Yuletide riveting

It’s a busy time of year for certain, but it turns out that installing Archer rivets doesn’t take that long. This is the last step before things get black.

622’s boiler jacket

According to the erecting card, #21’s boiler jacket was “Planished Iron” when she emerged from Baldwin’s shops. What colour that was is almost anyone’s guess, I think. I doubt it was true Russian iron, but as that was also planished, I figure the boiler was probably a similar colour – which is to say some […]

For the next locomotive

I’m about to cover all the parts of 622 in primer, and will soon forget some of the details of construction. These will be important when I go to build 622’s sister locomotives. For future-Rene’s benefit, here is a list of construction notes, design improvements and wire sizes. wire Sizes Boiler handrails .02 Phosphor Bronze […]

Cricut makes quick work of tapered course

The original tapered boiler course took about a week of fitting, filing and filling before it was acceptable. Now, the process to draw the shape may have been painful, but cutting it out with the Cricut took all of five minutes. Because the two boiler sections are actually quite accurately formed, it took very little […]

Re-drafting the taper course ends in a draw

I first noticed the crack in 622’s taper course when I was putting together the slides for my recent clinic on modern tools. Just before going to prime all the parts, I decided there was no point in seeing if it was serious enough to fix. I made the original taper course from .010″ styrene, […]

Spoiled for choice

Chris Mears made some wonderful observations in a comment and follow-up post to my post, Where to. You should go read Chris’s writing, because it is dense enough that you will almost certainly take something different from it than I do. Let me precis my primary takeaway from Chris’s post and comment: the adoption of […]

More floor space

Our family of four lives in a modest 1800 square foot (170 m2) side split house. Every room does double duty. The rest of the family calls the train room “the rec room.” The heavy shop is tucked into an alcove of the laundry room, which is also our recycling centre and pantry and provides […]

Where to?

Tonight I delivered a new clinic, “21st Century techniques to model a 19th Century locomotive” to a small audience after the local NMRA division’s annual general meeting. The intent was to attract more attendance to a business meeting with some diverting content. They would have called someone else, but I guess the entertaining people were […]

Daylight Savings hour sketching

Coinciding as it did with Hallowe’en this year, I almost didn’t get any extra modelling done for daylight savings hour. But then, I was awoken by an incident on one of the servers at work right at the moment that clocks went back, or at least most of the clocks went back. So, while waiting […]

Turnout control Mark II

Now that I almost have a functioning locomotive again, I’m eager to get back to operations. As I had to get the 3D printer out to create a new steam dome after the first got chipped after its tungsten weight propelled it at the floor, I decided to try out a plan for an improved […]