Aligning the turntable pit

About the only machine tool I own is a little drill press. I bought it for $50 at a garage sale over a decade ago, and it has paid for itself many times over. Unfortunately, because my tools are not going to automatically align parts, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to trick […]

Driving the turntable – the plan

Sadly our guests just left, leaving us to ourselves and returning to progress on the turntable. I had decided that I need to sort out the drive system before going much further with construction. At first I thought I would get a worm gearbox from Lego. Unfortunately, they don’t have the right pieces on their […]

Furniture

We are having some visitors from out of town this week, and so, I’ve been mounting a bit of a blitz to try to get the guest room looking a little more presentable. In typical home renovation fashion, if you want to do one thing, you must do another first. In my case, I wanted […]

A little progress on the turntable

I’ve been mostly focused on furniture-making for the past week or so. However, while the glue was drying this evening, I managed to get a little traction on the turntable. I had cut the PC board for the turntable platform a couple of weeks ago, and was struggling to find some 1/4-28 screws that would […]

Roundhouse Door Mechanism Design

I’m on a sea cruise to Nanaimo today to visit some family. Not much will happen on the turntable, but the enforced downtime gives me an opportunity to refine and explore my thoughts on making the roundhouse doors operate. The plan is to drive them with magnets beneath the layout; operating doors that need to […]

MDF is the pits

Or the pit, as is the case tonight. I just finished roughing in the turntable pit, which I ultimately decided should be concrete, not wood. The key dimension on the turntable pit is the elevation of the pit rail. Sure I’d like the pit itself to be perfectly round, but as long as it doesn’t […]

Carload from Baltic

Chris Mears published an excellent post, entitled Carload from Baltic. Here he very eloquently captures some of the inspiration for my own musings about car forwarding, and particularly the relationship of the railroad to local shippers and receivers. It’s well thought out and written; give yourself a treat and take it in.

The feeder tool

I was over to my friend, Scott Calvert’s last night. His new Boundary Subdivision is almost the exact opposite of Pembroke. Where Pembroke is small, the Boundary is huge. Where Pembroke is set in 1905, the Boundary is firmly in the diesel era. I seem to be spending my Boundary evenings on installing feeders – […]

Roundhouse Excavations

Originally, I hadn’t thought I would be building pits for the engine house as you weren’t supposed to be able to see inside. However, because the corner of the roundhouse is going to get cut off, I’m going to need pits. Well, that’s a great excuse to get the router out! So, after a little bit […]

Laying out the house tracks

I had hoped to make a bunch of progress on the roundhouse tonight, but unfortunately, the Boy and I wound up talking about Bill C-51, and I had to promise to actually read the whole thing before he could relax and go to bed. Every Canadian should read it, along with the existing provisions in […]