Wednesday, February 10, 2016

HAPPY BELATED NEW YEAR

Happy New Year all.  I'm not going to start by whining about all work no play - things continue to be busy for JE Musser Building and Renovations.  We are considering moving out of our shared shop in the old Collingwood Movie Theater (and leased office and studio there also) into our entirely own workshop - just considering, but move would take up even more of my time.  I've been down this road before with a large commercial cabinet shop so know the pluses and minuses,  but  compared to now, I had a considerably smaller operation back then.

I have been sporadically modeling.  On last post I had caught the paper modeling bug.  Upon returning, inspired, from the Paper Modelers Convention I went at it full bore, literally.  There is a plethora of free paper models online that can be downloaded an printed out.  I only have ink jet printers so the prints need to be sealed with a spray varnish prior to working with them otherwise the glue could potentially cause the glue to bleed.   The paper kits (all German, Polish, or Russian) that I purchased at the convention have very high quality paper and printing - well worth the $15 or so.   Back to the "full bore" comment - my first model, a free download, was a 1:1 scale model of a Heckler and Koch 45 caliber submachine gun.   Looked interesting and challenging and free (sans cost of ink and paper)    I got about 16 hours into the project and realized just how time consuming it was going to be to build.  For a second I considered giving up,  but paper modeling can be very obsessive and so long as a movie is playing on tv, not a bad way to spend some time.   I pushed on, and probably at least 120 hours later, I had a gun, abet, made out of printer paper.


DEFENDING MY TRAINS WITH MY PAPER GUN - NOTICE ANGRY OLDER WHITE MAN LOOK

A funny aside, its one of those things that once I built, I didn't really no what to do, so I leaned it up against a bookshelf in my parlor/man cave.  Was proud of my work, but also there was a certain "shock" value for friends that stopped by.  If it was real, in New Jersey, with a folding stock, silencer, large magazine, and short barrel, I'd probably be looking at 20 years.   I forgot it was even there and during the local NMRA January Division meet layout tour, I brought a few model railroaders up to the parlor to show them my z-scale coffee table layout.  They seemed interested, but all suddenly had "to get going".  Later I realized the paper gun was right behind me, next to the z-scale layout!

I followed up the gun, with a 1:200 scale model of a container ship.  Again, very high quality paper and printing.   I'm about half way, and probably at least 100 hours into this build, but I had to put it aside temporarily, as I was getting a little fried from the paper modeling, and after the aforementioned January layout tour I was inspired to get back to some trains.    I'm determined to finish up the blast furnace precipitator complex.  I'm adding additional piping that crosses the tracks to a non-modeled third (or fourth since we have the ferro furnace also) blast furnace.   And this piping also extends to a convenient stopping point where the clean gas lines for the blowing engine house, the boiler house, and B-Furnace stoves will branch off.    My dilemma with the piping is where do I break it.  It's a bit harder, and doesn't look as good with separations.   The result is a fair majority of the larger dirty and clean gas piping will be permanently glued together and when it's time to finally paint the precipitator assembly, it will probably be a two person job to move it from the basement, our to garage to paint.

I will try to update more frequently as time allows - a few event we went to lately I'll cover in separate posts - Cabin Fever, a model engineering show in Lebanon, PA, and our yearly Battle of the Bulge reenactment at Ft Indiantown Gap, PA.    Also, as of yesterday I finished building a 3d Printer with the help of my son Jimmy.  We are printing out 1/100 war-game miniatures for him as I write this and expect to make some model railroad items on it soon.    This will also be covered in an upcoming post.   Also some book reviews.
3d Printer kit - Future post