbolt the cover to gain access, and a lever wouldn’t be […]

Boiler keyhole?

Okay, it may be time to admit I have a keyhole problem. Ever since watching Dan Gelbart’s videos on prototyping, I’ve been thinking about them. This latest design element might be a keyhole too far. What if, instead of screwing down through the smoke stack to hold the front of the boiler in place, I […]

Flood update – Game On!

Wow, construction sure goes a lot faster when teams of professionals show up and work all day, rather than a lone amateur burning the midnight oil! Today, all the cabinets in the train room were reinstalled. So, this weekend we can excavate Mt Flood and get some tools out. As we say in street hockey: […]

Update on the Flood

I was overwhelmed by the number of people curious about the state of our basement recovery at the Railway Modellers Meet last weekend. Today we made some serious progress, when Matt, the conscientious floor installer put most of the subfloor down. Like every other worker who has come to our rescue, Matt took one look […]

Conformity and the NMRA

From the first time I entered an NMRA model contest, back in 1994, I have had a challenge with the Conformity section. How did a freelanced model earn full points while my prototype model did not? It didn’t take long at that first convention to fall in with Richard Hendrickson and the Prototype Modeller crowd. […]

Infographic for Railway Modellers’ Meet

This weekend is the third annual Railway Modellers’ Meet up at Simon Fraser University. I always like to bring something to display, but this year, most everything is buried in Mt Flood. So, apart from a whole lot of computer drawings, all I have are the two proofs of concept for the frame. In other […]