(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 home and then headed out on the yard sale run. I found four yard sales. There an area on Dixie highway where there are some empty lots. People 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 would rather have a floor model.
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 a woman who has periodic yard sales had one with several of her friends. There was a lot of interesting stuff. I ended up buying a Kindle white-paper text reader. I gave a moment consideration for one of several guitars but I decided I am not willing to go through the effort to learn to play one.
I found another yard sale that had some kitchen stuff and some furniture. Nothing I really needed.
I got home, 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 dial rolls for each time it spins around. I gave it a very long thought, then left, knowing I could come back later. I never did.
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.
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. 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.
Mom’s 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. In some of the older homes, the air conditioning was added later. Open the windows and air passes through, carrying away the hot air, and run some fans keep you cooler.
I checked to find out what ornaments I did last year. I had made tea pots and gingerbread houses as last year’s ornaments. Those I got them done before Christmas. After Christmas I tried out hot air balloons and steam engines. I gave them out to a couple special people but never got farther. . I need to make enough of those two 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 a two by twelve (which tends to be a better wood for carving.)
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 ornaments before, won’t be disappointed, and it is a bit more interesting to make also. Also, one must avoid any designs that have been done several times in variations. No more snow men, no matter how good a design might look. I may have done five designs of them over the past 19 years. That is enough.
I avoid simple ball shaped ornaments because that is more lathe work than carving.
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 started carving in the year 2000. During that year, I saw in one of Dad’s magazines where they wood-turned some Christmas trees, snow men, and Bells. I thought it would be fun to try. Dad had a tiny Craftsman lathe. I started turning with that. It would run a little bit and then die. A period later, it would run a bit then die. I finally gave up (mostly after I took it partially apart and then it refused to work). It dawned on me that I could carve them. I added a sleigh to the designs, and I carved a whole bunch of them and decided that I could do 12 of each. Half way through the project, It dawned on me that this was 48 pieces, and that was intimidating. By December, I had them done and took them to work. Some sold so well that I had to make a bunch more of them.
After that, I was hooked and each year made a batch. In the past ten years, life got in the way and have struggled to get 4 designs or even make 12 of the designs I did have. Last year was the first in a long time that I had gotten seriously into making ornaments again.
Coming up with designs is the toughest part. They have to be simple enough to produce a bunch of them in a short period of time. They also have to fit within certain parameters. Generally, I prefer to make them out of two by two whitewood you can get at a hardware store. That places a limit on the size. I have used other woods and other sizes but my aim is to use whitewood.
A lot of times, I will do the carving in stages. Rough out a bunch, getting the basic shape. Then add details to them, and then do the final finishing of them which will likely include painting, signing and adding a coat of varnish.
I prefer making them by a knife but I will use a bandsaw, a lathe, dremel, etc. to remove the worst of the wood. I will also glue stuff on, though I do not like that kind of design. Some designs are strictly on the lathe or some other method if needed.
What I need to do is to go on line and search through ornament design and see what is available. See if any ideas pop up as I search.
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 boomer cupped us on the Everglades-side and then faded as it slid west. Mom did not get the rain she was hoping for, for the plants she has in pots.
Yesterday, the neighbor’s A/C died. My brother had stopped at a job in the morning before coming up and then came here directly in his truck rather than ride up with his daughter. I told him about the A/C. He checked it out. He first put a vacuum to the drain pipe to see if it was clogged. Nothing came out. It was clean. 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 over time. He said that the burned out capacitor was Chinese. 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. My neighbor has air again. It turned out to be under warranty as he put the AC 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 over 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 other controls. Some 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. The 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 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. The wheels are running on a square mm or even less 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. 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. 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 control
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 more enjoyable and we worked out what we would do different if we build it over again. We have some ideas. Running laps is nice, but Model railroading did not become really enjoyable 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 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 having do deal with what the cards required. 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 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, 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. 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. 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 and changed my work times 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.
2423
This is my model railroad layout.
The tracks at the top (switch yard) were to store trains to come onto the layout and go off again.
the ovals is the best design layout I have ever seen.
the lowest tracks on the switch yard is a barge port where cars can be taken off of and added to the layout
this was the simple layout we tested.
swapping cars makes for a fun operating session.
Doing laps around the layout, the first switch is the one you can back into.
You have to take the first car.
then you do some laps and then stop at the second track.
there you have to run the train around to the back of the train to swap the car on the end of the track, leaving the first car on the track.
you run the train around again to the head of the train and do some more laps.
You stop on the end of the oval and then run the engine on the other end and then do the same thing you did before.
swapping four cars with four cars on the train takes 45 minutes without even trying.
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