Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e had to head up to the hospital yesterday (for me) and, as always, I brought one of my cameras along in case I saw anything worth capturing.  This time I grabbed my compact Fuji X30 camera with its fixed zoom lens.   For those interested, the Fuji X30 is a small camera with classic rangefinder camera styling that was released about 12 years ago.  It has a fixed lens so there is no need for carrying extra lenses.  The disadvantage of this camera is the sensor is smaller than the sensors in my other cameras so the tonal quality isn't as nice as my other cameras.  Nevertheless, it does capture some nice images...  certainly better than any cellphone. Since I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car while we were driving on the highway, the car was moving at 65mph while I was shooting photos.  This meant I needed as high a shutter speed as I could get to avoid any motion blurring due to our speed as well as due to bumps.  Sheila's Honda Accord has a very stiff suspension mak

A fter our visit to the hospital yesterday morning for more testing requested by my oncologist, I did a bit of painting in the afternoon.  I managed to paint the newly constructed top truss of the truss bridge for our little garden railroad.  Painting this bridge is actually quite tedious especially those thinner diagonal supports on this top truss.  It is like painting a wrought iron railing or balustrade...  tedious and time consuming. There is a lot of brushwork...  back side, front side, left side, right side...  of each piece so it always ends up being more time consuming than I thought it would be.  This does no favors for my spinal injuries.  This sort of tedious activity with my hands out in front of me puts so much pressure on my spinal injuries that it takes my breath away and makes it hurt to breathe after just a few short minutes.   I hope to do some additional painting today too.  I think I'll just add more photos to this blog entry until the bridge is in place outdoor

A s I had mentioned in previous blog entries, although adding the truss plates and bolt detail made a significant difference in bridge detail, this morning I worked on the top truss to add even more detail.  More detail is always better! Oh yeah...  and yesterday, I managed to mix more paint and repaint the entire bridge.  Well...  I still need to paint the wood I added for the top truss but I have the rest of the bridge painted in the new color. This color is difficult to see indoors but it is a medium to dark charcoal with a slight green tint.  Under indoor light, this color appears rather bluish but it does appear green under sunlight.   Below, you can see the new parts of the top truss system that I added today... In order to keep the new top truss square as the glue dries, I clamped it in place on top of the side trusses... There is no bottom to this bridge because that is already in place on the garden railroad.  All I need to do is place this down on the support cross-pieces tha

I sanded down the trusses of the truss bridge this morning, cleaned off all the remaining dust and then primed all the new brass truss plates.  I had only a small amount of red oxide spray primer left at this point so I decided to use up the rest of the can on the rest of the bridge trusses.   You know...  some bridges are even painted in this  red oxide color and left that way...  I don't think I'm going to leave it this color though.  I'm still leaning toward a medium to dark gray with it tinted slightly toward green or a light gray tinted more obviously toward green.  At the moment, I'm leaning toward the medium-to-dark gray tinted slightly green.   I just remembered that I didn't do anything with the top cross-bars...  I really should sand them to get them ready for more paint.  Actually, I should sand them to get them ready to be glued to some stringers and diagonal cross pieces.  Then I can focus on paint for that top section of the bridge.  

B efore it rained again today, I managed to get the truss plates drilled and installed on my garden railroad homebuilt truss bridge.  Now that I see these plates installed with the bolt details, this is definitely one of the things I felt the bridge had been lacking.  What a tremendous difference these relatively small details make!  Well, maybe I shouldn't call these truss plates a "small detail"...  it was a bit tedious making them and installing them. I had originally intended to glue these truss plates in place but, after I drilled all the holes in every plate using a drill press, I felt I could easily drill tiny partial holes into the bridge through each hole in the truss plates and then hammer in a nail.  I drilled the holes only halfway into the bridge trusses so that the nails still had a bit of bite.  Plus, the diameter of the holes was smaller than the diameter of the nails so that also helped to keep the nails in place.  The holes were only large enough to keep

I had a rather lousy night last night and, consequently, only got about four hours of sleep.  Regardless, I needed to do some work in preparation of our water being hooked up to the new water main in the street.   Yesterday, I spoke with one of the guys from the crew doing the hookups to find out their plan.  I needed to know their plan so I could do what is necessary to prep the house, clear a path, and then lightly tack everything up again. This morning, I went outside to the back side of the house to make sure that the crew hooking up each house has clear access to the area under our house where the old water supply comes out of the ground.  This required about two hours of work.   I'm exhausted now...  my knees are killing me...  my spinal injuries are killing me...  my bones hurt...  if I wasn't completely soaked in sweat, I'd probably just hit the couch and sleep for a few hours.  At this point (11am), I'll probably take my lunchtime medications, shower and then

I had a hectic but productive day today.  I was pulled from one project to another project in mid-project over and over again today but I eventually got back to each project so I'd say I had a productive day. My main plan for today was to get back to working on the truss bridge I am building for our garden railroad but I kept getting interrupted. Our roads have been dug up for the past few months as they install a new water main.  They have already finished our road so the next crew is now coming by to run the water from the new main to our house.  So, while I was working on the brass truss plates for my model truss bridge, I was interrupted by someone from these crews working on the water.  He wanted to prep our house for connection so I helped him with that for a bit.  That is a whole other story that I don't want to get into at the moment so I'll get back to my day. After helping the guy at the front of our house, I went back to working on the truss plates.  Fortunately

A s you've probably seen in recent blog entries, I'm still working on the homemade truss bridge I designed and built for our little garden railroad.  Although this bridge is looking pretty good, I felt it was still lacking something (see photo at right).  After painting it a few different colors and thinking long and hard about what is bothering me about it, I had decided to add some details in the form of truss plates and bolt/rivet details.    I thought about making these truss plates out of wood but cutting wood as thin as I would need would make them very susceptible to warping and splitting so I ordered some brass stock to make these truss plates.  I also ordered some round head brass nails to make bolt details.  I'll drill holes in the plates where I want the bolts and then glue everything in place.   The brass stock I had ordered earlier in the week arrived on Thursday.  So, yesterday, I cut the shapes needed for truss plates.  Although brass is a rather soft metal,

I 'm still feeling rather lousy so I stayed indoors again today.  I happened to find a small project to keep me busy for a short while so that was good. Since the time that I felt I had finished painting the new truss bridge for my little garden railroad, I've been thinking something isn't right.  I couldn't put my finger on it but I was left feeling the something wasn't right.  Part of me thinks the color isn't exactly right even though I've painted it and repainted it about a half dozen times.  I don't know if I should go lighter with the green or go darker toward a greenish charcoal.  I also realized that maybe I'm just feeling as though it is not "complete" yet and needs more detail.   In an attempt to add more detail to this truss bridge, this morning I decided to order some brass stock and tiny round head brass nails to add some detail to this bridge.  I plan to cut the brass stock into shapes depicted by the white paper in the photo