Coffee Shop XXXVIII-7/20/2013


I'll have to admit, as Ken says, I have had a problem in that I guess Fire Fox wouldn't allow me to view various videos as I needed to upgrade my Adobe Flash Player and then when I would try and download the newest version of Adobe it never would download properly so I just said to heck with it and found a way around it, at least to some extent.
 
So far, the only problem I have had with Chrome is listing stuff on Craigslist..........the only place I've found so far where Internet Exploder works faster.
 
Hey Jeffrey! When I looked at your pic of the loco entering/leaving that shed (page87, post#864) I thought it was a takeout from Tom Cruise's movie "War of the Worlds".
 
Hey Jeffrey! When I looked at your pic of the loco entering/leaving that shed (page87, post#864) I thought it was a takeout from Tom Cruise's movie "War of the Worlds".

It's an attention getter!

*

Got my hair cut today and also got my beard and mustache trimmed. Went to my doc appointment to see what's causing all this racket in my ears. He suspects I have a partially blocked blood vessel in my neck. He set up an appointment with a cardiac specialist for me so they can do an ultrasound scan of my neck and pinpoint the trouble spot. The appointment is set for October 4th. In the meantime I'll just have to live with the noise.

Got my newest Varney F3A today. The ad said good condition. It really isn't. The drive is in pieces which I already knew and the frame is damaged. The body however is in great shape and that's the only part I was really interested in. Somebody had already put brass handrails on it. Saves me from having to do it. One of the handrails is missing from the firemans side rear side door so that'll have to be replaced. I've already cut an opening in front for the coupler. It was easier this time. I drew the outline of the opening on the pilot, drilled an 1/8" hole in the middle then used my dremel with a 107 engraving bit to remove most of the Zamac from the area I had drawn out then used a 105 engraving bit to square up the corners a little. The headlight (blank) and portholes come next. The brass handrails protruded through to the inside of the body and had to be trimmed back so they wouldn't interfere with the frame. The body is now sitting on an Athearn blue box F7 drive and looks right at home there.

Well that's all for tonight. See y'all tomorrow.

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Get yourself some lead soldiers and do a wartime scene Jeff, you might have to upgrade to code 200 track if you put all those engines on at once.
 
Have you tried Firefox? I think the last time it crashed, or did anything weird at all, was about three weeks ago. I also think it was operator error that caused that glitch. The time before that was about 6 months ago. It's very stable.
I might try Firefox sometime. Right now I'm so impressed at the improvement with goo-chro. Can't believe it took me this long to start using it since I've had it on my computer for two years. And so I decided to try using the wireless on my laptop again today after many months using a cable. So far so good. But I still switch over to the cable when doing online banking because I don't trust the old version of WPA wireless security. I could maybe update it but I'm far too lazy to do that.....LOL! :rolleyes: :eek:
 
Good Morning! from Tipton IN.

It's Friday, September 13, 2013

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:cool:

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Temperature in TIPTON IN

High in the 70s today and clear!
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Get yourself some lead soldiers and do a wartime scene Jeff, you might have to upgrade to code 200 track if you put all those engines on at once.
I intend to have four in a lashup. As far as weight goes I already have the equivalent of four Varney's on the rails. Three are Frankenloco chassis with Varney F3B metal shells. The fourth is a Frankenloco chassis with a Bowser plastic F7 shell and an Athearn superweight. One of my friends wanted to test the sturdiness of a long trestle he had scratchbuilt and what better to use for that than four locos that together weigh seven plus Troy pounds! The trestle held but definitely needed to be strengthened if it was to support that amount of weight on a regular basis.
 
Good Morning

It is very cool out here this morning!! 48 and only getting up to 55?!

Had a very good day yesterday. Did a lot of nothing but fix and repair!!Bang Head The op session turned out to be our Murphy Convention after allGrumpy

Hope those who were evacuated out of the Boulder region in CO made it out ok...and they have something to come back too!!Tongue Tied
 
Good morning. It's 74° with 87% humidity. The high will be 95° and will feel like 102°.
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Today I'll most likely be doing some work on my newest Varney F3. There's a handrail missing so I have to make one for it. My steel wire is a little thicker than the brass wire that's on it but it shouldn't be noticeable except on close inspection. Looks like .020" vs .025" or something like that. There were two handrails missing from the engineers side cab door but I found them in the box and installed them last night. A little dab of super glue works wonders. There's still the headlight and portholes to drill out so I should be pretty busy with that.

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Jeffery- the house picture reminds me of the house where my grandmother grew up, in Kansas about 1910.
However, she said they did not have a grass lawn, just a rail to hitch the horses to.
Where is this house located?
 
Little Buffalo State Park in Pennsylvania. The house and ranch/farm it's on belongs to my younger sister. They have horses and pheasants.
 
