Scattered Thoughts . . .

T oday I went digging into old hard drives searching for some old photos from the camera that I just sent in to be converted to Monochrome Infrared.  The camera I am having converted to monochrome is my old Panasonic Lumix G3.  I won't be able to shoot color photos with this camera anymore so I figured I should dig out some old color photos that I shot using this camera as a reminder of its colorful days.  Truth be told, I never really shot a whole lot of photos using this camera.  For a relatively short one or two summers, however, it was my main camera for wildlife photography while at the lake house due to its slightly larger crop factor (2x) which provided me with a longer zoom.  I have captured quite a few really nice images of loons, ducks, and nature but each of those images always needed a lot of post-processing work.  This camera was replaced as my primary wildlife photography camera when I purchased my first Sony camera.  Those Sony cameras p...

M y slow motion control knobs arrived this morning.  I quickly pulled the gears off each axis of my old mount and installed these new knobs in place of the gears.  I had been, very briefly, using the old gears as slow motion control knobs until these new knobs arrived.  These new knobs make it very easy to slowly track astronomical objects manually as the objects slowly drift across the sky.  Well...  really, the Earth is rotating and the astronomical objects are stationary by comparison but they appear to drift across the sky in an arcing pattern.   The upper photo shows the Declination axis while the lower photo shows the Right Ascension axis.  These knobs are just the right size for easy fingertip control of slow tracking.   Here, below, is a photo of the Declination axis gear that I removed this morning.  The gear shaft is a standard 1/4" shaft so finding nice knobs to the replace the gears was very easy.  For a short while...

I managed to get a little bit more work done on this hopper conversion project today. (As mentioned in previous blog entries, I'm converting four American Flyer S scale hoppers to O scale narrow gauge hoppers.)  Last weekend, I had previously cut two different sizes of bulkhead shims for shimming the coupler boxes to the correct height from the rail but I had not glued them in place. That was today's job.  Since I had already pre-cut all the shims, today's work was fairly easy. I had a little bit of trimming to do on the first of eight sets of shims but I today's task was to simply glue each shim in place with some super-glue gel.  Next, I can glue some brake wheels in place on one end of each hopper. Hopefully that will be quick and easy task too. Hmmm... I need to pick up more glue first... I just remembered that I also need to build or buy some stirrup steps for each of the four hoppers. Once these are installed then I can spray paint each of the cars...  ...

This morning, I started gluing the grab irons on the O scale narrow gauge hoppers that I am converting and detailing. As usual, this is not working out the way I expected. Getting the Crazy Glue Gel into the tiny holes is a sloppy task even while using a toothpick. The glue is bunching up and I am leaving spiderweb-like glue trails between all parts. It seems to be taking forever to dry too. I expected this to require me to work quickly before the glue set with the grab irons solidly in place. It is not working that way. It turns out to be a bit messy and it is not holding quickly. I stopped after adding the grab irons to just one of the four hoppers. I decided it would be best to wait to see if the glue will indeed set up well enough to hold these tiny grab irons in place. I don't want to do all four hoppers this way only to find out it won't work.  In addition to seeing how well the glue holds after allowing some extra drying time, I also want to see how...

I wrote a little bit about a week or so ago about starting to convert some old American Flyer S scale hoppers to O scale narrow gauge. I do a little bit on this project every now and then and today I made some more headway on this project. I had already stripped the bodies in a bath of rubbing alcohol. The lettering and any paint came off easily with a toothbrush after only a few minutes in the bath. Of course, I had previously removed all the trucks and couplers.  After taking a dip in the alcohol bath, I quickly found that three of the hoppers are molded gray plastic and one is molded black plastic. The black plastic is softer than the gray plastic so it is easier to work... cutting, filing, sanding... but that does not mean the more brittle gray plastic makes any of these things difficult to accomplish. I suspect the black plastic will hold paint better too. I built a small jig to start bending brass grab irons. I will need 16 small ones... and 8 large ones. I might also b...