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Myles, Welcome back! It looks like the trip to the hardware store was very worthwhile.  The first 4 pictures after the video show Image not found.  The rest of the drawings and the interior of the store are visible.  They certainly packed in a lot.  It looks like a great  building  to model.

The turret should be really something when done.

Last edited by Mark Boyce

Just some status. I found out that the laser cutter at the First Build Makery is run on Adobe Illustrator. My drawings are Coreldraw. It takes CorelDraw, but only up to version 5 and I was saving these files in Ver 2017. And to make matters worse, my 2017 CorelDraw stopped booting up in my VM Fusion/Windows 10 emulator on my MacBook Pro. I bit the bullet and purchsed the 2021 CorelDraw Essentials thinking this would give me the capability to save as an AI file. The stripped down CD Essentials is so basic it can't export any other vector file types, only bitmap, i.e., it don't do beans! I ended spending 2.5 hours at the First Build trying to find a translation program on line that could convert CD to AI. I found several, but they only converted the outlines of the building pieces, ignoring all the engraved brickwork lines in the shapes. Without the bricks the job is useless to me. I was working with the Essentials with a 30 refund policy and gave it back and got my $140 bucks back. I was not happy!

I've subsequently sent the files to Stephen Miley at Rail Scale to cut the parts using my original Corel Files. I've since downloaded several free/cheap vector programs that run in Mac, but none export directly into AI either, and they're not as familiar to me as CD which I've been using since Ver 1.0 in 1990s. Corel seems to be the best user oriented vector program out there. Not sure yet what the ultimate solution is. The bricks are laid into the corel outlinse using the "Paste Inside" command. It was something about how they appear digitally to conversion programs that ignored them. Any of you IT gurus out can chime in anytime you want here.

Meanwhile, the hardware store willl be built at higher cost than I wanted.

And, I just got an offer from a fellow in Paris, France who wants to commission me to make another Nighthawks Cafe. Unfortunately, that was a non-laser, non-3D printing project and was almost entirely old school except for the bar stools which were laser cut for me. I would have to do a lot of drawing and again deal with the CD draw/Adobe problem since I wouldn't do it without laser cutting it. I have no idea what to charge the fellow. He said "money was no object", and then there's the shipping to France part. I want to review the time spent making the first one and give him an estimate. It has to be worth my while.

And last weekend I finally joined the multitudes and got COVID. Since I was double-boosted, my case has been ridiculously mild. I had one and half days with a low fever and the usual aches, a slight sore throat and a runny nose. By Wednesday I felt pretty good, got re-tested on Thursday (still positive) and re-tested myself today (still positive), but feel completely normal. I also took an antiviral regimen (Mulnapirivir) so that helped too. Haven't been the shop all week and it bugs me, but I did get to binge watch a lot of my favorite shows.

Later...

On my goodness!  What a rigmarole!!  I'm glad Stephen can cut the parts for you, but it is sad it will cost you!  I agree, you will need to make the second Nighthawks worth your while for sure!!  Make sure you figure in packing it for an overseas trip as well as shipping and a nice profit for you!  There won't be any meeting at Sheetz to drop off that building. 

I'm sorry you contracted COVID, but glad you are on the mend.  Our younger daughter and son-in-law got it back towards the end of last year and said it was like a bad cold for a few days.  Somehow, Kim and I have avoided it.  We have had both booster as well, but know that isn't 100% as you proved.  I hope you don't have any lingering effects and get back in the shop next week!!!

And last weekend I finally joined the multitudes and got COVID. Since I was double-boosted, my case has been ridiculously mild. I had one and half days with a low fever and the usual aches, a slight sore throat and a runny nose. By Wednesday I felt pretty good, got re-tested on Thursday (still positive) and re-tested myself today (still positive), but feel completely normal. I also took an antiviral regimen (Mulnapirivir) so that helped too. Haven't been the shop all week and it bugs me, but I did get to binge watch a lot of my favorite shows.

Later...

So glad that you are better!

