Coffee Shop XLI-2/23/2014


Well I almost had a joystick for my //e today. I had a bid on one on Ebay for under $15 and it looked like I had it but somebody sniped me in last few seconds and I lost it. Oh well, another one will come along eventually.

Did some work on a loco today. A Rock Island FP7 had a loose connection in the DCC harness. Getting the shell off was ten times the work of the actual repair. I'd loosen the snap clip on one side then when I lifted the clip on the other side the one I'd just freed snapped back in place. It required me to put a screw under the one side then lift the other side so the chassis would slide out. The repair was simply soldering a wire back onto the 8-pin plug.

Sometime in the near future I have to open up my //e and vacuum out the dust that's starting to accumulate in it. Maybe tomorrow.

Time for me to call it a night. See y'all tomorrow.

P1010540.jpg


DSCN3313.jpg
 
Good morning. It's 57° with 100% humidity and patchy fog. The high will be 72°.
pcloudy-1.jpg


This morning I put away the locos I was working on and I'm now making preparations for the next project. That will be to convert two re-powered Varney F3A's to DCC. The first part of that will be to hard wire the harnesses. At the beginning of the month I'll get a couple of suitable decoders.

Sometime today I'll open the //e and using the vac with a dust brush I'll get the dust out of it. That'll take a while but it needs to be done.

P1010548.jpg
 
Good Morning All:

I spent a good part of yesterday, waiting for DAP Alex caulk to dry, it's like watching grass grow..........

IMG-20140318-00301.jpg
Train #455, "The Delmarva Express" ready for departure from Stoney Creek Station. The only thing missing are the catenary poles and wire..........

It's 34° and overcast, going up to 45° with rain showers today. At last that other word is not mentioned in any forecast.

Joe
 
Well I made the dusty interior of the //e as dust free as I could using a small brush I normally use to clean my beard trimmer and a small Shop-Vac with a mini dust brush.

DSCN3470.jpg


I then turned my attention to one of my re-powered Varney F3's. It has a blue box Athearn F7 chassis and is therefore a fairly easy install. Remove the motor, remove the contact tabs from the bottom of it then solder on the gray wire from the DCC harness. File the solder join flat, cover with a piece of electrical tape. Apply a strip of tape to the contact patch in the bottom of the motor well. Reinstall the motor. Solder orange wire to the top tab of the motor, red wire to contact arm of front truck, black wire to headlight clip, jumper wire to front and rear trucks. Organize the wires so they're not an unholy mess, just an organized mess.The 9-pin plug is over the rear flywheel awaiting a decoder. The decoder and a light or LED will have to wait until I can get such things, probably the end of the month.

DSCN3478.jpg
 
It's been a pretty good day. Even though I haven't been feeling all that great I managed to get the dust cleaned out of the //e and I got one of my two newest re-powered Varney F3's ready for a 9-pin decoder. I provided evidence of both of the above in the form of photos. This evening I installed a DCC 9-pin harness in the other re-powered Varney F3. As is customary with me I took a photo of the victim. It tried fighting me every step of the way or that could have been my shaky hands.

DSCN3485.jpg


Installing the decoders will be next month, assuming I can get them. I'm not sure what the bills will be looking like yet.
 
Well as I said earlier, it's been a busy day for me. For someone else it would likely have been a bit painful. I have a solder burn on the inner side of my left calf. A somewhat respectable glob of solder took a dive this morning. I thought it had hit the floor and didn't give it a second thought. I went right on with my work. This afternoon I just happened to look down and spotted the solder glob still stuck to my calf. It had been several hours since the morning solder job and the evening solder job wasn't even an idea at that point. I pulled the glob off and went about my business. Never felt a thing. Since then I washed it with some 91% alcohol and taped a small gauze pad over it.

Other than that and the activities I cited earlier I've watched some TV and played a couple of computer games. Toyed with an Apple program called 'Apple Organ'. It's a fun little program that allows you to play some rudimentary music on the keyboard. Only sixteen or seventeen keys so it's pretty limited.

That's it for today. Time to call it a night. See y'all tomorrow.

P1010559.jpg


DSCN3486.jpg
 
Gee! the molten solder trick, that takes me back to probably my 1st year of apprenticeship. Did the same thing, only this "blob" dropped down into behind the tongue of my shoe, I can tell you, I felt that, don't know if any of the dance steps would have won a competition, but by the time I got the shoe off it had done a real nice burn. Still got the scar 60 years later.
 
Looks like an update for my house and street may be in the wind on Google maps. The g/maps street view vehicle was parked opposite while the driver took a break for morning tea in the park. Nothing new to report much around here though.
 
