Tuesday, February 1, 2011

IT'S A GIRL / FIND - Or Not? / FREE-MO






Busy day - a lot to report.
First off - the newest addition to the Musser family, Chloe Casmira Musser was born this morning in Cape May Court House, NJ.  She is my brother's second child and second daughter.  She is shown with her older sister, Ella.  
Second - As I think I've talked about before, I'm on an eternal search for a new source of corrugated siding material in styrene or other plastic.  I primarily use Evergreen, which is .040 thick with .040 spacing and costs about $6 a piece.  Needless to say large steel mill buildings eat up a lot of this material.   Plastruct makes a thinner corrugated material that comes two to a pack for about $10 or so.  That makes it just slightly cheaper, but it can only be used as a laminate and not by itself like the Evergreen.    So, finally, at Sattlers Train shop in Westmont, NJ I think my prayers have been answered.  The proprietor, Bruce, just brought in a new line of plastic pattern sheets by JTT Architectural Model Parts.  The corrugated material, listed as HO Scale 1:100, comes in slightly larger sheets, two to a package, at the most excellent price of $5.50.  Finally I can clad the power plant and open hearth at a reasonable cost.  I picked up the one package that he had, along with another pack of concrete block pattern, and a curb and sidewalk package.  Slight disappointment set in when I got home and compared this new material to both Evergreen and Plastruct - the spacing of the corrugations is much bigger.  It works out to almost two corrugations per scale foot - by that an outie, and innie, and outie, and part of an innie.  Roughly six scale inches between the high part of the corrugations.  I think it is usable, but I'm going to post my dilemma on the Steel Board and see what others think.   
Third - Free-mo progress.  Well as usual I'm not where I wanted to be in terms of the modules, but that's the way it usually works.  We should have the mains up and running at least for Timonium this weekend and probably will be working on them at the show.  I've posted a photo of the as-yet unnamed module.  With the cold weather we fortunately had a room on the first floor that is being remodeled ,  so it is serving as our warm module construction area.  This module is has a diverging branch line and has three end plates.  We are planing to use it to take the Pipe Foundry module off the main line as it is a little unrealistic having the main go through a building.  (Free-mo rules can be a pain in the ass at times for modeling large industrial structures.  They work best for rural main lines.)   However, this module could also be used to split the module set up into two streams.   And you might recognize the Walthers lift-bridge - yes it does operate.

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