Site seeing – March 31

If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ll know that I’ve had some health challenges in the last week. It is perhaps fitting today, for the last day of March, that we look at objects other than me in need of repair.

I love a good wrecked model railcar, especially when they’re done right. Unfortunately scaling down a wreck is not easy. Plastic is not steel, especially in scale and so plastic tends to be an order of magnitude thicker than steel would be in a scale model. Getting it right is more an art form than a science. Which leads us to today’s sites…

Site 1: Model railroad hobbyist forum (Link here)

Over on the MRH Forum there’s a thread running on ‘Train Wreck Experiments with a heat gun and weathering’.  I really like the work that went into this unit. And there’s some great advice on modelling wrecks from those in the know on this thread.

Site 2: Model railroad hobbyist forum (Link here)

Also on the MRH forum is another thread at the moment on dents and dings on cars. There are some reall good comments starting to come out in the conversation, and some great pictures as well like this one by Verne Niner:

Read on for some more great ideas.

Site 3: Jeff Eggert’s Yard Office (Link here)

I’ve vistited Jeff’s website again, and again, and again. His scratchbuilt grain hopper (linked here) is a masterpiece, and in line with today’s dent, bent and rent theme. I hope that you enjoy.

Talk to you again in April.

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I made some ties

Chris Mears over, on the Prince Street blog, spent some quality time recently ripping out Balsa ties for his railroad.

I bought one of these tools a while ago to make ties for my future O gauge layout (also using Balsa). A big thanks to Chris though for simplifying the idea for me.

Prince Street

Armed with a fresh sheet of balsa and my trusty balsa stripper, I have just finished making up one heck of a pile of ties. The process couldn’t be simpler. I’m starting with balsa sheet. Instead of cutting individual ties to length, I find it easier to cut the sheet to length, matching the length of my ties. I can then rip these into individual ties using the balsa stripper. Since the tool manages the width of each tie, the only really careful work is dividing the sheet by length. In all, I find it relaxing work. I figure I cut about a thousand ties this evening and this brings me another step closer to getting some track in place.

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