Scattered Thoughts . . .

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