The Home Machinist!

I've kind of decided what I'm going to do, or let the weather do for me, as one of you put it. I was on "down time" for the finger to heal after surgery and thought it a good question to ask of you guys. I'm thinking about painting the trucks (again) after assembly and then hit them with a little ru...

Well the finger has almost finished healing, it just has a little spot in the end of it about 3/32" round that needs to heal up. I think Tuesday I'm going to get back into building things. I visited my dad's place today and found the spare cylinder head we rebuilt for the boats 4-cylinder red-block ...

I'm sure this post will develop into quite a controversy, but what's your take on large scale modeling and weathering?
Real trains are rusty, dirty, greasy, etc. I always weathered my HO scale equipment.

I have my popcorn at the ready:)

Ok, so you have a steel plate to work with. What I like to do is permanently install the screws into one part or another with JB weld or PC7 or loctite, or solder them if that can be heated(probably not), then you have studs sticking out that don't leak and you can cut a neoprene gasket you can reus...

^^^ It probably cuts really nice. They make 1/4" round carbide inserts and holders, I've been watching ebay for one to come up.
My thought was to rough the wheels within about .030" and then finish cut them with that in one pass. Carbide likes to be "loaded".

So I heard back from the engineer who just ran a free "napkin calculation" on my bridge. C12's vertical with C4 or 4" HSS cross-members is supposed to be good for a 5 ton live load at a minimum

That's really cool! I ran a turret lathe off and on at my 2nd workplace, the thing was awesome for producing short runs of lathe parts(I made brass NPT nuts of various types and sizes for heat exchangers), and it was fun to run. On ours the drill carriage had stops to each position but we had to use...

I know in the boat repair world, epoxy resins (50/50 mix) will adhere well as long as the area is roughed up, but poly resins can have issues adhering to a repair. I would think that you could bed in some plastic pipe fittings or plastic plate to give you something to attach to. You may have to get ...

Some of the Baldwin S-12's have a long single tone horn on them that was reported to be 190hz. Measuring off of the Athearn model, it would be about 30" long in full scale, it's 5" long for my model at 1/6th scale. I have found a bicycle horn I'm going to cut up and use for the cosmetic side, but ha...

Looking really good Glenn! I wish I could have made it to the open house.

Hello All, I got a chance to measure my Ottaway flange radius on the drivers, and tender wheels today. Also the drivers on my 1904 Campbell 4-4-0. Also I did a quick measurement of a piece of 12# rail from my rail storage yard. Methodology: used a set of machinist radius gauges to find the best fit...

Good idea on the axle size Glenn, 1/2" is a joke. The interesting part is, that the shear strength of 1/2" steel is plenty strong for quite a lot of load so I wouldn't worry about breakage between the wheel and bearing, but deflection and bending of the axle between the wheels is definitely an issue...