Scattered Thoughts . . .

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 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 ...

S o, the other day, I built a retaining wall for the front side of our little garden railroad and wrote about it here  in this blog previously.  That new "model" retaining wall looks great and I have to say it was a brilliant idea to add this detail.  Today, I started working on building a truss bridge for the back side of the garden railroad.   I've been sketching different ideas over the past couple of months because I always knew I wanted one of these bridges on this garden railroad but I finally decided on a plan this morning.  Once I had the plan sketched and figured out all the dimensions of each of the parts, I immediately headed outside to start cutting lumber and building a truss bridge.  My civil engineering days are long behind me but, if I remember correctly, this would be a Warren Truss bridge due to the equilateral triangles across each side of the bridge. Designing this bridge required me to test my geometry and trigonometry skills (and ...

L ittle by little, I've been working on building a custom homebuilt, non-commercial spectroheliograph for solar astronomy.  A spectroheliograph is a scientific instrument used for imaging/graphing the sun in one specific wavelength at a time.  It is not an instrument for visual observations though.  It is used to capture any single wavelength between 400-700nm at a very narrow 3 angstroms (0.3nm) in graphical waveform.  Then specialized software is used to transpose that waveform into an image.   This particular spectroheliograph was designed by Christian Buil in France.  He kept this particular design small and relatively simple for do-it-yourself amateur astronomers such as myself.  I believe he also has spectroheliograph designs that are research-grade and costing tens of thousands of dollars.  I opted for the dirt-cheap do-it-yourself and a-little-more-difficult route to build what is considered a beginner spectroheliograph.  It is s...

I finished my homemade telescope pier extension project today and it seems to be working as planned. There isn't a whole lot in life that is more satisfying than designing something in sketches in a notebook, then building each individual part yourself, then assembling all the parts and finding that everything works just as designed and planned! My primary problem that prompted this project was that my longer telescopes would hit the tripod legs when viewing almost straight upward.  Also a factor in my decision is that my astronomy tripod isn't tall enough for my longer refractor telescopes which meant I would need to sit down very low on the ground to see into the eyepiece.  I needed a pier extension to raise the mount and telescope higher.   Some may ask why I don't just extend the legs fully to gain some overall height but this is a bad idea for two reasons.  First, it will do nothing for me to resolve the telescope colliding with the tripod legs.  And ...

I've moved on to the second phase (and unplanned phase) of our garden window project by working on refinishing the window sashes for this window.  Our homebuilt garden window has a couple of removable window sashes that we can insert into the frame for colder weather. In the warmer months, I will leave the sashes out (as seen in the photo to the right) so the view is wide open with no obstructions. These sashes were in pretty lousy shape. It seemed silly to design and build this nice new garden window and then just install the same old worn-out sashes when the weather cools down and during the longer part of the year when we need extra insulation. I've been experiencing this throughout our renovations... you know... when you make a clean spot, everything else that didn't look so badly before you made a clean spot suddenly appears horrendous... I needed to do something about these window sashes.  I also needed to replace the window sill... something else I hadn'...

As has been the norm here for the past few months, it is dark and dreary outside this morning. I'd like to get back to working on our garden window but I'm not going to pull all my tools outside when it appears as though it will rain at any moment.   On the positive side, it is far cooler out there today! The humidity seems to be at far more tolerable levels too!   I should be able to get out there to do some work in another hour or two... I'm looking forward to making more progress on this window project.