Solvent fail

I should have known I was in trouble when the Tamiya cement so reluctantly entered the syringe. But, my trusty MEK Pak has finally breathed out the last of whatever makes it work, and so, I was stuck (so to speak). So I went ahead and made that test mould with Tamiya Cement. Plainly this […]

Test masters

I was just about to glue my 3D printed wheels to the bottom of a box and rashly pour rubber over them, when my inner project manager whispered in my ear and pointed at the risk register. Wrecking the Shapeways wheels would put me back a couple of weeks and $16 in shipping alone! For […]

Treasure at the Winnipeg Railway Museum

The day after our trip on the Prairie Dog Central, I carved half an hour out of the family vacation to visit the Countess of Dufferin at the Winnipeg Railway Museum. This venerable old engine is the one that I could find that has a mud drum, and she was going to help me with […]

Six holes of triumph

It’s midnight, and I’m having a little celebration over having drilled six holes in the flatcars. Ordinarily, drilling a few clearance holes through the weights wouldn’t be cause for a happy dance. However, it feels so long since I overcame the calls of work, family and community to spend a little time on my projects, […]

Not that much room under flat cars

The Vancouver Train Expo seems a long time ago now. The bolster pattern that I worked on there? Yeah, it didn’t work out. I had forgotten to leave room for the straps and bolts on the tops of the trucks. Well, one nice thing about modelling in styrene is that mistakes are quick and cheap […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Flat car sides and ends

The evening of detailing did nothing to shake my conviction that three models is enough. Once I’d trapped the little wandering buggers with some tape, the stake pocket jig and its low-tech companion, the end sill template, worked beautifully. Okay, the “end sill template” is just a piece of paper with ticks on it; to use […]