Wet Palettes Transform Acrylic Painting

The loss of model railroad paint manufacturers like Floquil may actually be one of the best things to happen to this hobby. When our crusty bottles of Grimy Black and Boxcar Red ran dry, the creaking was almost audible as we collectively raised our heads to see how other modellers coloured their miniatures. We found […]

Three at Once

If you’ve got a third machine that can make stuff, you really need to get all three machines working at once. So, on New Year’s Day, I revved up the two 3D printers, printing parts for the upcoming steam throttle project. While they were happily layering away, I fired up the laser cutter to make […]

A Second Printer Joins the Shop

Thanks to Santa, a second 3D printer has joined the heavy shop. Why would anyone need two 3D printers, you might ask? You might ask the same of hammers, and yet I own a regular claw hammer, a tack hammer, a rubber mallet and a maul. Like hammers, different 3D printers have different uses. Resin […]

Coal Dock Book Arrives

Less than a week after I placed the order, Blurb delivered our annual photo books today. The family photo books came out beautifully, as usual. I was most excited, however, by the model book, which I submitted primarily as a test. It is the 7×7 size in paperback, and now that I have it in […]

Book design

For 18 years, I’ve timed our family photo book to coincide not only with the kids’ birthdays but also with Black Friday sale pricing at Blurb. As the years have passed, the tools have improved, and the laptop has gained power. It’s possible that as the kids become less cute the photo volume may be […]

2023 in Review

12 months have gone by in a heartbeat, but if I really pause to consider it, I’m pleased with the year’s results.

Full extension slides for quality of life

I saved some money when I built my modelling desk by using some drawer slides I’d found at ReStore. While they were the right length, they were partial extension or regular or whatever the opposite of “full extension” is. With the two-inch overhang of the desktop to facilitate clamping, these slides wound up hiding the […]

Two New Materials for the Laser

While XTool has an extensive catalogue of suggested settings for their laser, they don’t appear to agree with me on the selection of materials. So, I designed a quick matrix of power and speed settings to help find the optimal setting for new materials. 100 small squares increment either the power or the speed in […]

A New Airbrush

After last year’s rant about my airbrush, I decided to do something about it. The first consideration was that the new tool should be gravity-feed, rather than siphon-feed like both my previous airbrushes. Painting HO scale models uses a surprisingly small amount of paint – drops. Ultimately, I am not going to place a ton […]

XTool Finds a Home

While I’m optimistic that the XTool is going to be fabulously useful, it also takes almost as much space as a third child. Although it is less than 24×24 inches, that is still almost .25 percent of our home’s floor space. I had to consider where it would live before I even pushed the “buy” […]