Coffee Shop XXIX

ModelRailroadForums.com is a free Model Railroad Discussion Forum and photo gallery. We cover all scales and sizes of model railroads. Online since 2002, it's one of the oldest and largest model railroad forums on the web. Whether you're a master model railroader or just getting started, you'll find something of interest here.


Status
Not open for further replies.
Good morning. It's 71° and sunny. The high will be 82° and it will be mostly sunny.

Went to my doctors appointment in DeRidder this morning. They finally discovered what I've been telling them all along. The brace they made is totally inadequate for the job. So it's back to square one. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the rest of the day.

Yesterday I had to dig up the leaking water pipe that my nephew said he was going to repair - last month. I got tired of waiting and did the job myself. Took about half an hour. I'm sure feeling it today but at least there's not a wet spot in the yard anymore. Finally had enough dollar bills to rub together to send off the payment for my History Channel magazine subscription. So now they shouldn't bug me about it for another two years.

DSCN2319.jpg
 
Now Karl....that hit song was suppose to be without the video. Oh well, the words say it all and the video shows what happens to you after you receive the ARRP card in the mail (actually the puppet looks more like Carey! hehehe).:D:D The guy doing that did a great job! I still remember the talking fist on Ed Sullivan (sooo-right!). LOL:D

BRRRRRR! We woke up to 58 degrees this morning. Looks like we got over 7.5 inches of rain from 10am yesterday until midnight. I believe our storm total is around 8-9 inches. Yes, the river is already at the top of the banks and the watershed from the hill country, north of here, hasn't even got to it yet.:eek:

Soon after yesterday's post, the power went off and on for a couple of hours and knocked the Internet out for ~two hours. The neighborhood over from us was out of power for 3 hours (guess it was that singing transformer. hummmmmmm!).

Jeffrey, I finally got the Dlink Bridge working yesterday. I am :o:o embarrassed to say, I must have had it connected the night before (@2:30am) and didn't realize it. It was showing as a LAN on the Linksys chart because I still had the Ethernet cable plugged in. I "ASSUMED" wrong that it wasn't connecting wireless.....Dlink is still a PITA and I will never buy another. The new Linksys E4200 is everything they say it is: excellent range and high speed transfer rates. Pricey, but very good.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
RexHea said:
Jeffrey, I finally got the Dlink Bridge working yesterday. I am :o:o embarrassed to say, I must have had it connected the night before (@2:30am) and didn't realize it. It was showing as a LAN on the Linksys chart because I still had the Ethernet cable plugged in. I "ASSUMED" wrong that it wasn't connecting wireless.....Dlink is still a PITA and I will never buy another. The new Linksys E4200 is everything they say it is: excellent range and high speed transfer rates. Pricey, but very good.
Click to expand...
Glad you got it working. I hope it doesn't pull down the speed on the Linksys equipment.



So far today I've remotored a Proto 2000 BL2 (Athearn motor from SD40), a Stewart F9A (motor from Proto 2000 FA1). I have a Stewart F9B here that needs a motor. I may be able to shoehorn on an Athearn motor. I also have a Proto 2000 E7A with a cracked nose that needs fixing. I figure a little super glue gel should do the trick. I seems I never run out of fun things to do.
 


Well, today I received four locos in the mail. One worked but had a cracked shell. The other three had good shells but two had slow motors and one had a dead motor. The one that worked OK is a Proto 2000 E6 chassis with a Trainline E7 shell. The nose was cracked so I put some super glue gel in the crack and held the crack closed for fifteen minutes while I played some solitaire. The motor in the BL2 worked but it ran extremely slow even on straight DC. So I changed the motor out with one from an Athearn SD40. The other two locos are Stewart F9's, an A-B unit set. The A unit had a weak motor so I changed it out with one from a Proto 2000 FA1. The motor in the B unit was DOA. It wouldn't even show up on the meter. I shoehorned in a motor from an Athearn switcher. While I was at it I changed out the trucks with a set that were compatible with the motor. So now it has AAR trucks. Point is it works. I don't much care what it looks like as long as it runs good. Someday I'll be able to get decoders for these four.
 
