The Home Machinist!

Hey Greg: I really like your truck design for a simple truck. I would love to get a set of drawings for it. Specifically, what I'm thinking about doing is making a set like that with a 2" shorter center-to-center distance between the axles, to be used on a short caboose. Just thinking about tha...

Anthony: The axle pump on the Allen American is all the way over to the engineer's side, right up against the frame. Is yours in the same position? I guess I'm asking where is it located, and second question is how much does it really need to move to give you the clearance you need? Some pictures wo...

is that guy wearing ladies heels? Lillian "Curly" Lawrence was a strange fellow from all accounts, and also someone who would not tolerate any criticism of his work. He has been both praised and criticised by people that I have known over the years. Most of his stuff was very good, but no...

If you look down the page, the Specifications section lists the gauge as 3.5". In the description it says: about 3.5" between the wheels. To me, that means that it is probably a 3 1/2" gauge locomotive, but you can't be completely sure of that. The person selling it likely doesn't kn...

Can't even tell you what scale and gauge it is... How they expect to ever sell it? Only 1 picture, and it's from overhead and with the item still stuffed inside the box. Yeah, he's really not wanting to sell it. Like someone above posted, a lot of this is just junk someone has found at some estate s...

Based on the tape measure held crudely across the wheels, It looks like 5" gauge to me, which would be 1" scale. It seems like most people selling this type of stuff don't have any idea what scale or gauge they actually have. Well, I guess they don't know what scale or gauge actually means...

I typically squirt a little oil on my nylatron bushings once per day when running, just to wet them and give them a little lube. That's all that I do. Maybe I don't have to, but I've been doing that for 20+ years now and nothing bad has happened yet. I have also used oil-impregnated cast nylon for b...

Someone is going to have to draw it and then post it. The only reason why there are open sourced plans for the 'Scotty' mogul is because Paul Brien from Nashville drew them up in CAD back years ago, and in extremely great detail. A few years after his death, I thought it would be a good tribute to h...

Look at this thread: http://www.chaski.org/homemachinist/viewtopic.php?t=112842 In it, I explain how my son and I built a small 4 wheel switcher, and the components we used. It may not be exactly what you need for your particular application, but it will get you in the ballpark. FYI: the Plum Cove b...

Start with how tall you want the decorative dome to be that you are planning on using. Then make sure that your inner dome is about 1" or so shorter than that so that your safety valves can stick through the opening when screwed directly into the top of your inner dome. That's what I do: Start ...

I was going to say: Don't use Cork! It will hold water and will rust the crud out of the boiler shell. I've torn down several locomotives that had Cork used as insulation, and the shell of them was in very poor shape in a few areas with lots of rust and pitting. Of course, these locomotives had been...

If it were me, I'd build another car or modify the one that I had so that the bigger tanks would fit. I'd do that before I would try to fool with a bunch of smaller tanks. I'd want the largest capacity I could have, so I would make sure that two of those 20 pound tanks would fit in there. Will be a ...