Coffee Shop XXIX


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Good morning. It's 74° and mostly cloudy. The high will be 94° and it will be partly cloudy with a 20% chance of thunderstorms.

This is not a good day for me. Woke up this morning with a blood sugar level of 47. Mixed up a glass of raspberry lemonade with 14 grams of sugar and had a good drink. Level is now at 74. Not optimum but a lot better than it was. I also have a cold chill. I just can't get warm. I have the heater on to warm it up a bit in here. It's hard to type. I've already made more mistakes than a first grade spelling class. No modeling today unless I can stop shivering.

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Good morning folks.

I have the day off and am knee deep in ground foam, glue and Silfor. Well, not knee deep but you get the picture. I'm continuing with the process of finishing areas of the layout from left to right. I use the word finish loosely though. I'm bringing each section to the next level of detail. I'm kind of doing this in layers so to speak. The buildings have been built for a year and the track layed for two, but there was nothing to make them look like a part of the real world. I'm now adding the weeds and growth that would have been present behind the buildings and around the tracks. It sure helps to make it come alive. Now I need to buy cars and people. LOTS and LOTS of cars and people!:D

I'm listening to old time radio and running trains while I 'play'. What a great day off!:cool:

I hope your day is going as well as mine.
 
jeffrey-wimberly said:
This particular model is of a beam ablanced pump and they tend to be on the big side. They fill fill the need of economically producing many of the shallow wells. The pump most people are used to seeing is the conventional unit which is widely known and accepted. It's the old reliable 'WORK HORSE' of the oil patch an dis the most universally adaptable. Other types include unitorque, low profile (useful in fields irrigated by traveling sprinkler systems or in urban areas), air balanced units which use compressed air instead of heavy counter weights, reverse mark which is similar to the conventional unit but requires a smaller prime mover for the same amount of work.
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We have them all over the place working the methane gas fields (over the coal seams) and commonly called "Horse Head" pumps. I've been told they are there to keep the wells' fractures free of water, so gas pockets can easily form (Don't know for sure). I've seen a few big ones near the size of your model.
 
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Yeah, I've seen a few big ones too. I was riding with a friend of mine as we were returning from Denver. We were going through Kansas when he commented that those pumps didn't look very big. So we pulled off and walked out to one. That took a bit and it seemed it wasn't getting any closer for quite a while. When we finally got to the fence around it it was very obvious that thing was about as high as a two story house. And there are bigger ones! He lost $50 on it. On my model it's 31 scale feet from the ground to the top of the jack head at full rise.
 
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Good afternoon,
The Oil/Gas/etc pumps I used to see seemed as though there were at least a couple of sizes of them. It's been a long time ago and still not certain if there any in operation, but I would think so, here in Central Calif?


I just looked them up on the web and this is what I found for the Central Valley area of Calif.
There are hundreds of pumpjacks on Lost Hills Oil Field near route 46 in California. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpjack

There is also a great pictorial description of a Pumpjack

*A pumpjack (nodding donkey, pumping unit, horsehead pump, beam pump, sucker rod pump (SRP), grasshopper pump, thirsty bird, jack pump) is the overground drive for a reciprocating piston pump in an oil well.

It is used to mechanically lift liquid out of the well if there is not enough bottom hole pressure for the liquid to flow all the way to the surface. The arrangement is commonly used for onshore wells producing little oil. Pumpjacks are common in oil-rich areas.

Depending on the size of the pump, it generally produces 5 to 40 litres of liquid at each stroke. Often this is an emulsion of crude oil and water. Pump size is also determined by the depth and weight of the oil to remove, with deeper extraction requiring more power to move the heavier lengths of sucker rods.

A pumpjack converts the rotary mechanism of the motor to a vertical reciprocating motion to drive the pump shaft, and is exhibited in the characteristic nodding motion. The engineering term for this type of mechanism is a walking beam. It was often employed in stationary and marine steam engine designs in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Looks like you started something Jeffery and that could be a very interesting working model to also have on a layout too! In fact that would go great with my Oil/Kerosene
storage facility and I have room, I think, to place it.
 
