Good evening Shop Dwellers! 39*F and calm under clear skies here in central MD.
A quick
shout-out to all who 'liked' my drive-by post from Monday night:
Garry, Phil, Hughie, Tom-O, Sherrell, Patrick, Guy, Karl, Tom-C
Jesse - It looks like you have kinked joints on both ends of the bottom turnout connection in the upper-left corner of your photo. I clipped a piece of it to show you what I'm referring to:
A kink in straight track could cause enough problems, but a kink leading into a sharp-radius turnout will
definitely give you derailments. (
P.S. I just noticed you also have uneven joints between the curved sections in the top half-loop.) Can you get any flex track? That would be the easiest way to avoid kinks and still use that track plan. Otherwise, you might try
pre-joining all of your track sections tightly together
before permanently spiking down your track, although your curve radius won't be as broad.
Tom-C - I had to laugh when I read your post about the bird feeder. We have squirrels constantly devouring the seeds we put into our feeders for the birds; they always seem to find ways to either outsmart the anti-squirrel devices, or - when that fails - literally
chew thru them! I asked my wife if she'd like to see raptors swoop down and devour the squirrels, but she said "Absolutely
not - that would be
too gruesome!"
* * *
Guess it's time to share the incremental photos of my F9-to-F7 conversion. As you may recall, I was using the cannibalized shell to rehearse the cutting-up operation. An important insight I got was that my Dremel 1/8th-inch, rounded cutting bit was the
wrong tool for the job: Because it wasn't much bigger than the thickness of the plastic, if I failed to keep it in far enough it would "escape" and claw its way upward outside the boundary of the intended cut-out area - potentially damaging the shell. So, I had to make a trip to my local Ace Hardware to get some of the optimum-shaped bits that I needed. As luck would have it, their Dremel section was heavily picked-over and they had nothing even close to what I was looking for! That forced me to go to Home Depot and see what
they had; luckily I found what I needed. But this used up an extra hour of the time I'd set aside for this project.
Here's what I bought: A
long, narrow grinding bit that was the same diameter as my ill-suited cutter (right) and a
pointed-tip grinder (left) which I used to get rid of the bulge of the bottom headlight:
That long bit gave me much-better control of the cutting-out process,
without the risk of runaways!
Before I began cutting, I grabbed a Sharpie and blacked-over the areas I wanted to eliminate - the panels immediately behind the forward doors on each side, and the 48" diameter dynamic brake fan:
I on the side panels, I started at the porthole with the Dremel and worked my way outward from there, using jewelers' files to smooth the edges. For the 48" fan, I had to drill a quarter-inch diameter hole in the center as a starting point for the cutting bit. Here is the shell with target areas carved out:
A little more filing of the edges wherever needed, and I was able to fit-in the pieces from the cannibalized shell (including the 36" D/B fan). I filled in the bottom headlight opening with quick-setting J*B Weld:
Before permanently cementing the pieces in, I decided to slap a coat of PollyScale Reefer Gray primer on them to minimize the chance of any underlying contrasts in darkness of the final paint:
I spent pretty much all of my free time on Monday sculpting this shell, which is why I didn't have time for a normal-type post. Now I'll need to order a set of Stewart/Bowser F unit super-detailing grab irons from Detail Associates (or
whoever makes them [?])...
I put a shake roof on it instead of what was provided.
