Weekend Update 3/12/17

[up1950s]

[C855B]

"Shave and a Haircut"? "Brush (hog) with Death?"   

[mu26aeh]

The Long Arm of the Butcher

[Philip H]

Had a late and hastily arranged trip to Bernie Kempenski's house yesterday. Got a look at his Aquila line and ran a local switcher on th PoLA. I do like his sound equipped Genset!

[jereising]

New additions to the Sub this week.  I got tired of waiting for my usual supplier to show them (they appeared today...) and got them off the Bay at a decent price.



I like the cars, nicely done, MT.  I'd seen a report that DI containers wouldn't fit; not strictly true, they're a bit tight but as you see they do fit, that's a DI in the well.  The cars are operating in the second slot of long trains and the bottom container is weighted.  I did replace the plastic wheels with FVM metals but that's standard on the Sub for signalling purposes.  The body mounted coupler works well.

Now, if MT had done THIS car:



I'd buy a bunch.  As it is, the two I have may very well be all.  FVM is said to be working on one; I predict large sales when it appears.

[jgiovenni]

... and you miss the locos...  so there are only cars on my run-by captured at Joba Pass:

















Ciao!

Giovanni

http://www.plasticando.com

[Iain]

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I was doing some steamy stuff yesterday.  This is the steam chest for the main vacuum pump on the steamship I work on. Yesterday, I got most of the work done on the pump except repacking, which will have to wait until next week because we did not have the correct size packing.

[narrowminded]

That looks like an old "D" style valve from a steam engine.

[Iain]

That looks like an old "D" style valve from a steam engine.

That's because it is.

[narrowminded]

That's because it is.

 From the post I was thinking all about the vacuum side of things, not the driving side.   But it's good it looks like one if it IS one.   When parts don't look like what they are they often don't work.

[C855B]

A couple of MTL Airslides arrived in the mail this morning:



This is my first encounter with "modern" MTL tooling. I will certainly say they've raised the bar overall. These are very nice looking cars.

Installed True Scale Couplers (long shank) on one of the pair this evening. Pleasant discovery was they came with body-mounted couplers, removed by simply pulling a pin. Holes were already threaded for 00-90 screws for the TSC. Unpleasant discovery was the stock roundhead screws with the TSC do not work, they rub the axles. Fortunately I had flathead 00-90 in the hardware stash, which then required countersinking the coupler box. It turned out to be easier to remove the floor for this work. I didn't do the other car this evening since my eyes were already falling out of my head from the first one.

Surprise, but sort of not, was the stock MTL wheels don't like Micro Engineering Code 40. Not awful, just enough interference to where they don't roll freely. No trouble, they were going to get FVM wheelsets anyway.

[nkalanaga]

Interesting about the wheels.  The last MT wheels I got, which were a year or so back, worked fine on my ME C40.  I wonder what they changed, or are these entirely new wheels?

[C855B]

They're 36" I don't recall having seen before. They might easily be on other cars, but this is the first for me.

[garethashenden]

I've made a bit more progress with my LSWR M7 project. It's coming along, although I have a problem with the chassis, it's got quite a curve.



Here you can see the curve:

[peteski]

I've made a bit more progress with my LSWR M7 project. It's coming along, although I have a problem with the chassis, it's got quite a curve.

Nice!  You are making good progress!  That gear on the driver axle looks really beefy!

How did the chassis end up bending down?  Was it straight when you soldered the frames to the PC board?  The fiberglass-epoxy PC board material is quite forgiving - you should be able to straighten it.