(January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.)
07-27-19 Saturday
High feathers and ripples, with some lower puffs. 91 degrees as the high with a humidity around 62%. There was a light breeze. Some thunder heads appeared in afternoon, but missed us for the most part spending the vast majority of its energy over the edge of the Everglades.
After breakfast, we saw a sign for a yard sale but they were not set up. I got to mom’s and then headed out on my yard sale run. I found four yard sales. There an area on Dixie highway where there are some empty lots. People will sometimes set up some yard sale stuff there. Today, a guy had all sorts of tools, a lot of them were new in-box craftsman stuff. He was selling them at half price. I considered a 10 inch high work-bench drill press but was not about to go the price he asked I did not have it to spend. I would rather have a floor model anyway.
I had headed South first, then came up north on the back roads. I did not find another yard sale until I was almost at the northern part of the route. There is a woman who has periodic yard sales. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. This time she had several of her friends displaying stuff. There was a lot of interesting items.
I gave a moment consideration for one of several guitars he had but I decided I am not willing to go through the effort to learn to play one. Now if one was electric, I might have gotten it for a friend. I ended up buying a Kindle white-paper text reader. I have a couple of them and really have not had the time to use them.
I found another yard sale that had some kitchen stuff and some furniture. Nothing I really needed.
I got back to Mom’s, then went to the yard sale we saw in the morning and gave everything a good look. They had a scale where the gauge is on the top of a post. The needle spins around for each 50 pounds (I think) and a small dial rolls for each time the needle spins around. I gave it a very long thought, then left, knowing I could come back later. I never did. I just did not need that heartache just yet.
The kindle works. He has some books on there that I would not read. I need to clear it of his amazon account and load mine in. If you are selling something like this, It might be good to clear it first. He did not have a charger so he had no idea what was on it.
After a little bit, I went out back and looked around. I did not feel like pulling the lathe out. I ended up emptying the work bench and sorting through everything. I consolidated a lot of stuff. I did not find what I was really looking for, but I did find some stuff I forgot I had or did not know where it was I THINK I can find everything a little bit easier. We will see about that. I really wanted to be finished with this project as noon came around, but I finally got it done at about One. It always takes longer than planned. This is not the place for this stuff but I have to empty out the shed and see what is in there, and figure out what I can relocate before any of the stuff on the workbench can be put away, if I can make room anyway....
My neighbor got home from running around and found the house warm. He said the AC worked great last night but this afternoon it was not working. He opened the windows and is running the fans. It cooled it down some more.
Older Florida homes were designed to be “cooled” without Air conditioning. Sometimes the air conditioning was added later. Open the windows and air passes through, carrying away the hot air. If you run some fans, you can keep the house cooler. Many times what I will do is have a fan blowing into the house from a window our out a window. The air has to go somewhere and there is an exchange of the old air.
I checked to find out what ornaments I did last year. I made tea pots and gingerbread houses as last year’s ornaments which I got done before Christmas. After Christmas I tried out balloons and steam engines. I gave a couple of my test examples out to a couple special people but never got farther. I have worked on a couple so far this year but really did not get far. I need to make enough of those two designs for this Christmas. I need to seek out some new designs to make. Now is the best time to get started. I think I might pick up a stick of good two by two wood or even better, a two by twelve (which tends to be a better carving wood.)
There are a few designs I did years ago that might be nice to do again, but will have to think about them. It is always nicer to come up with brand new designs. Those who received those old designed ornaments before might be disappointed with getting them again. It is a bit more interesting to make also.
Years ago, I thought about Rocking horses as an ornament. I still have not come up with a way to make them. Every design I tried failed for one reason or another. I had a possible method last year but ran out of time. I was not satisfied with what the results looked like. It is harder than I thought it would be.
I will see what I do tomorrow.
Year 19, Week 29, Day two (week 1029)
(January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.)
07-28-19 Saturday
Early morning was blue skies, then puffs appeared randomly, then gathering friends. At about noon, thunder boomers showed up on the radar. They sort of skirted us and then disappeared. Yesterday, one of the thunder boomers cupped us on the Everglades-side and then faded as it slid west. Mom did not get the rain she was hoping to get for the plants she has in pots.
Yesterday, mom’s neighbor’s A/C died. My brother had stopped at a job in the morning before coming up and then came here directly. I told him about the A/C. He checked it out. When he is working, I tag along like a little child, helping when I won’t be in the way or make things tougher on him. He first put a vacuum cleaner to the drain pipe to see if it was clogged. A clogged drain pipe can flip a switch and prevent the A/C from running. Nothing happened.
