Scattered Thoughts . . .

M ore than a week ago, I decided to put together some photos and a video that more closely show the vast upgrades I accomplished on my large scale steam locomotive.  Since I was so busy getting ready for a barbeque with the grandchidren, I completely forgot about all these photos as well as the video until I was showing Sheila a photo of something our grandson, Lukey, noticed about one of my gondolas that I had never noticed.  He noticed that it is a model of a gondola meant specifically to carry gold from mines.  I had no idea but it makes sense since these old ten-wheelers were among the first locomotives sent out to the wild west.   Since I never really finished showing better photos of these upgrades, I guess I'll try to get this blog entry completed before heading to bed tonight. _______________________________________________________ First, let me preface this with a quick update on my health since things weren't so great today.   Quite simply, t...

T he first thing I did this morning was to install the charging jack into the tender.  The glue holding the mounting plate in place had dried overnight so it was secure enough to drill the hole and install the jack.  That was a quick and easy job this morning! This charging jack is located underneath the water hatch of the tender which allows me easy access to recharging the battery which will power the locomotive.  The jack has a rubber seal to keep water out of it in case I get caught by a surprise rain shower.  Actually, I'm a bit surprised that the rubber seal fits in this very small space.  It fits so I'm leaving it in place.   I still have not soldered any wires nor installed the DCC circuit board but the tender is now ready to be wired.  

I t is another rainy spring day here so I'm indoors for the day.  I decided to do a little more work on kitbashing this large scale 4-6-0 steam locomotive.   Long ago, I decided that I wanted to add marker lights to the front end of this steam locomotive whenever I got around to repainting and kitbashing it.  Back when this type of locomotive was manufactured for real-life railroads, there was no such thing as marker lights on locomotives.  Instead of lights, these early locomotives used flags.  However, these 10 wheeler locomotives were still in use when marker lights became more common in use rather than flags.   If I remember correctly most of these 4-6-0 steam locomotives added marker lights to the lower part of the front end mounted just above the cow catcher where the flags had been located.  I seem to remember seeing these older locomotives with marker light mounted this way.  However, I've always preferred the marker lights being...

W hile I'm in the house every day this week while still recovering from a very busy week last week, I've been doing some maintenance on some of my model railroading locomotives in between long naps.  Earlier this week, I cleaned and lubed a big Fn3 scale steam locomotive.  That little project went extremely well so I continued testing various locomotives and provided maintenance on them as needed.   The latest two locomotives I worked on were two MTH O scale locomotives.  One was a steam locomotive and one was a diesel locomotive.  I haven't run either of these locomotives in a number of years so I expected them to need some work.  I already knew that the MTH steam locomotive needed new traction tires so that is where I started.  I had the new traction tires on hand so that seemed like the logical place to start. Since I hadn't used either of these MTH locomotives in a few years, I quickly realized that I have forgotten how to set up the power con...

As I wrote in my previous blog entry, I am in need of a few days of recovery after yesterday's bout with poor health. It is Day 1 of recovery and I am already bored. My boredom and need to accomplish something overruled my need to rest and recover (I may pay for this tomorrow). I pulled the new large scale steam locomotive and its tender down to the floor... grabbed some tools... plugged in a DC transformer from my O scale narrow gauge trains... and started to unscrew hidden screws... No task is simple, especially when trying to recover from anaphylaxis the day before, but I quickly realized that the first four screws I needed to remove were a bit stripped and none of my screwdrivers could hold well enough to be effective. Quickest solution... grind down one of my screwdrivers to make it fit well enough... After some grinding, one of my screwdrivers fit well and I managed to disassemble the tender which houses the sound card. The battery contacts powering the sound card wer...