Peter

Last edited by Putnam Division

I've passed 12 days of isolation. New rules state that after five days and no or diminishing symptoms you are not really contagious. At 10 days and no symptoms you are much less likely to be contagious. So I'm now in the normal part of the house and am not wearing the mask. We had our first dinner together tonight since last Monday.

I treated myself to go back and read my thread starting from building the mountain, then the refinery and finally Nighthawks. I wanted to recall how much work Nighthawks was and what I would charge for it. So I decided to price it high and see what happens. Meanwhile, my lovely wife doesn't want me to sell it since it was so special to me. I'm asking $2,500 plus packing and shipping to Paris, France. He wrote back and asked me to give him the overall sizes of the building and not a peep about the price. Probably asking too little...

I think I know how to pack it so it will survive. The only problem is the people and stools breaking loose. I think it's possible to get inside to reattach if they do.

It cracks me up to re-read the Saga. When I look at the finished products on the layout, my brain plays tricks on me and pretends that they just appeared there. It's like childbirth (or so I'm told) in that the creation process can be quite painful, but you tend to forget about it and do it again. Each one of the special projects required things that I conjured that I look back on and wonder, "How the heck did I think of that?" And wonder if I were to do it again, would I be that smart?

So the question remains, if I sell Nighthawks will I make another for myself. If I do, it will be an entirely different proccess. I now possess the magic machine to produce the parts much more perfectly than the hand-done pieces I made. When I did Nighthawks I actually mention about the resin machines they had in the engineering department at University of Wisconsin when we took grandson for a tour. At the time I was awestruck since they were $3k apiece. Little did I know that in a little over a year, the price would drop by 10X.

On another front, I explained that one of the things I like to purchase with the NH proceeds would be the full version of CorelDraw 2022. It's over $400. Then my lovely wife said that I should get it regardless of the sale. We spend money on lots of stuff and this is important to what I'm doing. With it I can be back in the business of designing things that I can laser cut myself. Before I can make another Nighthawks I will need the software.

I’m glad you are doing better and your wife stayed well.  I don’t know how we would work out isolating one of us in our house.

Funny, when I read about the fellow in Paris, I was thinking you would be building another for him, not that he would be buying the original.  Now it makes sense he would be buying the original.  He said price was no object; the amount of time that was put into it by a skilled designer and craftsman doesn’t come cheaply.  I think your wife is right, the software is a small price for the joy it will give you.

Me too. I was using version 1.0. In those days the companies with whom I worked covered the cost. It's a different deal when it's me paying. Having now tried seven vector drawing programs I find Coreldraw to be the most comprehensive out of the box of all of them with a reasonable learning curve. Inkscape is free and pretty busy, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to change the ruler origin on the page. I also couldn't intuitively figure how to change the drawing's scale. Furthermore, being Euopean, it keeps defaulting to metric paper sizes and millimeters. Adobe Illustrator is powerful, but it too has limitations that are built into Corel, the most obvious is scaling. If you want to scale a drawing in AI you have to purchase and add-on.

If the deal goes through I will have to make a new Nighthawks, and fairly soon so I don't lose the inertia. As I said, the new and improved version could be nicer and (hopefully) go together easier without all the hassle. I could 3D print the entire turret as I did with the turret on the House by the Railroad. Cornices, corbels, etc. all will be sweeter a la the Hardware House. Nothing can happen until CorelDraw Suite 2022 is loaded on my computer. The reengineering will start in SketchUp as I incoporate all the learnings and fix all the mistakes from the hand-built version.

A few more comments about the Saga...

It's been a full decade since I started writing this. It's beginning to feel like Homer and the Odyssey. Some of you guys have faithfully read every word almost for the entire duration. Amazing! One of the things I often dwelled on was the act of getting old and the potential to run out of time before the project is compelte (whatever that is). Well… I'm happy to report that except for a few minor bumps in the road, I am still pretty much capable of doing all the stuff that has to be done, except not so happy about climbing on the layout. I'm actually surprised that my aging has been gradual with nothing happening that's a show stopper. I'm kind of getting ready for cataract surgery and even for that my son, the eye surgeon, says his mom and I are on the old side of the curve of most of his cataract patients. The bicep tendon rupture as my son in law said, creates no problem for me and it happened six years ago. The AFib causes no problem at all other than taking Eliquis (blood thinner) so I have to be more careful about doing greivous bodily harm in the shop. Some of the developments like migrating from scribing and cutting to laser cutting to 3D printing has been a blast and I'm glad all y'all are enjoying the ride. So I pledge that as long as I'm able and have something interesting to write about, I will keep doing this.

