Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e've had nothing but rain for the past ten days or so which means nothing was accomplished outside.  And, before these past ten days, I had one half of a day to get the lawn done.  We had about two or three weeks of solid rainy weather before that one clear day.  Since it has been raining for the past ten days, this also means that the lawn was very overgrown and needed attention before I did anything else so I spent two or three hours working on the lawn. After getting the lawn done, I pulled out the table saw so I could do some work on our garden railroad.  This was the first bit of work that I've done on the railroad this year.  I have a few things I'd like to accomplish in detailing this little garden railroad which I hope to get done little by little throughout the summer. Today's project was to cut a bunch of long ties to make a deck for the long compound curved wood trestle bridge.  I needed about 90 long ties.  Fortunately, I had enough scrap...

M y goal for yesterday was to get the cockpit seat for the new biplane built, painted and installed.   As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, this biplane is for our garden railroad.  This plane is approximately 1:24 scale which is slightly smaller than the 1:20.3 scale of the trains.  Since this biplane will be positioned over tall plants a few feet over the garden railroad I figured being slightly smaller in scale was a good idea for getting just a little bit of forced perspective.   I needed to make a seat for the cockpit mostly so the pilot could be positioned correctly and not fall into the fuselage of the plane.  This wasn't about modeling an accurate seat but more about a sturdy place for the pilot to be mounted in the cockpit since the seat is not visible with the pilot in place.  If the seat was visible, then I would have spent more time making it look like it belonged in the open cockpit of an old biplane. I had already made one seat f...

A fter our recent visit to the annual train show in Springfield, I thought it would be a cool idea to add an airplane to our backyard garden railroad.  I figured it would look good swooping down right over the tallest of plants.   I haven't fully worked out how I'm going to do this but my first thought was to have a long, tall wood stake hidden in the plants.  I'm thinking that the top 12 inches or so could be clear acrylic.  Then the acrylic could be somehow inserted into the bottom of the plane.  I know I'll come up with some way to mount this plane over the plants but, at the moment, I'm not completely certain.  My timeframe for this railroad is the early 20th century so I decided that a biplane would be ideal.  Finding a biplane in the right scale turned out to be fairly easy (I found one at Wayfair).  Once I had the biplane, I realized that, since it has an open cockpit, I should also find a pilot to purchase. I found a pilot figure on e...

W e awoke to some snow again this morning.  There was only about six inches out there but it is supposed to warm up today with some mixed precipitation so I needed to clear the driveway and rake the roof before it got wet and heavy.  Wet and heavy isn't good for the roof nor is it good for my extensive spinal injuries.  Then it would all freeze again tonight and that would make it impossible to move so it needed to be done this morning.  While I was on the roof looking down on our little garden railroad in the backyard, I was reminded that I never did get a photo of this garden layout from the roof.   Lukey and I talked about capturing a few photos from the roof one day this summer but that day was far too hot to climb up on an asphalt roof!  As it was, we were chasing the shade with lawn chairs while we ran trains so we could stay as cool as possible.  At one point, I think our chairs were on the other side of the yard from the garden railroad si...

A s I do every Christmas, I set up a six foot section of train track on our mantle.  I usually have my O scale trains on two tracks set up here for Christmas.  These are Lionel-sized trains.  This year, however, I decided to set up my newly completed large scale trolley (F scale) on the mantle which is more than double the size of those O scale trains. This trolley I've set up on the mantle is the one I just finished rebuilding this summer for our new garden railroad.  It is really a pretty nice model now that I completely rebuilt it.  The beauty of this train is that is it wireless which means I don't have to fuss with keeping the track clean...  there is no need for a power pack or transformer...  there are no wires...  there is no need to deal with finding a nearby outlet.  I placed the track on the mantle and then placed the trolley on the tracks...  that's it...  ready to go.   I ran it back and forth a few times to m...

I had a bit of a list of tasks to complete today before the temperatures drop below freezing.  I didn't get any of that stuff done though.  It was far too cold and wet outside today to spend any amount of time out there so I had no desire to head outside to work on everything that has water in it.  Instead, I stayed indoors. I did straighten up the house a bit...  did a load of laundry (although, now that I'm thinking about it, my laundry is still sitting in the dryer)...  and I installed the interior window of our kitchen garden window.  So, I did accomplish a few small things before sleeping all afternoon.  Actually, I didn't start on the garden window winterization until after my long afternoon nap.  Whenever I plan to accomplish something on any particular day, it must be right after waking up in the morning or after a nap.  I run out of energy far too quickly to wait an hour or two so I always jump on any tasks that must be done immedia...

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 th...

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 th...

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 t...

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 ...

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.  Al...

I n my previous blog entry, I wrote about my custom designed, homebuilt truss bridge that I have been working on lately for my little garden railroad.  I had applied far too many coats of paint in varying colors and shades in an attempt to get the color I had envisioned.  I eventually landed on a pale olive color for this bridge like many truss bridges in real life. After writing that previous blog entry, I also applied additional shades of green to this bridge to add some tonal depth to this paint job.  The single shade of green was a bit "flat".  I'm not referring to the finish of the paint...  ie, gloss, satin, matte, flat...  but referring to the tonal depth of the paint job.  I had applied one or two more shades of green lightly with a dry brushing technique to add some tonal depth.  Today, I applied some reddish washes very lightly to give the impression of rust developing on the bridge. In this photo, below, my locomotive is just departing ...

A s with most of my projects, I had thought that painting my homebuilt truss bridge would be a quick and easy job.  It hasn't been difficult but it has not be the least bit quick. This paint job is becoming a very long process.   First, I primed it with a spray can or two.  Then I spray painted an Anvil Gray spray paint and it was far too blue.  I wouldn't even call it a gray.  It really was a very dark blackish-blue and I didn't care for the color at all.  Once I started spraying this color, I realized that I had been fooled by the name of this color once before when I was painting my steam locomotive.  It was far too blue for that project too and ended up wasting a few days while I searched for a more appropriate color.   Then I sprayed a can of something named Deep Gray.  One would think this would be a gray that is into the darker shades of gray but, on the contrary, it was a rather light shade of gray.  This paint also had...