Running Bear’s June 2025 Coffee Shop

[santafewillie]

What I have been told by someone in one of the companies, when a driver makes a delivery, he drops a pin in their map. All subsequent drivers deliver to that pin, right or wrong. And it’s almost impossible to correct.

Amazon used to do that. Only select drivers were allowed to alter the delivery location.

My neighbor (a quarter mile north) gave an acre to their daughter as a wedding gift, and they put a double-wide there. However the first Amazon delivery to them was mistakenly delivered to our house and was pinned as the correct location. I had to intercept another half dozen (along with many that I didn't catch) and redirect the drivers to the correct location before I finally got one who was able to fix it on the spot. All of the others claimed that they couldn't do it and that they would report it to their dispatcher, which obviously didn't happen.
You can imagine the ensuing confusion after last year's tornado that took out those two homes next door! "Duh! There's no house where the computer says there should be".

 

[Boris]

The older I get, the more I see, the less I trust. Especially the "news".

Dave: I feel the same way.

BTW: My "least favorite carrier" is the USPS, but FedEx is not far behind. Many times, it depends on the quality of the individual driving the route on a given day. The Amazon people locally, try. UPS is mostly reliable.

 

[Boris]

Nearly complete, 742 W Front Street, aka the G.M. Stull Building, is posed at it's permanent layout location.

 

[westtexjohn]

Good day to all............

More work in train room today.
I tried making up a 3 wire connection for a servo. I have a kit with the pins/ends and spent a pretty penny on a precision crimping tool. I spent about 30 minutes and did one wire with one pin......way too tedious for me to deal with. It was at that time I decided to order a 20 pack of male to female servo connectors that are only 6 inches long. I now can just snip off the male/female end I need (making a 3 inch long pigtail) and solder the three servo wires together with a bit of shrink wrap a whole lot faster than trying to make them up. Live and learn. In case your wondering, I'm using servos to power my turnouts so I have a bunch to do.

Amazon delivers to my place here in west Texas with no problem. They do a better job than my USPS guy does. I have received items from Amazon on a Sunday which I thought was great.
I hate it when an item is sent by UPS but somewhere along the line the package is handed off to the USPS. I can usually always add another 3 to 5 days to the original estimated delivery time when this happens.

I may try flying my drone this afternoon if the wind dies down. Well, maybe not as I just heard thunder outside. It was sunny 30 minutes ago. I need to go over the start-up documentation/instructions again anyway.

Everyone have a great day....John

 

[chadbag]

I came to the same initial conclusion, but it doesn't bear out all that well. I actually wrote a test program yesterday to verify my assumptions, and on an M2 Mac with gcc, even a regular ol' float has more than enough precision to accurately represent the value to two places. Even doing mm/inch conversions (or inch/even smaller units) repeatedly didn't affect that. And that was with -O0, so no compile-time optimizations. I tested to an additional six decimal places on the math, btw.

Sue me, I was curious.

It's doing something somewhere with math or something odd, or perhaps it's written in some other language that doesn't handle floats as well, dunno. Either way, it's unacceptable for a CAD package to have so little in the way of precision IMO. If I enter a value, I expect it to stay entered, exactly.

Maybe it's single precision float. Though I'm betting it is uses mm or something under the hood and converts to inch for display. That's just a guess.

I'd use fixed point math as integers, with an assumed decimal place, personally.

 

[insomniville]

All this talk about Amazon just reminded me that I had a six week supply of cat litter sitting on the doorstep. Amazon here is fairly reliable, at least.

Pro tip that all of you already know: on a very hot day, even though it's 75F inside, that spot up in the corner of your ten foot ceiling where you're hanging cable? Yeah, that will be a bazillion degrees....

chadbag: Pretty sure my test was with single precision, but I've not looked at the compiler details recently enough to know how it's sizing float vs. double since everything moved to 64-bit. Either way, I'm with you on this: integer (or even string!) representation, at least for something that is user-entered... Behind the scenes doesn't matter quite so much as long as it's perfectly reproducible (and on every platform). Of course, maybe it's using mm or nm or something for internal representation, and doing all the math using an integer representation with too few decimal places. Who knows?

Back to running cable...

 

[jmupton2000]

In the UK we have a number of courier options, nearly all of them somewhere between moderately capable (The Royal Mail) and utterly hopeless (Evri, formerly Hermes).