Evening. No good about it. I went out this morning to get some laundry done. A couple hours watching TV then pack it up and bring it home. Right? WRONG! I got the clothes in the wash then my father roped me into working on his yellow MTD Yardman. How many ways can you spell junk? We couldn't even get a click out of it. Charged the battery and now we could get a very healthy clack from the starter solenoid.Nothing from the starter. I checked at the starter for power. Zip,zero, bop-kiss! So I pull the solenoid. Are you ready for this!? One of the terminals was burnt clean off! Well that called for a trip to town. We'd get a new battery for it as well. Stopped at the other side of the shed to check the red Murray. The battery wouldn't even take a charge. It was deader than my right foot, and that's pretty dang dead! So, two batteries. We got everything and I was stuck with putting most of it on. I got the yellow Yardman going. My father took it for a test run so everybody could see the work "he" did. I started on the red one. Just needed a battery change, oil and gas. It started righted right up. Later he was talking about all the work we did on them and then it was all the work 'he' did on them. By the time we were finished I was pretty wiped out. We had chili dogs for dinner the I rested there until my back stopped screaming so much, collected my laundry which was done then headed home. I just struggled into the door, put the clothes down and set to work on this post.

I won't be awake in about an hour so it's time for me to say good night and see y'all tomorrow folks.

P1010577.jpg
 
I bought a Spectrum USRA light (2-10-2) DCC and sound steamer about 9 months ago, but needed a 9 volt battery for my throttle.
I finally got the battery and ran the engine for the first time this week.
It is a SOUTHERN freight engine and the speed is like a real freight engine.
I ran it at 40% throttle and the sound was accurate for about 35 mph speed.
At full throttle, I got a scale 50 mph and the sound of 100 mph rods and pistons.
After playing with throttle settings for about an hour and a half, I found 40 to 50% throttle produced the best speed and sound combination.

All in all, I had a lot of fun running the engine and finding a prototypical appearance and sound as I operate the engine.
Just one more thing to make this hobby more enjoyable to me.
 
Hello Crew! Just dropped in to say hello. Shortly after I joined this forum a couple years ago, I began to somewhat regret the handle I'd chosen (railfan) which now in retrospect seems lame and lacks imagination and character. Think I was just stunned no one else had taken that name....since probably because they had better judgement....ha ha. So I struggle to make up for this by simply being a character, trying to fit in, and avoid causing trouble when possible. I'm not perfect. So just wanted to get that out in the open....no big woof...or wufe....which ever. :rolleyes: :eek:

Yeah, and then you have those rogue railfans with zero respect for etiquette, screaming at trains with excess enthusiasm, looking foolish and making me look bad. Hoo hee hoo ha ha! :eek: :cool:
 
Wait, there's more!

So I walked to down to the post office today, as if I lived in mayberry usa or some similar utopia, where they effortlessly just stroll downtown, on a whim, saying hello along the way to floyd the barber, goober, aunt B, barney, sheriff taylor, all like this. And on the way back I went in the nice used notebook computer store, hosted by a handsome young man Zac, and after briefly scanning the inventory, selected probably the nicest and only dell latitude E6510 business grade notebook in the place, which I quickly paid for, preventing some other tech savvy genius from beating me to it. Yeah, and it has windows 7 professional freshly installed on it, with a dedicated Nvidia graphics card with like stuff I can't even pronounce, let alone understand, but ha ha.

No, seriously it seemed like a good one, has the kind of options I like, and now been playing with it for hours and hours. And the youtube videos look and sound fantastic on this thing. Well, that was my day in a nutshell. But I must reduce the sensitivity of the dang mouse touch pad, as it's driving me insane the way it keeps messing up my text. :cool: Keep smiling if you can!
 
need-cofee.jpg


44 work hours so far this week, 22 more to go before Sunday,,and the train fairies have not arrived to do ANY work on the layout this week :(

cofffeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Morning. Can't say it's good as I'm in a lot of pain this am. It's 45° with 99% humidity and it's cloudy. The high will be 78°.
pcloudy-1.jpg


My one task for today seems easy on the face of it. Test a rebuilt disk drive. Problem is it has a connector my //e isn't set up for. I have a computer with the required interface card. It's (you guessed it) in the closet. That means getting that computer and a monitor out of the closet and setting them up. Yeah, right! The monitor will be on the floor and the computer on my lap and the disk drive (it's a heavy beast) on top of the computer. That'll probably put my legs to sleep. Guess what. When you have impaired feeling in your legs you can't tell when they're asleep. You go to get up and there's nothing there. The degree of what happens depends on how far you get. That usually ranges from falling to the knees to a total face plant. I try to avoid the face plant if at all possible. The last one would have scored me a gold medal at the Olympics.

Other than that I have nothing planned outside of a lot of time on the bed watching TV.

P1010578.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.



Back
Top