A bad note. Something is leaking again in the kitchen and has dripped water on the layout. It's funny since I was just re-reading the part of the Saga where I replaced all the street paving on bridge street due to the great diswasher rupture of 2018, and I was in the shop today for the first time since COVID, and looked at Bridge Street and saw this. Something has leaked in the same area as the original AND IT HAD DAMAGED MY STREETS!

The leak actually ate through the street and pavement. And of course it's in the middle and the hardest place to reach. I suspect it's the dishwasher again which is directly overhead in the kitchen. The dishwasher is only four + years old. I dread having to repave that road… again! I'm going to have to raise the taxes of all those businesses to pay for this infrastructure work. I may enlist Thatcher Sasse, the son of a friend who's 12, and a wonderfully creative model maker like my grandsons. Who, by the way, are a senior in college and starting freshman respectively. Moving to Louisville when we did when they were 7 and 5 years old was the best decision we ever made. We were there for their entire childhood and they had a great time in my shop.

The Leak of 2022

Have to call a plumber. Ugh!

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  • The Leak of 2022

Just follow up to the Woodbourne Village's water problem: Our 4-year old GE dishwasher was indeed leaking. What really aggravates me was what was leaking. There were two nylon, hex plastic nuts that secure and seal the entrance and exit of the heating element wiring. The two were at the rear of the bottom pan and not visible looking under the dishwasher. The plumbers had to pull it out. The underneath floor was soaked as was the bottom insulation. The nuts were completely loose! The rest of the mechanism was pristine! We made a emotional, certainly not rational, decision to get a new one. My wife and I were unconvinced that whatever casused the nuts to loosen in the first place, wouldn't happen again. And frankly, the value of what's in the basement under that dishwasher exceeds the value of the diswasher by magnitudes. We ended up buying a new Bosch Level 500 machine.

Meanwhile, the problems didn't quite end there. The shut off valve for the dishwasher feed line under the sink, didn't shut off! It was one of the old-style washered, multi-turn valves. The washers in these things especially in hot water service, and if they're rarely ever used (like this one), harden and become basically useless. I opened that cabinet a couple hours after the plumbers left and it was a flood! Like everyone else, there's a lot of stuff under there and most was wet. The washer was disintegrating and was dripping steadily regardless of how tight the valve was closed. We put a bit Tupperware bowl, but it was filling about 2" an hour. I didn't want to get up at 4 a.m. to empty it, so I turned off the house water during the night.

The new DW was delievered from Lowe's on Sunday. The delivery guy wanted to try the valve and opened and closed it again. This time a piece of the washer was expelled and it was now running, no longer dripping. The DW was going to be installed on Tuesday, I took the new supply hose from the new dishwasher, put on the now-running valve and ran it back up into the sink and duct taped it on the counter so at least we got rid of the bucket problem. Later that day I went and bought two new valves, one compression like the old one and one PEX. I didn't have much room to cut the old compression ring off the pipe stub, so I took a gamble and used the new compression fitting valve on the old fitting. According to the hardware store, there's a 60% chance it won't seal properly. I installed it with some pipe tape and tightened it the best I could and it did not drip, but it was still wet around the threads. The plumbers were able to put a little bit more torque on it and it is now fully in service. It's a quarter-turn ball valve and won't cause a problem going forward.

I hate plumbing.

