Thanks guys! Sure does seem like yesterday… here was a shot from before we moved from Pennsylvania. This was the layout's 2nd iteration after returning from Germany. Alex, the senior one, was at the controls. Jack's expression is about the most explicit evidence of "pure joy" that I can imagine. That MTH Z4000 is 27 years old and still runs perfectly. It's a nicely designed product. Bought it the first year it was produced. Alex might not have been five yet, but I let him run the trains. Jack had to wait a few more years. They always treated all of my hobby stuff with the utmost care and respect. It's a two way street. Respect them and teach them, and they will return the favor.
Didn't work today, but did yesterday and that's what this post describes.
I got all the wiring hooked up, found out how to get the floors in without wrecking any wiring, and did a lighting test. Making the floors removable was essential, since after the first assembly, one light panel on the first and one on the 3rd floors did not work. Turned out that the screw terminal connections on the circuit board terminal blocks weren't so hot and I had to redo them. That took much longer to do than I thought it would. Using that fine 32 gauge wire might have been a mistake since the terminals are designed for wires with a little more girth. Notice that I like lighting random spaces and not the entire building. Also I used black construction paper on the partitions in the non-lit spaces.
Looks pretty good with the room lights on.
But, as feared, with the lights off, the plexiglass walls and the Rust-oleum red printer were not opaque enough and had a lot of light bleed.
To counteract this I brush painted some thick acrylic craft paint on the exeterior walls of the illuminated rooms. Two coats helped a lot. The colonial blue is denser than the green and there was still some leakage. I may go back and do another quick coat on Monday. This image shows the wiring bundle that had to be control while assebling all the walls. I still have to the window treatments, which is another reason for not gluing down the floor panels. I didn't want to go the carboard "sheet rock" route since I didn't have the clearances on the floor panels to accept the added wall thickness.
I'm still waiting for Bill Newell to send me more interior images for the first floor. Right now this is what I've done, and it's way too sparse to work, in my opinion.
Had my semi-annual physical on Wednesday and everything is within targets. I have a tooth getting a crown Monday. When at the dentist last week, I told him about a rear molar that was acting funny when I bit down on something hard. He found it was cracked. We agreed it needed to be crowned at my convenience. My "convenience" was determined while eating my cereal this Monday and having a chunk of that molar decide it was time to separate. Amazingly, while as a kid, I had amalgm in every tooth in my mouth (some of those fillings are probably still there), I never had an adult tooth pulled. And since the advent of the Sonicare tooth brush, haven't had a new cavity in years. It's all about maintaining all the old fillings and occasionally replacing them with crowns. Our dentist says my wife and I are the only people of our age in his practice that have all of our natural roots. Probably stopping smoking in 1975 didn't hurt either.
If I don't get the images soon, I may have to put this aside and work on something else. I just picked up another scale model: the Takom 1:35th scale AH 64D Apache helicopter. I'm getting into building these larger scale helis that are being kitted now.
Have a nice weekend.