Evening all

Been a gorgeous day today so been sat outside cutting sheets of card printed with bricks and pavement etc then stuck them to a couple of modules for on the railway, one's an inclined access road to the fire station the others forms a tunnel with the fire station and yard on the top of that.
 
We drove up from SoCal to the Bay Area this morning (475 miles), and when we got here, the first stop was at the Train Shop to pick up my two GP-9's. They are gorgeous, and the Tsunami sound is amazing.

Now, we have a couple appointments, then we head back home. We should be there around midnight. It will make for a pretty long day.
 
Good morning. It's 74°. Today: Partly to mostly cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms. Hot. High 93°. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.

Nothing on the schedule today. I don't feel any better than I did yesterday except that I'm not so cold. I might do some cleaning up on the layout.

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Good Late Morning,
It's about 90* at almost 12:00Am and going for 98* so it not as cool as I'd like it but it's
supposed to get up to 100* tomorrow.

I finally got the control boxes mounted on a sign board type of arrangement so if I have to remove the actual well enclosure at some point or another I can detach the two legs of the control board mounting sign board giving them something to stand alone, so to speak, on while the main box is removed. This actually came about by accident but glad it did!

Hope everyone has a good day!
 
jeffrey-wimberly said:
Good morning. It's 74°. Today: Partly to mostly cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms. Hot. High 93°. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.

Nothing on the schedule today. I don't feel any better than I did yesterday except that I'm not so cold. I might do some cleaning up on the layout.

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Say Jeff, that's a very interesting looking rust affect on that Coal Hopper, did you do that? If so I'd sure like to learn how to do that!
 
I did that. It was done with AIM weathering powders and Valspar Clear Flat. Spraying the Clear Flat on makes the rust colored powder turn dark. The areas of lighter rust were applied over the Clear Flat. A full set of the AIM Weathering Powder will run you about $35 at Walthers. You can get rust weathering powder on Ebay for about $10. One of my own forum members asked the same question.
 
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Well, today I opened up the two Stewart F9's and ran a set of wires between them to tie the wheel pickups all together. No way they'll lose power going through turnouts. To permanently couple them I put a couple of horn hook couplers between them and lashed them together with strands of aluminum wire. No way those babies are coming uncoupled. That's about all I could manage today.
 
Good morning. It's 71° and sunny. The high will be 96° and it will be partly cloudy.

Yesterday I opened up two Stewart F9's and ran wires from pne to the other to join the pickups of both locos together. I also lashed the couplers together. Today I'll be working on a pair of Athearn F3's. Their chassis have been wired together for years. I'll be wiring a third F unit to them, in this case a Proto 1000 chassis with an Athearn Hi-F F7B shell. The couplers of the second and third units will also be lashed together. The heavy Proto 1000 chassis wiil add a lot of pulling power to the two much lighter Athearn's. A fourth unit, an F7B dummy will be along for the ride. The F7B's will be bringing dynamic brakes to the party. Neither of the F3's have dynamics.

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I finished wiring a Proto 1000 F unit to a couple of Athearn F units to make a permanently connected consist of three powered locos. All three were pre-programmed separately and speed matched then all three were set to the same address. Wires run from unit to unit to tie all the pickups together. This eliminates any stalling through turnouts. It also makes the three locos pick up power like one big twelve axle loco.
 
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Been a busy day for me. I hard wired an F7B onto a previously hard wired pair of F3's then wired together two Atlas FP7's back to back. The size of the wires are a bit bigger than I'd like but they'll do. The wiring together of the FP7's makes up for the inconsistent pickup of the newer unit so both locos now run great together even though they have Bachmann decoders. I still have a pair of Bachmann GP30's and a pair of Bachmann GP7's to wire into permanent consists but I need much thinner wire. When I get my hands on some 30 AWG wire I'll be able to proceed.
 
Good morning. It's 69° and sunny. The high will be 83° and partly cloudy.

This morning I'll be busy with the once a month task of paying bills. I can pay most of them from right here but there are a couple of places that insist on remaining in the stone age and want to be paid face to face. There's also the first half of the grocery shopping to get done not to mention the wallet emptying act of buying gas for the van. Later there's something I have to do. It seems there's a Union Pacific FP7 on my layout that's screaming to get patched. The Pennsy FP7 on behind it will also get it's patch.

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