Just Between You, Me, and the Bingo Card: Life Lessons from the Assisted Living Facility

Light I normally work in.

New light.

5 different color settings.

Flexible and holds where you leave it.

Made this to clamp it on.

 

Another great deal on a frozen engine. This one is nicknamed the "crocodile", maybe because it's green, maybe because it articulates front and back and loosely resembles a thrashing croc.
Or maybe both. It is driven from both ends, operates like the push-me-pull-you from Dr. Doolittle.
Freshly opened.

This an electric engine in real life and as such has the pantograph up top.
The small screw with the little dimpled dial left of center switches between track only and track/cat power. That actually caused me problems with diagnosis as I had no idea where it was supposed to be, and in the process of figuring out why I wasn't getting any power to the engine, I found a loose connection under the board. Fixed that, figured out the dial, and proceeded on with the gears.

Success! Pantograph up.

Down, they just barely clear the bridges by a short and curly.

Removed. If they ever pop up unnoticed, they will be destroyed with bridge contact and ruin the value, not to mention my day.
It has now been converted to diesel electric for regular service on my railroad.

 

It rained!

Foreground last night, background done this morning.

 

Mistakes were made. The bottle clearly says in small print, "do not shake". I knew this.
But every other step along the way requires shaking, glue bottle, paint, soap and water, etc.
So before adding a final coat, I gave it an absentminded shake.


oops.
Fortunately, it peels right up after cutting the edge with a razor knife.
Gonna redo just one and see if I can get it right before doing the other one.

Yes, I tried to cut the bubbles out first. That ain't gonna work.

On a positive note, it allowed me to level the surface better and get rid of the plywood crap that looked a bit odd under the water. Shit happens.

 

could have put a periscope and made it look like a submarine was coming up

 

Everything I did made it exponentially worse. There is less than a quarter cup of epoxy used, so not a big deal to just start it over. Biggest setback is curing time of 24 hours. Hopefully there's enough time for the bottle bubbles to settle before pouring
And, I may just fill in the other lake, need a place for the UFO to conduct probing experiments.
Found some neat little scale farm buildings as well.

The T-gauge shipped today from Scotland. Shipped via Royal Mail, as it should be.

 

love Scotland. good people

 

Loch Ness Monster!

 

would tie in nicely with the aliens

 

Hands down the fastest international shipping ever.

Literally got the tracking# today saying it was being shipped out of Edinburgh.
Checked it a bit after noon and it said carrier still awaiting package.
Sitting on the couch a few minutes ago, checked tracking, and it said it was delivered.
The entire set.

 

So freaking tiny!
All the track, directions that were fairly clear once you read thru it. There's just the one page, with pictures!
The tracks are marked on the back with the radius and the length in mm.
The two gray strips are fine sandpaper for cleaning the track. More on that later.

Putting the track together was fairly easy, and seems fairly strong for it's size. It's easy to mis-align the rail in the joiner, so some were pulled apart more than once and held up fine.

Getting it to stay on the track was a challenge all on it's own. The engines are magnetized and stick and run quite well at impossible angles. The passenger cars do not. At first I could not get a complete loop without losing a car. The solution was to use thin double side sticky tape and tape down everything on the table to keep the rails as flat as possible. That did the trick. The cars are just so light that any tilt of the body causes it to fall over. It runs pretty reliable now.

The engines have head/tail lights that reverse with direction.
Happy enough with it to order some more track, just want to lengthen a portion.

 

Good god thats tiny!!

 

LEGO's were perfect for getting the proper grade and stabilizing the upper loop.
I have a vision of a full length piece of hardwood for the grade, but getting the taper plus the curve might be above my pay scale. I think it would look cool if I can pull it off.
Piece of MDF for a board.
Undecided about a few extra tracks vs leaving it the compact desktop size it is now.

Was thinking of widening the outside rails 30mm each side and lengthening the outer loop 60mm. To separate the track that's side by side. Would be a gain of 240mm of track, or 9 1/2", which is huge at this scale. The overall shape would be the same , just wider/longer by a small amount.

Might be more fun to leave it, and order a few more track sets, then tie them all together thru switch tracks but keep them modular. Next winter project maybe.

 

could you add a beer can to that photo for reference.

 

insane!

 

No pics, but had to take an engine apart last night, it lost contact with the track. Take's a razor knife and magnifying glass to open it up. Super simple, plastic frame with a tiny pea sized motor sandwiched in it. Problem was one of the wheels was slightly out of gauge and lost contact with it's conductor. It was probably 1/100th of a mm of adjustment to make it run like new again. Took an hour of squinting thru a magnifier and filing down the probes on my test meter to a needle point to find the short
I can't get pics of this, but with a magnifier, there is legible print on the sides, numbers, has doors, handles, sheet metal seams. Pretty impressive.

 

Made by Rokuhan, been wanting to try their product.
These are Z scale "Shorty's" super cheap, some assembly required. Designed to look like the real thing, but squished up short to run ridiculously tight curves on small layouts.
They come as display only, but have motorized and rolling stock chassis for them.

Display chassis on right, roller on the left.

Motorized chassis. Middle car is powered, engines are dummies.

Coupled with the standard couplers. Yes, it came with stickers. Probably put those on someones truck when they come to visit.

Comes with a dog bone coupler that closes the gap and is more secure around tight curves.
They simply pull straight out and push back in.

Closed up the gap.

They were meant to run on a tiny oval with a power supply of no more than 3vdc.
However, they can also run on a full size track at 10vdc, but they will fly right off the thing in a corner.

At 2vdc, it runs super quiet and smooth and looks pretty good.

 

Should have known this would end up with Hello Kitty stuff