Good evening Shop Dwellers! 71*F and clear with a faint breeze, still plenty of daylight in my corner of Maryland.
I figured it was time I post something on here, even when I've got nothing to show for it (i.e. nothing worth shooting photos of).
Curt - glad to see your new layout is taking shape! Brings back memories of when I started making progress on rebuilding my own layout 8 years ago. Of course, my benchwork wasn't [isn't] near as 'purty' as yours, because I was using recycled lumber.
Jerome - I see that there's been a major resurgence of business at JTEX - lookin good!
Sherrell - sorry to hear about the disrupted travel plans because of the malfunctioning RV step assembly, hopefully the stealership will get the necessary parts soon.
Garry - I feel your pain about being told I'm "part of the problem", that's why I avoid FB, Twitter and all the other general social media like the Plague - same as I avoid the news media. If there's an important development that might impact me
personally, my wife will let me know, since she follows them and manages to just shrug off the blather.
Everybody else - thanks in advance for the "likes" this post might get, even though I don't have any pretty pics to share [yet]!
I've been working my loco roster enhancement project, doing all the things necessary to get the body shells ready for airbrushing. Seems like I've been working on this forever; that's mostly because some of the vendors I ordered from take up to 2 weeks before my items arrive. And when they
do get here, it's frequently at a time when I'm not free to begin using them (daytime job, yardwork, etc.). Then when I get around to doing the work that requires these parts, I discover that I'm missing
something else that I thought I had. So I place an online order...and the waiting game starts all over again! Welcome to the Brave New World where 95% of commerce has to be transacted online.
The latest missing item is my supply of spare teflon 'O' rings that go inside the airbrush. I thought I had a few - I was mistaken. I don't know how long the current O-ring has been in there, but I don't want to risk getting everything all set up - then discovering halfway thru the job that the spray is uneven or splattery because of a worn-out O-ring, and no spares to replace it with.
Ohhh I gotta share this while I'm on the topic of online commerce. Remember that GP38-3 that took 11 days to get here? And how the USPS, when I asked them to trace my package, emailed a canned response about Coronavirus and marking the case "resolved"? Anyway, the day after the package arrive they sent me an email asking me to fill out a survey about the trace case. I figured "Well, I don't have anything nice to say so I'll just brush this one off." But the following week, I got
another nagging email saying they "urgently need my opinion"...ok, fine, but careful what you ask for! I left a scathing review of "one-out-of-five's", and wrote a paragraph stating that waiting 3 days to respond to a trace request with a
form letter, not giving me any clue whatsoever of the package's whereabouts, then putting an entry in the tracking log that the case was "resolved" - that wasn't merely incompetent service, it was an
INSULT! Haven't heard anything back from USPS about that one yet...
As for the project milestones - I got the two Atlas GP40-2 body shells stripped and converted to look like earlier-model GP-40's, but still disassembled to enable easier painting. The two sound units I ordered a few weeks ago have been disassembled - getting the shells off their chassis' was a
two-hour ordeal - and I soaked them in denatured alcohol so I could get the bright yellow Pennsy-style stripes off. But the alcohol worked a little
too well: I only wanted to eliminate the stripes, but the underlying paint also softened faster than I had expected - so now I still have contrasting colors (tuscan and light gray). Paint didn't soften enough to get
all of the paint off; now there are stubborn patches of paint that I'm afraid to brush for fear of damaging the grabirons and other fragile protruding details. So now I plan to make a two-hour drive up to Mainline Hobby Supply where Brian can sandblast the remaining paint off for a modest fee. Time-consuming but at least I know I'll have truly clean and undamaged surfaces to apply the new paint on.
(...there, I just wrote a frickin' book
)