For the past three and a half hours I've been working on the new F3 and almost none of it was on the outside. The extent of the work on the outside was making and installing a handrail to replace the one that was missing from the fireman's rear side door.

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The rest of the centered around adding weight to this beast. It's going to be the lead on an ABBB consist and I want it to be heavier than any of the B's. With them all being metal Varney B units that's a tall order. I'll be providing links to photos as I go along so I won't be cluttering up the post with photos.

First off I cut down an Athearn superweight to the desired size and shape so it will fit inside the Varney F3 shell.

Cut down superweight on F7 blue box chassis.

The inside of the Varney shell had to be altered to make room for the weight.

Parts of the shell were cut away.

Next the shell was mated with the weighted chassis. This was harder than it looks. Lots of small cuts had to be made. And there's still plenty of room for a decoder in there!

Gordon Varney probably never thought of this!

The roof insert had to be altered so it would fit over the weight.

Altered roof inser

The end result is what I call the F3 Super. A rough weigh in, weighing the pieces individually puts it at twenty-eight ounces or 1.75 pounds. Definitely a heavyweight.

Varney F3 Super
 
Had my monthly IGG treatment yesterday, and the nurses thought that I sounded so bad that they put me in a room afterwards and had the Dr. come in to see me. I left there with 3 prescriptions, and two holes in my butt from 2 antibiotic shots. He thinks its trying to turn into pneumonia. He says there are places in my lungs that have no sound, so he knows there are some major problems. Since I don't have a functioning immune system, if it gets worse, I'll have to go to the hospital next week. I hope not. been in them enough and don't particularly want to go back!

If the two shots and the three prescriptions don't work, that's where I'll windup.

Because of my coughing and fever, no real railroading done today, but a friend of mine brought over some cars for me to look at. He's starting to weather his cars, and has no experience in doing so. What he has done so far looks very good. There was one car in the bunch, that the previous owner tried to fade, using a white wash, and it looks like he used a spray bottle to apply the wash with. Looked terrible. I gave Scott several suggestions on how to fix, and I hope that they work.

Right now, there is a lot of noise in our neighborhood. A construction crew is currently removing the old asphalt from our street and will be applying a new surface next week. Wish they'd finish up, as it did wake me from my nap at about 1300, and its making me feel even worse.
 
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Hope the meds work for you Carey, you sure don't want to get pneumonia. It seems that it's always the way when you're feeling low that someone kicks up a racket. Chin up and keep on fighting.
 
Been busy today working on a Varney F3A. Got an Athearn drive in it, did some surgery on the shell, put in a cut down Athearn superweight, fixed some handrails. Maybe tomorrow I'll get around to drilling out the headlight and the portholes. I tore it down so I could weigh it on an antique postal scale my father has. It's old but it's accurate. Shell, roof insert, drive, weight. After adding up all the readings I came up with 29.12 ounces. That's 1.82 pounds. That officially makes it the heaviest Varney rebuild in my fleet. It'll be a little lighter after I drill out the portholes and headlight but not by much. It's gonna take a stout decoder to stand up to the power required to get it moving not to mention the weight it'll be pulling. It shouldn't be too bad though. There'll be four of these monsters on the head end. An A and three B's.

My father made cheese burgers for dinner tonight. They were enormous! The patties were 1/4 pound AFTER cooking. I could just barely get two down. If Mickey D's served burgers like that they'd go broke.

Thunder storms came through earlier tonight. Lots of lightning and thunder but no rain. Weather guesser says it's almost a 50% chance for tonight. I'm thinking we won't see a drop!

That's it for tonight. See y'all tomorrow.

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Had my monthly IGG treatment yesterday, and the nurses thought that I sounded so bad that they ... had the Dr. come in to see me. ... He thinks its trying to turn into pneumonia. ... if it gets worse, I'll have to go to the hospital next week. I hope not. ...

WOW Carey, that positively sucks!
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Seems like last month's IGG dose wore off kind of early? You're on our prayer list!
 
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Jeffrey, You are definitely going to have to go to code 200 with those Varney monsters or they'll be creating a bow wave, and if you eat too many of your fathers burgers so will you.
 
Good Morning! from Tipton IN.

It's Saturday, September 14, 2013

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:cool:

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Temperature in TIPTON IN

Clear today with a high of 67.
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Jeffrey, You are definitely going to have to go to code 200 with those Varney monsters or they'll be creating a bow wave.

I'm using Bachmann EZ-Track so there's plenty of support there. But I don't know if my friend is going to let them out on his trestle again. It held last time with three but it was creaking a bit. He said he was going to strengthen it. I hope he does a good job. The total weight of the locos alone is now 7.63 Troy pounds (about 6.27 pounds). I don't know. That trestle looks mighty spindly. There might be an awesome bridge collapse coming.
 



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