RexHea said:
I braved the elements yesterday and went to Best Buy looking for a new wireless router. I came back with the new Linksys E4200 to replace my Dlink 1522 that was suppose to handle a house up to 5000 sq feet....Bull Crappy! Anyhow, I have everything connected up except a danged Dlink Bridge that handles some stuff at the entertainment area. The signal is very strong and super fast all over our property and Netflix movies download twice (thrice?) as fast than before.
Click to expand...

Best thing to do with any router sold for home use is to nuke the firmware and download dd-wrt instead. http://dd-wrt.com/site/index That lets you tinker with all sorts of things that are normally hidden from the end user. It also improves the throughput of 90% of the routers on the market. My crappy d-link now works better than the out of the box Linksys did before it was upgraded. Now I have 50mbit fibre internet connected to a 1Gbit intranet along with 140mbit wireless that covers the whole house, garden, and shed. (using an ancient linksys as a wireless relay) http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=1315396442&v=13662531
 
Good morning. It's 54° and clear. The high will be 84° and mostly sunny.

No plans for today. We'll just see what happens. The front area of my layout looks like Gomez Addams paid me a visit. There are pieces of old locos strewn about, motors, trucks, motor mounts, flywheels, frames, circuit boards, couplers with their springs gone.

P2030423.jpg
 
Good morning folks.

It's suppose to be another beautiful day today. Sunny with a high of 74.:D It needs to stay sunny because I just waxed my car yesterday and it's super purdy!:)

I'm finally going back to work today after four days off. It's been quite nice to get away for a few days before the busy days of fall and on to Christmas shoppers. I have to decorate the store for fall when I get there so my day is busy before I even get there. Maybe I'll be interrupted and actually sell something instead!;)

That's all I've got for now.
Have a good day everyone.
 


Good morning folks

It was 72 F and raining when I hit the water logged streets this morning. Our high will be 81 F with more heavy rain.

It looks like since this rain started yesterday we have gotten close to 2 inches. Needless to say flooding is again becoming a problem around here. There are road closures all over the places and accidents everywhere. Some people at work spent nearly two hours getting into the office when their normal trip takes less than 30 minutes.

It was a rough extended weekend for us. My kid’s godmother passed away on Wednesday. Her funeral was yesterday. My wife and daughter took it hard. I don’t think it has fully sunk in with my son. Although yesterday after we came home from the funeral he decided to clean-up the attic and basically spent the entire afternoon and evening working on it himself. I offered to help but he chased me out. I am still in shock over it. We knew it was coming but no matter how prepared you are you are never really ready.

My daughter’s volleyball season started out on a mixed note. She is now a varsity starter. However, the team went down in three sets to their down the street rivals, Archbishop Prendergast. In the first set the first string looked unsure and played tentatively. It was only the third time they have played together as a unit. In the second set the coach made a few changes and the results were very inconsistent play. The only reason the game was semi-close was the other team also played poorly. In the third set the first stingers played much better as unit and lost a close game. Overall the girls were pleased with their performance and they showed some determination as they did not give up and fought to the last point. It was a welcome change from what we saw last year where the team gave up on a regular basis. Today we get to see if they made any more progress as they take on Conestoga High School.

We have our Cub Scout Welcome Back night tonight.

I hope everybody has a good day.
 
Hi, guys.

I'm back from 3 weeks in England/Ireland/Scotland. I did lots of tourist-type stuff, but nothing to do with trains (except ride on them---*yawn) I did go past the National Railway Museum in York on a couple occasions, and would have loved to stop there, but it just wasn't in the cards.

Looks like I'll be taking a hiatus from active modeling for a while. I'm not happy with the direction I've headed, and might just chuck it all and start over. At a bare minimum, I'm not going to throw more money into what I'm presently doing until I've convinced myself it's what I really want. I'm not sure what I will do, but doing anything really ambitious in HO in a 9X13 room is terribly limiting. 6-axle diesels on a 22" radius just look plain goofy to my eye. I'm just not sure what I want to do yet.

I really like On2-1/2. Short mainlines, small trains, and tight radii are permissible, and allow much more opportunity for building structures and scenery.

