Ace-Garageguy

From the text in the posts, it sounds pretty cool...but the photos won't load right now... Crickets... Oh wait...now they're starting to come through... Crickets... OK. Cool!!! Great project.

Went for a hike in a national park I haven't visited in a few years. Went today instead of tomorrow or over the weekend to avoid crowds. It's adjacent to a fast-moving stream/river that dumps into the Chattahoochee, it's some really beautiful woods with Civil War-era ruins, but it's changed in a lot of ways...not all good, and we won't dwell on that. It's a very rocky several miles of hiking trails with a lot more elevation changes than I've been doing recently, and it was pretty hard on my hips and lower back early on. After a while though, everything started feeling much better, kinda like squirting WD-40 on rusty hinges and working them until they stop squeaking and operate smoothly. Right now I feel great, and the longer I live, the more I'm convinced that people allow themselves to get old and creaky through lack of effort, and that even after injuries or illness, it's possible to recover and maintain a pretty youthful level of ability if you work through the pain, and let your body know it's not time yet to lie down and give up.

More and more money for less and less stuff is the new normal, at least for a while yet.

Cool model, good progress on dealing with what looks like pretty poor fit overall. I'm sure it's on the web somewhere, but I'm going to be lazy and ask what approximate scale is this thing? Just an overall height measurement is all I need, really.

Got another pair of HO scale Baldwin Sharks too, Model Power updates of an older AHM/Tempo model, in Pennsy colors, and both DCC-equipped. They came in with another Rivarossi HO scale Krauss-Maffei diesel-hydraulic locomotive too, so I can run a matched pair together after I change one number.

As my layout will feature a metal stamping plant as one of the main industries, I'll need specialized freight cars to service it. Automobile boxcars, with doors on the sides and at least one end, were originally developed to transport complete vehicles, but as time went on, they were used more to transport sheetmetal stampings like fenders, door shells, roofs, etc. to the final assembly plants. I got a smoking deal on a sealed pair (two different car numbers) of HO scale Proto 2000 50' automobile boxcars in Burlington colors. These are very high quality injection-molded styrene kits with separate ladders, grabs, trucks with blackened metal wheels, Kadee-compatible couplers, etc. etc. I'm just a little disappointed that these are "time-saver" kits, partially assembled, and whoever did the work was a little shaky and got too much gloo on a couple places. Nothing a little weathering won't hide completely though. And another hot deal on two Westerfield A-50-4 outside-braced automobile boxcars in Union Pacific livery. Again, very high quality kits, but cast in resin. More "craftsman" type kits than the Proto 2000 line, as the bodies are multi-piece, you have to form your own wire grabs, etc. , and they have to be painted and decaled by the builder. All four of these cars are appropriate for the alternate-reality late-steam-diesel-overlap period I'll be modeling...where steam engines are not scrapped, but rebuilt and kept in service (partially because America is floating on hundreds of years of coal deposits), and first-generation diesels are likewise repowered and modernized mechanically rather than being scrapped and replaced. This gives me a plausible backstory to allow all of the truly beautiful locomotives I love from several eras to run together on the same layout.

1932 film The Phantom Express. Train mystery filmed around real working steam engines. Excellent model work (no CGI obviously). Worth watching just for the real locomotives and the fine models if nothing else.

Exactly one plus exactly one may or may not equal exactly two, depending on your life experiences and emotions and background, according to some modern "thinkers".

Numbers are hard.

Much Ado About Nothing, if written today, would probably be better titled Much Doo-doo About Nothing.

"Thoughts" are an alien concept to a large part of the public, those to whom mindless rebleating is life itself.

Good grief, Charlie Brown !!

The doves around here tend to nest quite low to the ground, and very few young seem to survive being cat-lunch, whereas the sparrows and finches and wrens and mockingbirds and bluebirds and others that nest high in the trees are doing just fine.

Over the years, I've seen a few guys do truly stellar builds of the old Monogram Kurtis, and it's the car I remember seeing still racing at Indy when I first became aware. Kurtis cars (and the similar Watson and Kuzma cars) dominated their classes for a long time, and I've wanted to build several of the "big cars" from this Monogram roadster and the smaller short-track "sprint" cars (using the 1/20-or-so Monogram "midget" as a starting point). I've amassed a fair pile of upgrade parts, like the old Chris Etzel Offy engines, and various flavors of Halibrand wheels and better tires with correct offset treads, etc. and books. Still a lot of research to go, but these cars are some of my real top-line priorities once I get settled out West in a few more months.

Got a coupla these, sealed, at prices too good to pass up considering the stupid money some folks are asking now. Bought another one of these too, with a PE set. Again, too cheap to let go, and I LOVE these kits.

Software incompatibility issues between old hardware (2006 camera) and old software (Nikon photo-editing suite running under Win7) where unasked-for "updates" sneaked in without my knowledge, apparently during the few minutes the old computer was online with the firewall disabled. Took all morning to manually delete the "updates" so I could get on with my billing. Man, I sure wish all the IT dweebils would leave stuff alone THAT WORKS JUST FINE. Again, undoing some numbnutz ideas of what's "better" so I can get on with my own work.

Yup. Dove soup. Mourning doves are just about the stupidest birds on the planet. Beautiful, but stupid.

Night frights, sometimes brought about by PTSD, can cause even grown men to wake up screaming.

PM'd

Wills shouldn't be put off until the last minute, and most states recognize inexpensive DIY versions if you can read the instructions and fill in the blanks, and that's a whole lot better than nothing.

Crank calls were what the phone was for before telemarketers.

I think they'll look great. Most period shots of the real car show wheels that are pretty obviously polished aluminum or magnesium, not chrome, so either dulling that shine or stripping them and going Alclad or Testors buffing metalizer should give you the right look. I realize you're not building the SWC car as-was, but those wheels/tires just look so right on it...

Couple o' hamsters will make about a thousand more in a year or so.

Yup. So I have to give feePay points for having intelligent US-based English speakers as live agents...but they sure don't make it easy to connect with one. Unfortunately, being prevented from bidding on two items that were WAY under market value cost me quite a few bucks, assuming I can't find equally good deals...which I probably never will. There is, of course, no recourse for that. Nor is my 21-year perfect record untarnished. It will always show several "non-payment strikes" that were successfully "appealed"...which just isn't the same as having them go away...and all for something I WASN'T GUILTY OF. And THAT'S what chaps me the most.

"Amsterdam" is how people who drop the aitch pronounce Hamsterdam.