Getting Finescale

My friend, Mark Dance, just sent me a link to the Pendon Museum website. It’s been updated since the last time I checked in, and might be worth a look if you’ve not seen it before. I was first introduced to Pendon more than twenty years ago, when I was in university. Leafing through the […]

Next two pieces of backdrop

Tonight Andrew and I managed to get the next two pieces of backdrop up. The curve on the right is a 3′ radius, and was much easier to accomplish with the quarter inch Masonite. As with the sharper curve at the other end, we made a couple of plywood formers to support the curve. The […]

A Start on the Backdrop

Andrew came over for the first time in a while this evening and we made a start on the backdrop. What a battle! Of course it doesn’t help that I’m super-cheap, and so I’m using hardboard that I salvaged from the original basement walls. It is nominally 1/4 inch, but it’s about fifty years old, […]

Lights

I went back and forth for ages on what to do about lights for Pembroke. On the one hand, I’m familiar with fluorescent lights, and I know I can get ~5000K bulbs relatively easily. On the other hand, vertical space is at a premium, and I really wanted to check out the new LEDs. Finally, […]

Top Cabinet Carcasses Installed

Last night I finished installing the angled top cabinets in the corner. These were originally going to be just a single large cabinet, but it turned out to be more efficient in terms of material to make two cabinets. For some reason, which I shall have to investigate, the smaller of the cabinets is a […]

A Tale of Two Cabinets

Last night I got the second of two cabinet carcasses screwed to the wall and the ceiling. This took much longer than expected; indeed, I’d thought I would be done by Friday night, and I was finishing up at midnight on Monday. Well, as usual, I learned some stuff, and I’m writing it down here. […]

Cabinetry

For much of December, when I wasn’t over-eating, I was working on the cabinets that will go around Pembroke. They’re a long way from finished. Indeed, there will be six cabinets, and only two carcases are assembled so far. However, progress is happening and accelerating; hopefully I will get the first two cabinets installed tonight […]

North Section Wired

By gum, but it’s cold out there! The garage where Pembroke is under construction is not heated, except by a tiny little plug-in fan heater; it’s got about the same thermal capacity as my wife’s hair dryer, which is to say, it doesn’t make much of a dent in the -8 Celsius that we are […]

Eye-Fi – My New Camera Toy

Up until now, all the photos on this blog have been taken with my iPhone. It is a super-handy device, but I know you are surely as disappointed in the quality of the photos as I am. History shows that if it’s difficult for me to upload photos, I only do it a few times […]

North Section Track

The track on the North Section is finally complete. The elapsed time was longer than the south section, but that was due to real life getting in the way of the trains. Overall, I think the effort was less for this section than the first. Compared to the south section, I made a couple of […]