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

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.  Although brass is a rather soft metal,

I 'm still feeling rather lousy so I stayed indoors again today.  I happened to find a small project to keep me busy for a short while so that was good. Since the time that I felt I had finished painting the new truss bridge for my little garden railroad, I've been thinking something isn't right.  I couldn't put my finger on it but I was left feeling the something wasn't right.  Part of me thinks the color isn't exactly right even though I've painted it and repainted it about a half dozen times.  I don't know if I should go lighter with the green or go darker toward a greenish charcoal.  I also realized that maybe I'm just feeling as though it is not "complete" yet and needs more detail.   In an attempt to add more detail to this truss bridge, this morning I decided to order some brass stock and tiny round head brass nails to add some detail to this bridge.  I plan to cut the brass stock into shapes depicted by the white paper in the photo

M y health has been quite lousy since returning from Long Island last weekend and it is still lousy...  perhaps even worse than I had thought it was this past week, actually.   Sometimes I don't realize just how poor my health is until I either get worse or start to improve.  Then I can better gauge just how miserable my health is or has been.  In this case, I'm very slowly improving (I hope) but, as I can think more clearly, I am beginning to see just how poor my health has been this past week.  A few days ago I couldn't think clearly at all! At this point, mostly, I am worn out...  too exhausted to even stand for more than a few short minutes.  I could easily sleep away each day and night.  The only problem is that I want to accomplish something!  This is a frustrating place to be...  wanting to accomplish something and not having the energy to even begin to accomplish anything. Today the weather was beautiful...  sunny, warm, big puffy clouds in the sky, good visibility.

A fter a week of exceptionally lousy health, I managed to have a fairly productive day today.   We went out-of-town last weekend and that took a lot out of me especially since we went out-of-town two weekends prior to that too.  Between the two weekends, my health had had enough and I spent all week in bed and on the couch.  I couldn't think straight...  I couldn't see clearly...  I had great difficulty breathing most of the time... I was often lightheaded...  my bones and joints were more painful than usual... I slept a lot ...  and I generally felt exceptionally lousy.   I was hoping things would be back to normal yesterday but I had significant problems shortly after getting up out of bed so I aborted my plans for the day.  This morning, however, I felt more "normal"...  my new normal, anyway...  so I jumped into setting up a new WiFi system through our house (which was supposed to be yesterday's project).   This WiFi project involved pulling out our living roo

W hile we were at FAO Schwarz this past weekend with Lukey and Kenzie, we saw quite a few demonstrations of toys but one demonstration immediately caught our eye.   As we approached one end of the store, our attention was captured by this woman with a magic floating orb and she easily drew us in while holding our attention.  I could clearly tell that Lukey was quite interested.   The orb would float in between open hands above and below the orb and then the open hands would move to each side while the orb continued to float in mid-air...  then the orb would fly off and around her body...  the orb would slowly lower toward the ground and then back upward...  sometimes hands were above and below, other times hands were on each side...  sometimes no hands were anywhere near this floating orb!  This glowing orb just floated around our young female magician.   After we watched her short demonstration, I asked Lukey if that was something of interest and he enthusiastically said, "YES!&q