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 […]

The new photo studio

Years ago, when visiting Jack Burgess, I noted that he had what appeared to be a permanent setup for taking model photos. Right behind his modelling desk, there was a backdrop, lights and camera on a tripod, all ready to go for shooting top-quality in-progress photos. No dirty, paint-stained cutting mat background for him! “Kalmbach,” […]

More excavation in the turntable pit

It turns out that the smallest nice lazy susan base that Lee Valley sells is still 9″ in diameter. That’s about 65′ in HO scale, or about 15′ bigger than my turntable. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought this far ahead when making the original allowance for the pit, and so, I had carelessly made too small […]

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 […]