We then went out to the outside unit. Checking, he found that the capacitor had died. He said that the regular lightning we have around here, does little bits of damage to the capacitors over time. He said that the burned-out capacitor was made in China. The one he replaced it with was a much more expensive American-made one. He has found through experience that they last a lot longer. He said “the Chinese are doing their best.” My mom’ neighbor has air again. It turned out to be under warranty as he put it in earlier this year.
My brother and I just sat outside and talked model railroading. He saw a video of a model railroad convention. He said it went on and on about the hundreds of manufacturers involved in the hobby.
We got to talking about problems we had with running our model railroad and how things have changed in technology. They now have radio controlled engines, switches, and computer controlled lighting effects. Some remote control train controls send the signal through the track, some send them over the air, some are operated by a computer plugged in, some are dedicated devices.
They have battery powered engines that can go for days without replacing the battery or charging them. Some remote control engines might have the track powered to full and the controls are on the engine itself.
One of the big problems we were having was to keep the tracks clean and operating properly. They need to be kept in a surgical clean, temperature controlled room for best results. You cook, you use a cleaning product, you wear deodorant or perfume, the vapors will waft into the air and settle on the tracks. Heat will cause the tracks to stretch and shrink. The wheels are contacting on less than a square mm surface area on the tracks. A tiny bit of dirt will break the electrical contact, especially if you are running really slow with very little power to the tracks. Fewer electrical pickup wheels a train has, easier a bit of dirt will stop it. We never had a solution that would work well over several weeks.
Back in the 90s, when I was really hot and heavy in model railroading, the cameras were just getting into HO scale engines. That is about 1/8th inch equals a foot. Before then, you could only get them in the Lionel engines (1/4"=1'-0" scale) Now they have them in N scale engines, which is 1/16th inch equals a foot. I heard they are getting them into smaller trains. The remote controls are getting smaller too.
We then got into talking about operations we experimented with, then with how we would do the layout differently. While it is nice to see trains run in circles, we found that operations is much more enjoyable and we worked out what we would do different if we build it over again. We have some ideas. Model railroading did not become really enjoyable for us until we were placing cars in front of businesses and picking others up, and placing them on the train where they belong, in essence, switching train cars the way real railroads operate was when we really found joy in having a train set.
I have a simple oval, with an oval inside and siding tracks inside that. We experimented with many methods of operating trains. Our layout could be anywhere in the country. We had passenger trains meeting, going in opposite directions, We had freight trains doing the same, but exchanging cars with each other, We operated trains where one of us would work the throttle, and the other directed the train and placed the cars.
We had operating sessions where we had to drop off a car if we picked them up, or we simply decided what cars to swap. We also made up order cards that told where a car was going to go and have to follow those instructions on running the trains. That was fun as we were not making the decisions. One had to think about what you were doing rather than being lazy and swapping any car that was convenient . The cards at the industry told us what had to be picked up, and the cards with our trains told us what cars to leave, and in some experiments we did, some cards had the cars go to another industry or stay until the next train.
With these sessions where we did operation, we were totally focused on what we were doing. A train running circles could be ignored. If you had to do a select number of laps between stops, you had to watch the train and keep track of the times around, but swapping cars, forced you to pay attention to little else. We would run our trains at scale speeds, walking speeds for the trains. If you missed your turn, reversing until you could take the right route ate up a lot of time.
We did one experiment with a railroad layout with just two sidings. We had simple rules for that and following the rules, swapping cars and such, and our experiment ended up taking us 45 minutes. That was swapping out two cars, then reversing direction and swapping out two other cars.
When we started, we thought you needed several real miles of track with hundreds of switches to make a layout interesting. As we gained experience, our needs got smaller. My layout became the perfect model railroad layout. I have never seen anything better. BUT, that experiment we did, proved that you did not need a lot of railroad layout to be totally involved with the layout.
I read in the magazines that the modelers would build elaborate layouts, scenic them in super fine detail. When they decided it was done, they looked at what they had and started over, building a new layout. Reading the way they operated and looking at their plans, they were just running trains in circles, not switching cars to industry. My layout has no scenery, though I have a lot of buildings that could go onto it but we found that scenery was in the way of our operating sessions. It was not needed as our concentration was on the action we were doing, not on impressing people at the job we did.
I’ve taken up other hobbies since then so I no longer have time to work with the trains. That layout, right now, is a good shelf for stuff I have no place for.
Nothing else was done, but we had a lot of fun talking.
I will see what I do next week.
2264
No comments:
Post a Comment