Still Pottering Around

This week was interesting.  I helped my daughter and one of her friends make a Mangonel catapult.  The thing was about 60cm long and 30 cm high and actually worked!  The girls helped with the screwing and the sanding of all the wood cuts.  The contraption actually sent a rubber ball through the air for about 4.6 meters.  They were rapt with the result.

On Tuesday model railway activities were back on the agenda.  I visited two local hobby shops, Hobby One and Austral Modelcraft checking out what sort of bridges they had in stock, but also looking for ballast.  Both shops had  various bridges available, but I decided not to purchase one, and neither shop had any Australian ballast.  They only had the woodland scenic rubbish.  That evening, I had 11 guys come over for our fortnightly get together.  So I had to give the shed a bity of a clean in the arvo.  As I was attempting to vacuum the shed, one rather newish (still under warranty) vacuum cleaner blew up, so I had to do it with a broom and dust pan.  The vacuum cleaner has since been refunded, as it still had time left on its warranty, otherwise it was going out in today's curb side council cleanup.

Thursday I visited Simon Says Hobbies and Games, and decided to buy a bridge from his shop.  I also purchased a number of electronic components from Jaycar, so I could make 10 power supplies that rectifies the DCC track bus and produces a 12V DC power source.  I soldered up 5 of these power supplies, and eventually installed two onto the layout bus.  One was located at Fairy Hill Loop signalbox and it powers the headlights of a car parked nearby - maybe someone was visiting the signaller, or it was a crew car for a change over job.  The second power supply was located on the Summerland Way underbridge at Kyogle, and again powers another car.

On Friday night I ventured over to Brendan’s place for a BBQ snag, and a modelling night, with Geoff, Darren and Anthony.  I started removing components from the bridge kit and cleaning them up, ready for assembly.  Maybe assembly is next week’s job.

On Saturday, it was Club day, so after missing the last 2 meetings, due to cricket activities with my son, I was able to make it over there.  There was also one presentation by a club member about Engine Driver/Wi Throttle integration into JMRI and customising the function button descriptions on your throttle for a particular locomotive.  That was good stuff to know and the presenter has developed a process for a member to bring his .XML file from his home layout for any number of locomotives with his function key descriptions setup, e.g. Brakes, Coupler Clank, Dynamic, etc. and then copy it to one of the Club PC’s and automated jobs will copy these to a particular layout JMRI PC, either the N scale or HO scale layouts and once JMRI has been refreshed, those function descriptions will appear on your throttle at the Club.  Pretty Good stuff.  There was also a discussion on the scenery and industry plans on the top deck on the HO layout.  This also was pretty interesting and was very helpful.

After the meeting I met up with Jim who was having a clean out at home, and he donated to me two Lloyds dual control whitemetal water columns, a styrene 20,000 gallon water tank, about 10 x 20’ containers (five were refrigerated ones) and a shed.  These are destined for the layout.  Thanks Jim. 

Today I painted up the two water columns with silver and black paint.  So they will be fine detailed tonight/tomorrow and placed on the layout soon after.