The Home Machinist!

I was volunteering at loading on Friday and we had a guy taking forever, 4 or so hours to load a 6x12 trailer. We were joking about it and somebody pulled up, I think he was from Mid-South, had an Allen steamer and a couple cars who said 'time me'. I recall he loaded in a little under 8 minutes. You...

Thinking about it, one unwritten rule is to have your act together unloading and loading, especially loading, as that's a bottleneck and at the end of the week people are impatient and want to get on the road.

You'll be amazed at how that place can suck up trains. That said, if someone breaks down there can be a bit of a delay while it gets cleared, for example if a 2-6-6-2 2.5" scale Uintah articulated derails at the main entrance crossing. There are plenty of sidings though to drag stuff to, and water s...

Two words: comfy seats. Two 30 gal of propane should get you out and back, they do have propane at the track or at the casino across the highway. There are water stops along the ROW, just keep filling up. An Allen tender will get you between them. It's never a bad idea to have a few gallon jugs of w...

I'd be interested in anything you were willing to post, John. I've got a ball valve installed in a 1" LE Pacific but would prefer something like you've done, I think it'll last much longer.

I use masonry firebrick like GWRdriver. You can get it at anyplace selling wood stoves around here, in my case I got it at a local farm and ranch chain - Coastal Farm.

Another data point I found a picture of 1842 with a 100-C-1. SP had a large rebuild program of 70's into 100's, so some of the musical chairs is probably that. Some is due to service considerations - where could they get water? Some was likely which car was ready to go when a locomotive came out of ...

Doesn't surprise me at all, as I wrote earlier SP swapped tenders all the time. Look at it as an opportunity to build the tender of your choice. But here's another question from those pics - where'd the BL heater go on 1838? I suspect that photo is in a dead/scrap line and the heater has been scavan...

The model number for that feedwater heater likely is a BL-2. The type is BL and the size is 2 (although there are other sizes). Small correction here (pedantic I know, but you gotta know what you're looking for). Worthington made 3 types of "B" pump, the "B", the "BL" and the "BL-2". The difference...

You're probably right, a momentary contact pushbutton would probably do the job and not drain the battery. My thought was the circuit needs to be closed to charge the coil and opened to create the spark, but it'll likely charge fast enough through the momentary contact.

You basically have to recreate an automotive ignition, you can search around on the internet for more examples but here is one: https://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-method-of-getting-a-spark-plug-to-spark/ . You can probably replace the points with a normally-closed pushbutton. In my opinion it i...

The Mid-South Live Steamers was founded on that gauge shift and remains 7.5"ga-only, with no plans to expand to a smaller gauge. So far as I know it's not discussed, for the reason that it would divert badly needed human and financial resources away from maintaining the existing club track complex,...