Don’t settle for good, go for better

Sometimes, inspiration comes from the strangest places. The Boy brought home a book from the library called “Small Scenes from a Big Galaxy,” Vesa Lehtimäki’s inspiring collection of photographs of Lego Star Wars. You should treat yourself to a look at his Flickr stream to get an idea of the work. Last night, during teeth-brushing, I got drawn right […]

Roundhouse Walls go Up

While working on the Railway Modellers’ Meet last night, I almost finished placing the remaining walls. That back wall is going to be tricky and quite delicate while the model is under construction! At the end of the evening, I was sitting back, admiring the progress when I noticed that one of the back wall […]

SketchUp! goes online!

You might think that I’m no longer a fan of SketchUp! After all, I think my review of OnShape came down pretty strongly in favour of the parametric modelling tool. However, I will say that SketchUp is great for quick drawings. If you want to quickly mock up some buildings to see how they look, […]

The Muskrat River gets safe for swimming

It seems like years ago that I went through the ordeal of smoothing out the Muskrat River. In fact it was only five months. After spending three weeks filling and sanding and priming and sanding and painting, it didn’t read like water. I wasn’t happy with it. Rick Sutton and Mark Dance suggested that I […]

Erecting the roundhouse front wall

Putting the roundhouse together is a delicate operation. Not only is this not a square building, but also it needs to match the track configuration. So, it was with some trepidation that I approached erecting the front wall. I think along the way, I also changed my mind about how the roundhouse was going to […]

Roundhouse front wall

It appears that the front wall of the roundhouse was individual vertical board siding with about 6″ boards. So, I designed that up for lazy-guy individual boards on the Cricut and hacked it out of more Strathmore card. This time, I was slightly more careful not to paint adjacent boards with the same load from […]

A week of redos

It was a heavy week at work – most nights until past midnight. So, I didn’t get much done on the roundhouse. Even so, I managed to get a little bit done in the fifteen minute snatches between times. As I mentioned last week, the original shingle roof for the shed didn’t allow for any […]

Details on Cricut board and batten

Scribed and cut lines on the CricutA recent comment over on Model Railroad Hobbyist, where I cross-post some of this blog, made me realize that I didn’t do a great job of explaining the approach to board and batten. I actually thought it was simple and self-evident from the photos, but I guess it wasn’t. […]

Cricut shingles

Perhaps there is no harder problem for railway modellers than shingles. First of all, because we tend to have a bird’s eye view, they are right up front and centre. Secondly, it takes a team of workers about a week to re-roof even a modest house. So, while you could install individual shingles, it will drive you […]

Cricut board and batten

It is so nice when a plan works on the first attempt. Frequent readers of this blog know it’s rare for me, and so, I’m taking a moment to savour the victory. The battens went on today, pretty much as planned. I was amazed at how well they lined up with the board joints beneath […]