Oh well. That's my conundrum for today.

Glad to be back. Three weeks of living out of a suitcase can really get old, no matter how wonderful the location.
 
Good evening. It's a nice 85° here with hardly a cloud in the sky.

I spent most of the morning at my parents place helping my father cut bushes out of the fence and trim low hanging limbs. OK, he did that. I drove the tractor with a trailer on behind and loaded the limbs and bushes into the trailer and hauled them off to the burn pile. For lunch we went into town to Buffet City. Only place in town where you can get chicken cooked eighteen different ways. Then we dropped my mother at Stage so she could do some quick shopping. Fifteen minutes she said. Yeah! Right! Thirty-seven minutes later she emerged from the store with a small bag as evidence of her efforts. Still she set a new record for herself. Her shortest time before that was one hour and twenty-five minutes and she walked out with a store clerk carrying two large bags for her while she carried a third and I carried the fourth. I remember that particular trip because I had a little fun while I was waiting for her in the store. I was sitting near one of the checkout stands (they're sprinkled all over the store) just resting, leaned back with my left leg crossed over the right leg and my arms crossed, not moving a muscle if I could help it. This young girl about ten or eleven is standing close by looking at me. I'm not moving. She steps closer. Maybe she thinks it's some kind of display though why a clothing store would have a display of a bearded man in jeans and t-shirt is beyond me. She steps closer and reaches out and touches my left arm. I opened my left eye and while my left eyebrow disappeared into my hairline I said in a conversational tone 'BOO!'. She let out a short scream and jumped two feet up and four feet back. Back to today. By the time I got home it was 5 pm. I'm just sitting here trying to recover from the day. I'm sure that later I'll be hurting in places I didn't know I had. My foot is a bit swollen from the work this morning so I'm going to have to take it easy for a while.
 
Hope you enjoyed the UK Tom, (apart from the cost of everything which is crazy) You would have loved the NRM at York.

I'm getting ready to go for some surgery to close a varicose vein, it's a piece of cake to fix it so not expecting any problems with the new fangled radio frequency technique they use,,,, BUT i would sooner be going to the dentist to have some teeth out, i have one thats giving me hell on earth this week but gotta wait till next Thursday to get it out, wish the wife would get toothache so she can feel the pain for real, if she's ill everyone knows if im ill it's my own fault for being male ha ha,,, women eh.

Ya'll have a nice day folks :)
 
Good morning folks

It was 69 F and not raining when I hit the crowded roadways this morning. Our high today will be 77 F.

Even though it wasn’t raining when I left the damage was already done. We got close to 3.5 inches of rain overnight making close to 5 inches over the last 36 hours. Roads were flooded all over the place. Traffic was nightmare. Many of the major commuter routes were closed and most of the commuter rail was canceled. My usual commute of 45 minutes took 1 hour 50 minutes. I did not encounter any road closures just a lot of cars on the road. We are expecting another round of heavy rain this afternoon.

My daughter’s volleyball team lost yesterday, 3-0. They had moments were they were playing very well and other moments where they looked confused and out of sync. It is a little frustrating right now since they seem to very close to playing well as a group. There are those moments of a spark of good team. They just need to get over the last hump and I think they will do well. Again they did not give up. One girl, however, was driving them a little crazy because whenever she made a mistake she was getting down on herself and dwell on it too much and it was affecting her play and the team. Friday they have another match so hopefully we will see improvement.

We had our Cub Scout Welcome Back Night last night and it went off well.

With all the rain we have been getting some water in the basement. It has not been much and I have to go down and squeegee it into the drain. I keep waiting for the deluge of water running across the basement floor.

I hope everybody has a good day.
 
Good morning. It's mostly sunny and 59°. The high will be 83° and it will be sunny.

Nothing planned for today except to take it easy. I pushed it a bit yesterday. Both of the Stewart F units are now in running condition as are the BL2 and the E7. Time for a well deserved break.

DSCN1545.jpg
 


Status
Not open for further replies.




Affiliate Disclosure: We may receive a commision from some of the links and ads shown on this website (Learn More Here)

Back
Top