While still not working on the railroad, I have been very busy on the Missouri Turret. Yesterdat, I finished all 3D printing for this monster project. A picture is worth a thousand words. So feast on this. It took since January to create this. The Turret directory on my laptop has 1,042 files in it. Not included in the above are the sheet stock parts that have yet to be cut. Actual assembly and painting began yesterday afternoon. I want to finish and deliver before winter so the museum will still be open. Otherwise I'll have to hold it until next spring. There are many parts not show that are rejects, duplicates, wrong, etc. that are not show, probably 30% more. If I didn't know how to do 3D before this, I sure know now. I've pretty much tested the limits of the Elegoo Mars 3. The project would have been impossible with my Mars Classic.

ITP ALL the parts

This is the case design. It's all going to be LED lit so I need space under the base for the power supply. My bass playing old friend in Albuquerque is building the base, I'm doing the acrylic. I will also do some graphics with callouts to tell people about what they're seeing.

ITP Case Base Top View

Train work will restart when I'm further down this road.

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  • ITP ALL the parts
  • ITP Case Base Top View

Myles, I hate plumbing too!  I know exactly what you mean about those old shutoff valves.  Ugh!  Yes, buying another dishwasher was probably the way to go, considering you don’t know why those nuts loosened.  I’m certainly sorry you had all this water problems!

The turret project is certainly more involved than I imagined!  It will be a great model when finished.

The turret project is more involved than I envisioned too. What's in my head now is the build sequence. It's not straight forward. I've been building it in my head many times to see just what goes on before what. I'm also working on the painting sequence. While it would be easier to glue the stuff on the bare resin since the CA really has an affinity for the stuff, it would make masking and color demarcation much more difficult. Each deck will have LED ceiling lighting using the same copper foil/surface mount LEDs that I've been perfecting on the latest buildings. They need to go in before painting so they'll be less obvious. They have to be fully painted and assembled before they are slid down the central column that runs from the bottom of the powder flat to the bottom of the electric deck. The central column right now is a piece of 5/8" o.d. copper tubing. I'm thinking of substituting that for some plastic pipe of the same diameter. I'm thinking of making this change because of what is going to have to be done to the copper. I want to attached all the ladder rungs that are welded to this column on the ship. It would much easier to drill the plastic pipe and glue them in than to drill the copper and solder them in. I also have to cut access holes in the pipe to bring down the LED wiring from each deck. Again the plastic wins. I just went back to page 35 when I did the stacks for the distillery boiler house to double check the size of the PVC water pipe I used and it was, indeed, 5/8" so I'm going to buy a chunk and use that instead of the copper. I won't have to change the hole sizes in any of the decks.

The Bosch DW doesn't seem to dry so well. There are other settings that I'm going to try including raising the water temp. If I remember correctly, I used the hotter water setting on the GE to help it dry better. It does seem like very good build quality.

I wish there was a way to index this 102 page missive. I've been doing so backward looks to find certain things and it's very much scavenger hunt to get to where I want to go. Am I missing something? Is there a search function within a given thread?

Myles,

If there is no topic-specific search, I’m also guessing you can’t add reply-specific tags for searching.

But what you could do is add your own “index term” at the bottom of each reply you think you might want to revisit.

The idea would be to make the term unique to you so that the listserver search will find it.  For example, TM01_hopper_lighting or TM01_3Dprinting_turret, where the TM01_ prefix represents one of your custom search terms. You might test one or two terms to see whether you get the indexed topic.

Obviously, if this works, this means you keep track of a list of terms.  But you could create a somewhat sophisticated and/or structured naming convention this way that is easy to follow.  If it works, it should take you to the start of a subtopic.  And, you can add terms retroactively, too.

Hope this thought suggests some ideas.

Tomlinson Run Railroad

Last edited by TomlinsonRunRR

Hey gang! Been a while since I checked in. Sorry, but nothing new on the rails. I've been consumed by working on the turret project. We also had a vacation from retirement spending two weeks in Maui. Not a bad place to forget about politics for a while.

