At The Lake

[South Park]

  Either youzalls is at the lake, or you ate too much salt, drank too
much tequila, tripped over a log, hit your head on a rock, and
died of COVID.  Where is everybody ?

I spent the last 2 weeks framing gable ends and other details before
putting a new roof on the backshop.  Near 100º temps kept all shingle
laying to early morning and late day work, slowing progress a lot.

[Darel Leedy]

When the garage is bigger than the house. My kind of place!

[South Park]

  I had 11 cars to restore and house when I broke ground.  Then I got
deployed, traded lead with bad guys, saw some bombs, and came to
the realization that I would not live long enough to restore them all.
Now I have a GIANT shop (3600sqft) and a 800sqft house.  But, I DO
run my construction business out of it, and still have more old junk than
most museums, so ......  Most of the cars got sold.  Now I am down to 4.

[Paul R.]

Love that scaffolding,would give H&S a fit. Are those shingles asphalt shingles or a composite? over here mostly corrugated steel or cement or clay tiles.I have been model building buildings for a small traction layout in HO mostly kits, Bar Mills ,Foz models and others. Paul R.

[South Park]

Shingles are architectural asphalt.  Had to build a platform to stand the
scaffold on, so traffic could still get through to the house.  With no interest
in riding a set of scaffold to the ground, I built that platform to withstand
a LOT of weight and vibration.  It was rock solid.  I have too much
to get done to be getting dead just yet.

[Keith Hayes]

Went to visit the kiddo and ride the El in Chicago. While we were there we enjoyed some local food.

Not much going on in Leadville these days.

[Lee Gustafson]

Keith,

The next time you’re going to be in Chicago please contact me to see my layout if you have time. I’m located in a southwest suburb 15 miles from downtown Chicago. Layout is C&S oriented scenes On3 15 x 30.

Lee Gustafson

[Jim Courtney]

I've spent most of the summer of Covid converting my woodworking shop to a space for my retirement C&S railroad in S scale.

My table saw, other power tools and woodworking benches, tools and supplies were relocated to another outbuilding on the property. Far less convenient to use, but I can't have saw dust being blown onto a model railroad. All my automotive tools have been relocated to the adjacent garage.

Once the room was empty, the walls, ceiling and fluorescent fixtures were vacuumed/cleaned to remove 15 years of accumulated dust. New T-5 color balanced fluorescent bulbs were installed (CRI=98%, temp=5,000 degrees Kelvin) for bright, accurate light.

A new out-swing door was installed at the entrance -- I plan to run track around the four walls, with a semi-permanent duck-under at the entrance.  

The walls were repainted with "Agreeable Grey". The concrete floor was thoroughly steamed cleaned, then primed and painted with concrete paint. The brown floor seems like walking on a Hershey bar, but is color matched to the sticky, glacial mud that I track into the room on my shoes during the rainy season--perhaps the dirt won't show as much until spring cleaning is possible!

The existing built-in counters/drawers/cabinets have been repurposed for model and layout building: There is a brass fabrication area at one end, with jeweler's drill press and soldering tools. The other end is an area for painting my models, with my compressor, airbrushes and spray paint booth. I vented the spray booth to the outside with a dryer vent. The drawers are just the right depth for all my paint bottles. The cabinets are now stocked with scenery building supplies.






So, other than painting and installing some trim pieces, my 10.5' by 20' space is now ready for my S scale vision of Breckenridge and the Gold Pan Shops. I'm eager to get started on bench work, but that will likely have to wait until mid-October.

Next week we begin a complete kitchen remodel . . .

Then the painters come, to completely repaint the inside of the house. My future little piece of Colorado will have to serve as a storage unit for furniture, etc., until the work is complete.

[Bill Uffelman]

Excellent! Good plan to do kitchen after your RR room wad ready for storage so significant other did not complain that kitchen wasn't first!

Bill Uffelman 

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 3:56 PM, Jim Courtney [via C&Sng Discussion Forum]

<[hidden email]> wrote:

I've spent most of the summer of Covid converting my woodworking shop to a space for my retirement C&S railroad in S scale.

My table saw, other power tools and woodworking benches, tools and supplies were relocated to another outbuilding on the property. Far less convenient to use, but I can't have saw dust being blown onto a model railroad. All my automotive tools have been relocated to the adjacent garage.

Once the room was empty, the walls, ceiling and fluorescent fixtures were vacuumed/cleaned to remove 15 years of accumulated dust. New T-5 color balanced fluorescent bulbs were installed (CRI=98%, temp=5,000 degrees Kelvin) for bright, accurate light.

A new out-swing door was installed at the entrance -- I plan to run track around the four walls, with a semi-permanent duck-under at the entrance.  

The walls were repainted with "Agreeable Grey". The concrete floor was thoroughly steamed cleaned, then primed and painted with concrete paint. The brown floor seems like walking on a Hershey bar, but is color matched to the sticky, glacial mud that I track into the room on my shoes during the rainy season--perhaps the dirt won't show as much until spring cleaning is possible!

The existing built-in counters/drawers/cabinets have been repurposed for model and layout building: There is a brass fabrication area at one end, with jeweler's drill press and soldering tools. The other end is an area for painting my models, with my compressor, airbrushes and spray paint booth. I vented the spray booth to the outside with a dryer vent. The drawers are just the right depth for all my paint bottles. The cabinets are now stocked with scenery building supplies.






So, other than painting and installing some trim pieces, my 10.5' by 20' space is now ready for my S scale vision of Breckenridge and the Gold Pan Shops. I'm eager to get started on bench work, but that will likely have to wait until mid-October.

Next week we begin a complete kitchen remodel . . .

