Coffee Shop XXXVIII-7/20/2013

[kbkchooch]

Mornin Gang!

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and all the windows in the house are open! Its almost chilly in here this morning! The kittys are sitting in the windows, letting out little chirps and meows when a bird lites on the feeder.
Remotored my Mikado Project last night with a new can & flywheel. Hooked it up to 3 volt power source and watched it crawl, dragging the battery pack, across the workbench. Just the bare loco chassis. No heavy cast metal boiler, just the frame and running gear. Smooth as a switch watch! Getting ready now to head out to the Greenburg show, in an attempt to find a few out of production parts.
Will drop in later, maybe even with some pics of the project so far.
L8ters!

 

[railfan]

I suppose not too many of you think of August fourth being a holiday.......but at least a few little known countries celebrate it as....huge crane on a flatcar day.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Good morning. It's 85° (feels like 105) with 73% humidity. The high will be 95° and will feel like 110°. Isolated thunderboomers in the afternoon.

with

No outdoor activity for me today if I can help it. Did some light work on my IIe this morning. It uses an older 80 column text card that didn't have support for double high resolution graphics. A simple bit of old wire and a little soldering and it now supports double high res graphics. It can also now function as a RAM disk under DOS 3.3. This sets aside part of the computers RAM memory to function like a logical disk drive. Not hard to do on many modern computers but it can be difficult on these old dinosaurs as they're very hard to memory map. In this case the RAM chips on the text card serve as the RAM disk. When a program requiring more RAM than is available on the computers main board is being used the Ramdisk function will be automatically disabled.

No plans for today but I'm sure something will present itself.

 

[Trussrod]

Good afternoon all,
Hi Flo & Francine, you ladies sure keep the Coffee shop up nice. I'll have the Burger special and a Cola drink of whatever type you have. Oh Rex said he'd pay but I don't see him so I guess it's my money today!

It's 95.7 °F with a very slight breeze, Clear skies & Humidity of 9%, clouds could move in later on or tonight.

Well it seems I let too many things get in the way of work on my layout so that's going to change today. As I mentioned in an earlier post I bought a new soldering station [[Weller type] made in China - What isn't these days] from Micro Mark about 4 months ago and haven't even tried it yet. I gave my older unit away and wondering if maybe I should have kept it, I'm wondering if the new 48 Watt unit puts out enough heat to solder the rails when building switches?? Guess I'll find out.

Now I seem to have another problem, when I went into the train area I said why back my MDC/Athearn 2-8-0 down the hill so I could move my old MDC 2-6-0 out of the way so I could vacuum up some of the mess the mouse made with the Doc tree I had planted up there, it's demolished now. I have more out front so no problem, besides it's not all that prototypical looking but does ad variety.

Anyway in trying to get the newer MDC/Athearn loco to run the [DC] radio control unit kept cutting out saying there was some kind of a short and yet there was nothing on the tracks I could see and the reversing unit in the loco seem to work for a bit but would quit of course when the radio control unit sending unit killed the power. Giving it some thought it could be that some bug crawled inside the transformer and shorted something out. I have everything set up in blocks so it hard to understand where the short is unless it's within the Loco? More trials and tribulations. And here it is almost 4:00 PM too.


Say Corey,That a very good idea to inventory most of your stuff as that should be a big help.
I also wanted to mention to anyone else that doesn't have spread sheet program that OpenOffice.org is a very complete office suite which also incluces an excel like spread sheet and the whole program is a free down load, free to use and free to upgrade. Scott McNeally of Sun Micro systems is behind this to the best of my knowledge. It's a first class program and for FREE!


Say Mike;That's one Heavy Duty looking crane alright. I was looking at the protective cage they have over the operators compartment and then looking at the size of the boom and thinking they should be at least four times as big to offer any real protection.

 

[blownoutcylinder]

Good Evening.

Good BBQ, good friends, good beer....what else could one ask for...oh...great sunshiny day!!

BBQ'ed up a few ribeyes with some dry rub mixed in and a whiskey infused BBQ sauce I made up...plus baked potato and grilled veggies as well....lots to be had too!!

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

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

 

[Bill Tidler Jr.]

]Good Morning! from Tipton IN.

It's Monday, August 5, 2013

Temperature in TIPTON IN

 

[Trussrod]

Good morning Bill and all,
It's 68.2 °F, clear skys and looking for 93.0°F unfortunately, Humidity 12%.

I found my shorting problem, seems the hot weather expanded the rails enough that gaps between blocks had closed up. It required that I use the razor saw and re-gap the main line if several spots but I guess I must have been getting feed back through the main buss line? After doing a few gap jobs things were work like they should.

It's been a long day and now 4:08 in the morning.

Talk with you guys later

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

I found my shorting problem, seems the hot weather expanded the rails enough that gaps between blocks had closed up. It required that I use the razor saw and re-gap the main line if several spots but I guess I must have been getting feed back through the main buss line? After doing a few gap jobs things were work like they should.

I hope you get the shorting problem all sorted out. Usually they're caused by the simplest things.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Good morning. It's 76° with 100% humidity. It already feels like 87°. The high will be 98° and will likely feel like 110°. The forecast says there will be plenty of sunshine.

Only plan for today is to clean the place up a bit. Trash needs to go out and clutter needs to be thinned out. Other than that I won't be doing much.