The turret project is in phase 3: painting and assembly. All the parts are printed and reprinted if they needed correcting. I am sure that I printed 100% more stuff than the model needed due to rejects and surplus. Early this week the weather was the perfect-outdoor-painting day…70 degrees and almost no wind. I got all the parts primed excand ready for finishing except for the interior of the gun house shell. I started cutting and assembling the outer shells that will be opened to show the turret interior. These babies kept me up at night trying to tease out the best way to approach them. I had good success this week and have the lowest shell that surrounds the bottom projectile and powder flats. With that success I am now confident that the rest of them will be equally as good and the end is in sight. My trusty old friend Bryant, who lives in Albuquerque, is crafting the wooden base that will support this model. Bryant, besides being one of my oldest friends, and an exceptional woodworker, is also the fabulous bass player of my college band, the Sounds and Sondettes. I will be creating the plexiglass cover.

All the LED lighting is installed using the same techniqye with the coppoer foil I first experimented with in making Nighthawks. Everything I learn doing all this stuff gets transferred to the next project.

ITP Small Parts Primed

That pile of small parts will be painted by airbrush only and doesn't need priming. The relationship between the layers was mind boggling.

ITP Big Parts Primed]

I'm really looking forward to doing the detail painting which will finally resemble traditional model making.

Here's the lower shell with the annual rings that form the non-rotating working area in the lower turret. I had to create a structured sandwich with these rings so it would be stiff enough to overcome the spring in the styrene drum. You're looking down onto the powder flat. There's a lot of stuff that's going in there. Everthing will be illuminated.

ITP Lower Drum with RIng FitupITP Ring 2 Structure

That truncated portion really complicated this part, which was otherwise just a straight-side cylinder. This is turret #1 which is already in the space where the Iowas' hull started tapering towards the sharp bow that typifies this class of ship. The turret barrel had to be chopped off so it would fit between the side armor plates. #2 and 3 turrets do not have this problem. I asked Al Graziano about making these cylinders.

ITP Drum with Truncated Slice Fill Fit

A fellow who I've been sharing information with, Jim Slade, is making a perfect rendition of every plate on the ship, using the original micro-filmed erection drawings from the National Archives. He was instrumental in helping me properly define the pan deck, electric deck and this part of the exterior shell. He's using some pretty high horsepower CAD software to do it. He's not making a model. This is the lower shells, straight and tapered.

Those fingers (which I'm not modeling) are the weld points to tie the structure into the ship's framing. Notice, this structure supports the rotating mass of 2,500 tons that is the moving part of the turret. Notice also the single entry point into the powder flat lowest level. This entry and the one under the outside rear of the gun house are the only two points of entry and egress from this structure. Imagine evacuating 88 men in case of abandoning ship out of those two places. All other travel through the turret is by vertical ladders and little deck hatches. You'll notice in my images above, I was able to print the rollers, track and ring gear as a single split part.

ViewCapture20221013_004238

The LED lighting for the gun house interior is built on a thin ply substrate and then attached to the plastic using the 3M Transfer Adhesive Tape. Once you get the hang of using this stuff, it's amazing how it holds. I didn't want to solder the foil directly on styrene since it melts the styrene and the distortion could have penetrated to the good side. I did the circuit on the ply, then attached to the part.

ITP G House Lighting Install

When this thing is done, I promise I will get back to railroading. I'm procrastinating doing that roadwork at the back of the layout due to the position my body's going to be in doing it. My sciatica really acted up in Maui and I've been back at physical therapy getting myself back in shape. I can say, that from last November I lost 16 pounds went from a 38 to 36" waist for the first time in decades and didn't screw up in Maui and am now the same weight I was when were left. I have a fellow who I've been mentoring for 10 years and he has a wonderful son, who loves modeling and trains. He's 12 and perhaps I can enlist his services in this endeavor. My own grandsons are now both out of the picture. Alex is graduating Illinois Engineering and looks likes he's already landed a good job, and younger brother Jack is in Engineering at Washington Universit of St. Louis. He's took a machine shop elective and loves it. The professor was watching him work and realized he has some experience and he told him where he got it. He's also joined the engineering school race car team. I knew his older brother was into mechanics, but didn't realize that Jack had it too. Makes me proud…really proud.