Then the painters come, to completely repaint the inside of the house. My future little piece of Colorado will have to serve as a storage unit for furniture, etc., until the work is complete.

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[John Greenly]

Hi all,

not much railroading going on here either, and for similar reasons as  South Park and Jim.  Three years ago I got a local farmer to come over with his tractor to help my old crummy garage fall down, and have since built a new steel-framed building in its place.  I wanted something that looks enough like an old barn to fit in with my old house and neighborhood, but should outlast me with no major maintenance needed.  I'm very happy with my new barn!



I recently finished up the wiring and lighting--  I love these LED shop lights

 

I actually do spend a lot of time on the lake, South Park.  Rather than too many cars, as you can see, I subscribe to the philosophy that there is no such thing as too many boats.  All these I built myself or bought damaged, and repaired.  Getting a good workout on the water, flying along in a single scull, is what keeps me somewhat sane these crazy days.  



As to railroading, I could use the righthand 32 ft wall after my son moves his forging equipment out eventually, but my plan is to put in a mezzanine second floor over the back half,  that would be 16x28',  up out of the dust of the workshop and easy to enclose and heat.

Cheers,
John


 

[Robert McFarland]

Has anybody seen the pictures of the small steamboat that operated on Twin Lakes in the early days?They're on the DPL.

[Lee Gustafson]

John,

What a great space. The boat building is an interesting hobby a world apart from narrow gauge modeling. I can’t help noticing the music stand with what appears to be an etude book. As a retired music teacher and still active musician what instrument do you play? Stay safe and take care.

Lee Gustafson

[Jim Courtney]

Excellent! Good plan to do kitchen after your RR room and ready for storage so significant other did not complain that kitchen wasn't first!

Wish I could say I planned it, but it just worked out that way. Planning for the kitchen remodel began 8 months ago. Then COVID 19 arrived here first and our Governor shut everything down in mid-March. Our original cabinet maker didn't survive and went bankrupt. Our contractor had to shed 15 employees to survive--now it is just him and his most senior employee. They weren't allowed to go back to work until the first week of June.

We finally started over with a new Kitchen Design firm and custom cabinet makers to make stuff to fit our 70 year old kitchen. The earliest the cabinets can be delivered is week after next. And our contractor has finally worked through his backlog of stalled projects.

So, I've been filling the time by cleaning out 15 years of accumulated stuff, making 2-3 trips to the dump every week and slowly converting the shop into a train room. Hopefully, I can start bench work before the winter rains start in November.

[John Greenly]

Jim,  

you're a busy man!  Your railroading space looks wonderful,  very inviting and just right for the purpose.  I can't wait to see the track plan that will go in it!!
(hint, hint).  

Another parallel in our efforts-  I'm just about to have a big dumpster dropped off in my driveway for a week, I'm ready to go on a throwout rampage.  There's something so liberating about chucking things in over the side of a big container never to  be seen again!!

John

[John Greenly]

Hi Lee,

Music teachers are my heroes!  I'll say thank you for your service!!   What do you play?

I'm a clarinet player,  I play a lot of chamber music and presently bass and Eb clarinets in a professional orchestra.  There's some overlap with modeling because I use some of the same tools and techniques to do precise adjustments and modifications to clarinet mouthpieces and keywork.  I have a separate clarinet worktable in the same room as my modeling bench,  and I'm constantly stealing tools from one to the other.  

That stand is in my new barn because it has great acoustics, a very warm, resonant sound, so I like to practice in there.  The rigid, somewhat uneven spray foam insulation surprisingly seems to behave acoustically a lot like wooden surfaces with dispersive texture.  If I get to running trains with sound in there, they'll sound great!  

John

[John Greenly]

Robert,

thanks!  I found a reference, it says:

Twin lakes steam ferry and navigation company
Incorporators listed; to put steamboat on lakes.
Leadville Daily Chronicle
Jume 9, 1879 p.2 c.2

and this is the only photo I found, by Joseph Collier,  DPL call no. C-150, :



Are there other photos? my search didn't find any.

This is great, it would be fun to build a model of this.  I wonder where the ferry dock was, and whether it might have been served by the railroad?

[Jim Courtney]

Hi John,

I thought about a dumpster, but I am enamored of our local dump. It sits a top the ridge that runs north-south down the length of the Kitsap Peninsula, with breathtaking views of the Olympic Mountains, only 10 or so miles away across the Hood Canal. It's kinda like driving to Switzerland to go to the dump . . .

I envy your ability to row on the Finger Lakes. I tried kayaking on the Hood Canal once, when we first moved here, but got a bit lost. We live a few miles north of the big Navy Sub Base at Bangor. A Coast Guard swift boat with .50 caliber machine gun rushed up to me and, not so politely, told me to go back to where I came from. Haven't tried kayaking since. Supposedly they were much friendlier at Bangor before 9/11.

[South Park]

  Yeah,  unauthorized persons around a nuke zone is SERIOUS business
to military security personnel.  Get's them all sorts of excited !  

[John Greenly]

Jim,

Wow, if we had a dump like that I'd be visiting it often!

I have to worry about getting run down by drunken motorboaters on Saturday evenings, but at least they don't carry machine guns...  I think.  Really I am so lucky to live a mile from the lake, and our town park with a place to launch.  I can decide to go for a row, throw a boat on the car and be on the water in 15 minutes.  A great safety valve, if I'm trying to solder something tiny on a locomotive and my vocabulary shrinks to a single word, I can escape to the water!

John

Oh,  and I forgot to say,  South Park, thank you for your service!

[Jeff Young]

I've also been doing a bit of 1:1 scale modelling.  The two windows are done, but I have 6 more of the door leaves to make, and one wider door (the pieces of which are below the windows).



I've also been beavering away a little on a... well, what else to beavers do?