Our roads are filled with battered battle damaged white or dark grey vans, huge gouges in the bodywork, trim missing, dents where in theory it should be impossible to have dents unless it has been driven through a live firing range. all being driven like a bat out of hell with little to no regards to the traffic regulations, speed limits or any rules of the road.

Evri are the pinacle of ineptitude, their tracking system is vague and hopless, they really are the 'cheap' end of the market and their customer 'service' reflects this. Trouble is, ebay have now partnered up with them which has caused a lot of people who have sworn to avoid Evri like the plague, a few issues.

Amazon have the most battered vans though, often seen in vast convoys heading out from the local distribution depot just down the road in vehicles that are badly wrecked despite some of them being only a matter of weeks old!!

 

[Kusojiji]

They are Tomar shoes. The Varney uses metal trucks and picks up on one track only, the locomotive picks up on the other track. I have a Bachmann that uses wipers on the axles, and works very well, I think I will be adapting the shoes to also pick up from the axle to the metal frame, where a wire attaches to the motor.

This will provide some redundancy, to help for the start from a stop.

Thanks for the reply!!

As an option, I did write to Athearn and they do offer the tender trucks. I also asked about the main gear in case it splits.

Thank you for contacting Athearn Trains at Horizon Hobby!

We have the parts available.

$10.00 ea 1x 2428-PRO3 Tender Truck
$4.00 ea 1x 2428-04-01 Compound Gear

Shipping is $6.99 via FedEx Ground. If you would like us to order these for you, we can do that. We will need your address and phone number to create the order. Our parts department will send you a Square invoice for online payment.

Thank you!

Athearn / Horizon Hobby
Customer Support

 

[chadbag]

Shipping is $6.99 via FedEx Ground.

You should take them up on this

 

[DeaconKC]

Well we made it home from Branson. It was a nice getaway but it sure is good to be home. 96 here outside, so I'm gonna stay inside! This weekend will be busy with family again, but hopefully next week will free up some hobby time.

 

[Kusojiji]

I really need to get a couple sets of these. This is one tool I have never bought.

While I love my 2 Micro-Mark magnetic building jigs, there are some kits too big to use it effectively.

magnetic, now that's a great idea! I just tested the blocks and they are magnetic, so an advantage over stainless (if I remember correctly, stainless is not supposed to be magnetic?)

 

[Kusojiji]

You should take them up on this

That's before they knew where I live. Probably start sucking in all the dust when they find out haha

But, I definitely will for that price. I'll add a couple to an old caboose that I had bought Kadee trucks that use the axle wipers.

 

[Kusojiji]

Doesn’t do any good if the driver refuses to look. My neighbors and I all have our numbers on large signs plainly visible to anybody that will bother to look.
I’m currently having problems with Walmart delivering my stuff to my neighbor.

Kinda hard to get their face out of tweater or fleshbook long enough to pay attention to anything, especially driving... jus' sayin' haha

 

[Kusojiji]

In the UK we have a number of courier options, nearly all of them somewhere between moderately capable (The Royal Mail) and utterly hopeless (Evri, formerly Hermes).

Our roads are filled with battered battle damaged white or dark grey vans, huge gouges in the bodywork, trim missing, dents where in theory it should be impossible to have dents unless it has been driven through a live firing range. all being driven like a bat out of hell with little to no regards to the traffic regulations, speed limits or any rules of the road.

Evri are the pinacle of ineptitude, their tracking system is vague and hopless, they really are the 'cheap' end of the market and their customer 'service' reflects this. Trouble is, ebay have now partnered up with them which has caused a lot of people who have sworn to avoid Evri like the plague, a few issues.

Amazon have the most battered vans though, often seen in vast convoys heading out from the local distribution depot just down the road in vehicles that are badly wrecked despite some of them being only a matter of weeks old!!

Olivia's uses DHL and told me if I prefered to use Royal Mail, it would be at my own risk. I asked them for a quote and they never got back to me, so I guess we're done.

 

[migalyto]

magnetic, now that's a great idea! I just tested the blocks and they are magnetic, so an advantage over stainless (if I remember correctly, stainless is not supposed to be magnetic?)

This is the magnetic jig I use. Problem is for bigger kits it doesn't work well. If you flip it upside down and just use the flat side it becomes more versatile.