 

[blownoutcylinder]

Good Morning

We got down to 45 here...mmmmm....could Fall be around the corner so early?

Since we are having a somewhat statutory/not quite stat holiday a lot of grocery stores etc are closed but not other stores....

Doing some of the planning stuff today...need to measure out the space at the Lair of Doom...think that may be just the name for that studio as well, lol!!

Anyhow...have a good one!!

 

[Boris]

Good Morning:

It's a chilly 63° and sunny at the Jersey Shore. Some yahoo on CH 2 news, yesterday, was talking about how summer was over already. Really, when did the seasons change?

I might actually find some time (and energy) to clean up around my layout today. I also need to paint my project passenger cars, in case the clown on TV is right.

Have a great week!

Joe

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

The humidity here is so high it sounds like it's raining inside the a/c unit. Feels like it's 96 outside right now. I still have to pack out the trash too. Just checked postal service tracking and it looks like the two Mitac disk drives I bought are both arriving today. One came from Ohio, the other from California. I'll check the California shipment just to see if it has one of those 'This item contains something or another that's known to' blah, blah, blah. I seriously doubt it. It would be a laugh though if it did. I was just looking at my layout and wondering how long it'll take to construct a new park area that's big enough to hold the track that will cross it. Of course that'll have to wait until I'm back on my feet, quite literally. It doesn't hurt to formulate some kind of plan though.

 

[logandsawman]

Will this help cool you southerners off?


Crisp spring air, a layer of ice on the ponds and some lingering snow patches. The robins are chirping good morning all, and the trestle over the Bad River in Northwestern Wisconsin; 315 yards in length. One of my favorite places in the world.

Got a bit done on my suspension bridge Sunday afternoon, hope to finish it this week and take a photo.

logandsawman

 

[IronBeltKen]

Hello all, sunny and pleasant here in central MD. Wish I didn't have to work on a day like this to pay my bills!

Sawman, that's a cool photo of that trestle. What RR is it? Are they still using it?

Well this was an interesting weekend for me. It all began when I went out to the trainroom to start decluttering from all the carpentry and other work; found a leftover Conrail 86ft hi-cube boxcar that I had intended to store away since Conrail was too late my era. Then I thought, why not back-date it for Penn Central? I searched the 'net but I couldn't find any PC boxcars that weren't painted in that 'not-quite-jade' green color. As luck would have it, I had some of that color of Pollyscale paint, so I spent much of the day repainting the body. Had to order the decals thru my LHS, I'll pick 'em up Friday.

While I was perusing rr-fallenfkags.org for PC hi-cubes, I also saw what looked like an 'opera glass' style center spine flatcar. I never knew they dated back that far, so I did a google search and - lo and behold - this type of car was first manufactured in 1969, two years before my target year 1971. [The car in this photo was shot in 1974.] This was exciting news, as I've always loved this type of car and now it looked like I could use the one I had stashed away on my layout. Of course I couldn't keep it in its yellow TTX scheme, I had to paint it for BN. I mixed some leftover Pollyscale colors to get something that resembles BN green, now I just have to wait until Friday to pibkup the decals.

That's the good news; the bad news is, I got nowhere on cleaning up/decluttering the trainroom.

Have a great day everyone!

 

[logandsawman]

The trestle was used in 2011, when I was last there. An ice flow had hit it and done some damage, so they wouldn't pull too much over it at one time.



I think the line was purchased by the Canadian National, it runs into Superior, Wi.

The bridge had last been rebuild in 1991, and at that time had a hand rail on both sides. I walked over the bridge and back to access some land. When you are over the rapidly flowing water, it is a bit hair raising.

lasm

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Got the two Mitac disk drives. One worked right out of the box with no problems. The other one would just sit there spinning the disk with no other signs of life. Well, that's about what I expected for $10. I chased the problem down and found that the controller board for the motors was bad. I had another board just like it on an Apple drive but there's some soldered wires that have to be taken off then resoldered and I really didn't feel like doing that. So I considered my options. Here I had a drive with a bad motor controller. I had an Apple drive chassis with a bad control board. The solution was obvious. I put the Mitac control board on the Apple chassis and viola, it worked. I had a good drive. It was a simple matter to remove the Mitac chassis from it's case and install the Apple chassis in it's place. It was a perfect fit. The drive has been tested and is working perfectly! On the outside it looks like any other Mitac drive. Same story inside until you look closely at the data sticker on the chassis and see Apple. So as I look at it I have two new disk drives. A Mitac and a Miple.

The Mitac drives are on the left (obviously). On the right (top to bottom) are a Franklin Ace 10, an Apple Disk II and a Quentin AP-100 (I think. The label is gone).

 

[railfan]

Jeffrey, the unit numbers and hand rails are missing?

 

[railfan]

I walked over the bridge and back to access some land. When you are over the rapidly flowing water, it is a bit hair raising.

lasm

Did you have train schedule when you walked across the trestle? I would be afraidy cat anyhoo.
-

 

[Trussrod]

Good afternoon guys,
Nothing much going on here, it is bright and sunny though.


Log & Saw Man, I'll have to agree with Ken that trestle is very interesting.


Jeffery Yep, as I wrote just prior as noted in my quote, the short was caused be the expansion of the rails due to the heat.


Hope everyone has a good day.