The Home Machinist!

Burping the engine was one of my fathers favorite parts about being an engineer at the Billy Jones Wild Cat railroad back in the 1980's. Jim and ...Diane? You guys are right about getting the cylinders warm but even after that, maybe it depends on the engine, there was always some goop at the botto...

1. Fire up 2. Move off bay to running line with cylinder cocks open. 3. Slightly apply brakes 4. Put valve gear in reverse 5. Open the throttle quickly 6. Apply the brakes fully and shut the throttle 7. Watch cloud of goop fall onto track in front of engine 8. Repeat 3 through 7 until the exhaust dr...

Take a look at these from Eccentric Engineer.

https://www.eccentricengineer.com/safet ... ale-safety

They'll be a little big, but better than anything else out there (edit) for 3/4" scale.

The St Croix rail is 1" high. There aren't ties in the conventional sense, there are gauge bars the rail is welded to.

INGE wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 16, 2020 7:06 pm

Thanks to John Brock and Greg Easter for spearheading the re-build.

Thank you Jeff for joining the crew and picking up the slack when I moved west. Greg needed the help, I felt bad leaving before it was done.

Jack,

When you are pouring and setting more concrete posts you'll look back fondly on those days of sitting on your tractor. I would at least!

So the wooden post wobbled just before you rebuilt it? It was worse than that. My recollection is some were rotted through, but it had also been cut in one place for a bridge replacement and the beginnings of a rebuild that never happened. You had to run in forward to one end and reverse to the oth...

The St. Croix RR highline itself has ugly track these days. How many gauges is that? Very bad taste trying to be all things to all people like that. But I found this video from when the high line was wood and it looked a lot better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa2iLpxjoh4 Thank you for finding ...

Rich and Mike touched on it, but to emphasize, part of the drawing cost is the knowledge of the designer in addition to the making of the drawings: how much machining allowance is required in one place, how much clearance should be left in another, even material selection. It's well worth the cost, ...

With a Bridgeport or my clone it's pretty easy and you unscrew the bottom bearing retainer to gain access to it. It's a simple threaded set screw with a reduced tip. Check first that the set screw end hasn't been mushroomed over or bent. If so you'd have to cut the tip off from inside the spindle a...

Hope this isn't too far afield of the thread origin, but one place to find foundry intro is the art world. My son has been taking classes at the Chicago Fire Arts Center in Minneapolis https://cafac.wildapricot.org/classes/metalcasting/ . Another arts organization in SE Minn has an annual iron casti...

make friends with a lot of great people in a rich social circle that extends all over the world and have fun all at the same time. In fact, the same can be said of many hobbies, not just live steaming This, the only thing I would change is "make friends" to "make lifelong friends". Some casual, som...