The Models of our Youth

I’m in Ottawa this weekend, on my way to an educational program at Queens for the next three weeks. My mum has changed around the house in the past few months, and came across a couple of boxes of models. “What,” she asked, “should I do with them? They can’t take up room on my shelves forever.” […]

Turntable Do-Over

Sometimes it’s hard to concede that perhaps one of your best ideas ever didn’t work. I had been fooling myself for about a week, and finally had to accept the fact that the turntable ends were not aligning perfectly. I believe the error crept in when I didn’t clamp the little tongues down to the […]

Tie Length

I picked up a package of bridge ties from Central Hobbies a little while back, thinking that they would be right for the turntable. When I got them home, I started wondering if they might be too short to allow for the crew to jump down and get to the ends of the turntable to […]

Turntable Bridge Core

If you’re thinking of following along and using my method to build your own turntable, may I recommend that you make friends with someone with a lathe instead. I’m sure the whole thing is much easier if you have decent tools. Making the bridge itself is probably a doddle if you have a lathe. I […]

Turntable Drive Module

The trickiest aspect of the drive module was fixing it to the bottom of the turntable without interfering with any of the frame members. Recall that the lazy susan base is actually too large to fit the originally-planned site, and I had to route away some of the benchwork frame members to accommodate it. They’re […]

The First Signature in the Guest Book

It’s fitting that the first person to sign the Pembroke guest book is Brian Rudko. He is actually the first person I ever met from the Vancouver model railroad scene, so long ago that he doesn’t even remember it. Yes, Brian, we met at the National Narrow Gauge Convention in Seattle in 1991, two dozen […]

Turntable Connections

This evening I added the two rails where I will feed power to the turntable. I rolled them using the FastTracks Rail Roller, and then soldered to the pads on the PC board I created some time ago. I also added the square tube, which provides a positive connection for the gearbox. Unfortunately, the wormgear […]

Gear fitting

Tonight I installed the gears for the turntable drive on their axles. Of course, I didn’t have my 2 mm axle material on hand, and so, I had to use 5/64″ material. This required a whole lot of reaming on the worm, from which my fingers may never recover. The ends of the axles are […]

Two Pieces of Brass

I’m always amazed at how slowly I make things out of brass. Tonight, for example, it took me an hour to cut two rectangles, solder them together and drill six holes through them (one not in quite the right place!). Then I spent a further hour scoring and bending them (again, one score is on […]

Shaking down the Boundary Sub

My friend Scott invited a bunch of us over today for an informal operating session. This was the first session on the new Boundary Sub. I’ve been helping Scott out with construction occasionally for many years, and it was great to finally see trains running. There are some important lessons from Scott’s first session. Perhaps […]