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  • ITP Small Parts Primed
  • ITP Big Parts Primed
  • ITP Lower Drum with RIng Fitup
  • ITP Ring 2 Structure
  • ITP Drum with Truncated Slice Fill Fit
  • ViewCapture20221013_004238
  • ITP G House Lighting Install

I know it's not trains, but it is modeling...

Time for some more turret updates. I have a definite delivery date, during the week between XMas and New Years. The ship will be open to the public during that time and we're planning on another visit back East. I'm getting the finished base from my dear friend and former bass player from my college band, Bryant Mitchell, who has a terrific home woodworking shop. He retired to Albuquerque to be near grandkids (sound familiar?). I will take the base to the plastics supplier and have it measured for the acrylic enclosure piecces.

Almost all the decks are complete with their machinery. I'm at the punchlist phase. I still have to produce the bulkheads that separate each gun in the gun house.

Yesterday I put together the power feed circuit board and proceeded to solder in 10 CL2N3 LED driver chips backwards! I have more and another blank circuit board and will make another correctly. At the last minute I realized that the cutaway portion I made through the barbette was too low to view the traversing machinery and had to enlarge it after the shells were almost completely done. It was harrowing, but I pulled it off.

Electric Deck with 7 electro-hydraulic pump systems.

ITP e-Deck Complete 1

The complete outer shells with the large travese ring gear and roller bearing that supports the 2,500 ton rotating turret mass.

ITP Bulkheads Complete

The enlarged cutawat opening. I filled the double wall that's now exposed. I used Milliputt to make it look like solid 14" armor plating. Today I will finish sand it and paint the raw edges "Cutaway red".

ITP Enlarged Cutaway

The Powder Flat LED test showing the interior.

ITP Lit Powder Flat

The complete officer's booth with the addition of the auxiliary ballistic computer and the switch panels. The computer is one of five redundant systems in the ship.

ITP Ofc Booth Parts In

These are all the parts I made that remain. There's still a box of plastic kit parts for the gun house exterior. That will be the last thing I need to build.

ITP Parts Remaining

Vertical look at the powder flat showing how I had to cut the tops of the powder trunks so the ceiling height worked.

ITP Powder Flat Done

Projectile Flats 1 and 2 where projectiles are stored and loaded onto the three projectile hoists. They're hydraulically lifted up to the cradles that load the three guns. Powder trunks are shown in cutaway on these decks since their full presence would block seeing anything behind them.

ITP Projectile Flats Done

The three gun rear compartments with the cradle/spanning trays that transport the projectiles into the breaches.

ITP Reprinted R-Compartments Done

The finished base produced by my fried. It is now shipped.

ITP The Base WIP

A stage picture showing how the bottom four decks line up.

ITP Stack Status

The pan deck sits below the gun house providing space for the guns to elevate and recoil. Recoil is four feet! On this deck are the hydaulic motors that elevate the guns with a revolving nut to a 6" lead screw, and the worm gears that drive the traversing pinions. The cracked bulkhead at the front was fixed with some reinforcement. Still to install are the powder trunks that carry the powder cart and the projectile chases. I still have to craft the primerman's platform that sits here. From that platform, the primerman inserts the cartridge into the breach from below. The cartridge is what sets off the 660 pounds of cordite to fire the 2,700 pound armor-piercing projectile.

ITP Pan Deck Almost Complete 2

Okay… you're all up to date. As you can tell, if I deliver this over Christmas, I will be working on the railroad come the new year.

Everyone have a great Thanksgiving.

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  • ITP e-Deck Complete 1
  • ITP Bulkheads Complete
  • ITP Enlarged Cutaway
  • ITP Lit Powder Flat
  • ITP Ofc Booth Parts In
  • ITP Parts Remaining
  • ITP Powder Flat Done
  • ITP Projectile Flats Done
  • ITP Reprinted R-Compartments Done
  • ITP The Base WIP
  • ITP Stack Status
  • ITP Pan Deck Almost Complete 2
Last edited by Trainman2001

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