Magnetic Gluing Jig | Square Corner Tool for Modelers | Micro-Mark

Eight powerful magnets on a 21-gauge steel plate keep assemblies perfectly square while glue dries, working where ordinary clamps can't grip.

micromark.com

I'm now defiantly going to get a couple sets of these solid 123 blocks for building. I can see the possibilities.

 

[Kusojiji]

This is the magnetic jig I use. Problem is for bigger kits it doesn't work well. If you flip it upside down and just use the flat side it becomes more versatile.

Magnetic Gluing Jig | Square Corner Tool for Modelers | Micro-Mark

Eight powerful magnets on a 21-gauge steel plate keep assemblies perfectly square while glue dries, working where ordinary clamps can't grip.

micromark.com

I'm now defiantly going to get a couple sets of these solid 123 blocks for building. I can see the possibilities.

I see what you mean, but it's still a cool tool to have.

 

[troyphoto]

Well howdy there internet peeps and those wondering where their delivery driver is today...

It's Troy again.

Took some time to clean up and rearrange the hobby desk today:

It won't stay that way long, but I can dream. Still have some rearranging to do. Put the less frequent bottle of glue and solvents in that back corner. Reachable, but not stuff I want while painting or assembling a model. The only thing that comes to mind is acetone for when I CA glue my fingers to something. I'll find a spot for it in easy reach.

If you're wondering how the dwarves are faring, well, I had a project once I got my new 3D printer.

Seems that the Warboss came without his big cloak and his weapon and arms. I had plenty of spare arms with axes, but what about a cloak? His model had a wonky smooth back to accommodate the missing giant cloak he came with. Well, 3D printing to the rescue. Above is the bossman with his new arms. He's no longer mostly 'armless.

Here's the 3d Printed cloak. Big enough to cover his smooth backside. Though, I did have to trim his back down so the cloak would lay mostly flat, and not stick almost straight out. You can see the "greenstuff" putty blending the cloak into the body. It ain't perty, but it works.

Here's his bare backside prior to surgery

I cut that protrusion down by about a centimeter.

Here he is after priming "Xenithal" style (black undercoat, with a top down spray of light grey, followed by a drybrush of white)

 

[KriegslokBR52]

The nucleus of the E-60, was the E-44. The problem with the E-60 was not GE, but Amtrak, or the DOT. The motor was built to run at 125 MPH, but had 70 MPH trucks. It was top heavy. There was no frame. (That would have increased weight further). There was a lot of unproven technology, and Amtrak was looking for a one size fits all locomotive. They lasted from 1974 through 2004, in Amtrak service, and NJT service. In typical Government fashion, they had New York Airbrake 26 brake, which failed all too often. NYABCO complained they were not included in specs, WABCO brake system was recommended. It was not an off the shelf locomotive, and Amtrak added every sort of option, then complained about cost.
On the whole, the motor lasted 30 years.

Incidentally, the Alstom Acela replacements have been on the property six years, and are still not in service. Every french designed / built locomotive I have encountered was junk or needed extensive modification to make it work. However, knowing Amtrak procurement I realize that they cant be blamed for everything. No American rail supplier really wants to deal with Amtrak.

The E60 was basically a freight motor, too bad. But they did last pretty long for an unsuccessful locomotive, probably in part do to the fact that nothing else as a single unit would pull 17-19 car trains after GG1s were gone. I wonder if the dusted off EP5 was even considered . First few times i saw an E60 in service, i was kind of put off by it, since i considered the AEM7 a far better looking and elegant locomotive. But after a while i did learn to like them, that was do to the fact that when standing far away from a station, where it was expected to see them at speed, they put on quite a show. One could hear the long 17 car train coming well before it came to view, and it was like a freight train, but a lot faster. The E60s sounded like jets with their cooling blowers screaming at high speed.

 

[RhB Michael]

Now my parts have landed in Chicago. I guess the USPS has forgotten where St. Louis is on a map.

I can't believe we pay tax money for this kind of service.

 

[migalyto]

Now my parts have landed in Chicago. I guess the USPS has forgotten where St. Louis is on a map.

I can't believe we pay tax money for this kind of service.

Ah yes the Chicago black hole!

Hopefully you will have much better luck with it than I do. I always pray my stuff doesn't route through Chicago. If it does it always seems to bounce around the Suburbs for an extra 3 or more days. Luckily it doesn't happen too often.

If It goes to St. Louis distribution center its almost guaranteed I will get it next day.