The Home Machinist!

There's no better way for someone to ruin your personal experience than to shower you with ill-placed negativity for your first or last exposure at a track. Hopefully, those types of people are few and far between. Have a friend that contributes here on occasion. He has a great response for the mode...

Best suggestion I can give someone when considering "how to transport equipment" in an SUV, pick 'em up truck or trailer...stand around the loading/unloading facilities at their home track...or at other tracks. WATCH what others have done. Ask questions (ask if you can take photos). Make mental note...

Hello Anthony...cast, machined or ready for sale...even your waxes are impressive to look at! Kudos to you and the skills you've manged to perfect to deliver a working scale replica. Realize there's already a substantial amount of time invested just to have waxes ready to be cast (btw...do you mount...

Chris...getting cross-eyed trying to follow your 3D 3D drawing. Safe bet there's holes you'll have to drill...and then plug. Even the Van Brocklin water pump shown in the photos above has a couple of those. Something to consider (cause you didn't mention)...if you're looking to pump air, you'll need...

Chris...I'm assuming your question is in regards to the steam porting. Using the photo DaveS provided (similar to the 1st photo you posted), steam enters the pump from the right...and enters the right side valve chamber. There is a steam port that runs across the face of the pump (the horizontal bli...

At 1" OD...why not spin two halves out of brass round stock and silver solder the pieces together? The hex can be machined using an indexing head in a mill or something I've used...a 5C hex block in the mill vise. Polish to finish. Just offering an alternate idea. Carl B.

Hickory, dickory, dock. Three mice ran up the clock. The clock struck one...and the other two escaped with minor injuries! Sorry Greg...couldn't resist. Would point to one of the lines in my signature... Life, is like a sewer. What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it! (Tom Lehrer) If ...

Friend of mine a couple years ago shipped a 1.5" scale loco "down under". He was NOT ALLOWED to do and of the crating. Had to find an int'l shipping service. That service took care of all the paper work and they built the crate using certified materials for international transport. The receiving cou...

Glenn... "U" tube or "slack tube" is the best low tech approach if you're just looking to get an relative vacuum reading. You can ty-rap the vertical legs of tubing. Don't crimp the "U" at the bottom. To get your reading...measure the height difference between two water columns. Can add some dye if ...

Anthony...only one word to describe your work...(expletive deleted) INCREDIBLE! It's one thing to know how to do machine work...it's another to design a smaller version of the real thing. In this case, an injector and get the geometry worked out to produce the desired criteria. I tip my hat to you! ...

What's Next? In examining the old boiler, one item showed up that so far can't be explained. There's this tan'ish colored scale/residue on the inside of the boiler. In fact, inside the ENTIRE boiler with the exception of the crown sheet. With the rapid generation of steam and water boiling over the...

One conundrum about boiler wasting in our models: why do live steam steel boilers (particularly fireboxes) waste away so much faster than full-size locomotive boilers? A typical live steamer has a firebox that is 0.25” thick when new, but a 1:1 firebox is anywhere from 0.375” to 0.500”. The life of...