The Home Machinist!

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That's my riding car frame sitting on my turnout at the bottom of this page.

I'm using 3/8x1 steel flat bar and the "groovy track" method for the rail for my 12" gage RR (2" scale), as it's actually close to siding and spur sized rail in scale and is low in cost. With ties spaced 3-1/2" apart it easily supports 300#'s per wheel with no deflection. You can find it with a dece...

Thanks Tom, yeah I have a 6S, it just updated itself and I'll have to go turn off the auto-rotate setting again.

Happen to have a solid carbide drill bit the right size, or even a size that will allow you to upsize the bolt to 5/16"?
Also, what types and brand of tap are you using?

New picture

Now that's a BIG lathe!

The riding car finally rolls on it's own! I thought I'd blown the coupler height and was about 3/8" high, but when I assembled the 2nd truck, mounted it, and lowered the frame onto the tracks it was right at the proper height. Thank you AutoCAD! This frame is getting heavy, so I've been using a scis...

Looks good, and it appears your paint job went unscathed through the plasma cutting.

Thanks Ryan, The sides and top appear unaffected. They are like new- and have some kind of different coating- looks copper or gold colored, and doesn’t have the thick, hardened putty like substrate. Very good observation about the coating possibly causing the corrosion. Hadn’t thought about that. W...

Glenn, are the sides of the tank ok? It's too bad the pitting is so deep, probably the acidity of the rubberized coating itself used to seal the tank. Even if you could weld that replacement in, I wouldn't do it anyway. The heat of the seal weld will make the metal get lumpy and do all kinds of weir...

My hardware order came, so its time to resume assembly. I'm hoping to have the other truck assembled within the next couple days and get the riding car rolling.

I had some of these, where the top was formed around the cast iron post with the detents seemed like it spread open allowing the teeth to skip under load and they would drop suddenly. I'll have to see if I can get credit for them, I tossed them in the recycle bin several years ago. As always, you o...