Working with W-irons

Apologies for the title, it’s hard to follow up something as good as “Well Bust My Buffers“. It’s flippin cold outside, so more time working on trains.

I started by spilling some CA glue (the shiny bit on the left side of the picture), after that I moved on to trimming and gluing in the floor. The next step was the prepare the W-irons, now I should interject here I don’t know what a lot of these terms are so for my British readers I’m sorry, feel free to correct me in the comments (or just laugh at my ignorance).

Not sponsored by Mountain Dew… though if anyone from Mountain Dew is reading this and wants to sponsor this blog I’m down for it 🙂

I ended up gluing the bridle bars instead of soldering them like the instructions said, mostly because I don’t think I have the right supplies and equipment to solder them (and my skill level probably isn’t good enough). Then it was just a matter of folding things into shape. The support plates are pretty cool, how they work. The ones I got support setup as non-rocking and rocking versions. I’m not sure when you’d want to use one or the other but for this one I went with non-rocking.

The instructions called for soldering all the folds, presumably to prevent them from folding back so I took a stab at that. Looking at the discoloration I probably did a pretty poor job but things feel pretty solid. I think I should throw some primer on them quick before anyone looks to closely at them.

Well Bust My Buffers…

Posts two days in a row (and obvious buffer joke)

Well… That took a while

As I was preparing to write up this post I realized that my last post on this project was nearly a year ago… I guess time flies.

The quick recap is this is a Wizard Models kit that I’m building for my Box File Layout which to recap is this Scalescenes Kit. Now reviewing my posts on this project (this one will be #3) I’ve noticed I introduced this project as getting back into it, and that was in February 2019… and it’s currently January 2020 so that didn’t work out. What I recall from last year was that my first attempt at gluing did not work so I needed to either learn how to solder white metal or use an epoxy. The instructions recommended Araldite so I imported some, there is probably an equivalent available in the US under a different name but I don’t know enough about epoxies to know for sure. For future use if anyone knows of one please leave a comment!

Anyway my first attempt failed then, I ordered and received glue and essentially was afraid to mess things up and put it off, then got busy and all of a sudden it’s the next year. So today I cleared off a years junk and dust (and hey even found some stuff I’d been looking for) and started gluing

So far it seems to be working better though obviously it’s going to need some cure time to know for sure (though I’m certainly optimistic). In the year since I last worked on this another hobby has sprung up for me, one that has a bit more Wife Acceptance Factor, hand tool woodworking making furniture around the house. In addition to what was likely a needed break from trains it’s been useful in other ways like changed how I think about building models and it made me think of something Chris Mears at Prince Street said few years ago, or perhaps he said something that inspired something else for me which was an idea that layouts should be more furniture like. I’m not sure this is where he was going at the time but for me I started thinking that my layout should feel like furniture, something well built that fits in with it’s surroundings. I’ve never achieved it, never gotten far enough on a layout to achieve it, but it gives me ideas for this box file layout.

When I started this I already had in mind once I finished it I wanted to build it again, either as a different season or different techniques but I have a new inspiration that ties into my furniture building which is to build the “box file” box with a nice hardwood so closed it looks like a nice wooden box that’s nice enough to be in the house on it’s own and when it’s open it’s a nice little layout inside the nice wooden box.

Well that’s all I have for now, hopefully it’s not a year from now when I post next 🙂

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

I had some time the other night to work on trains, so I out this wagon kit I got from Wizard Models. This is for my box file project, sure I haven’t started yet (other than starting to print it) but as soon as I get started I’m going to need some rolling stock right?

My plan was to actually start gluing things together but I realized I didn’t know where any of my glue is so it ended up mostly familiarizing myself with the instructions and try to figure out what all the names of things are.

Over all I really like the nature of these kits, American rolling stock kits end to be shake the box hard enough and it might be assembled when you open it so it’s nice to see something that takes a little bit more effort to build.

Getting back in the groove

I think it’s obligatory for a hobby blog to 1) start any post after a long period of noting with an explanation why, and 2) a comment about how unnecessary such explanations are…

So here is my totally unnecessary explanation of why it’s been nearly a year since I’ve done any significant modeling. I think that covers #2 so on to #1, about a year and a half ago I made a pretty big job change, that changed what kind of time I had to do hobby related things so it dropped off significantly fast forward to this fall we came to the realization that the room that my home office/train room lived in would be better utilized as a bedroom so that’s what happened and the layout/storage shelf came down.

Fast forward a couple months and I’m sort of settled into my new office (in terms of work) but haven’t done anything modeling related other than stacking boxes on shelves in the closet. Then I see this post show up in my RSS feed: Scalescenes Box File Layout

Now I had looked at Scalescenes before as I have done a couple printed card stock models but at the time I couldn’t justify spending the time or money on something that wouldn’t even be on the same continent as my ongoing projects. But I have wanted to do some UK themed projects for quite a while (and my UK trip last year didn’t help with that 🙂 ) but I was looking at it from the lens of 1) I don’t have active projects, 2) I don’t have a lot of space and this doesn’t take much space, and 3) this is awesome.

I don’t have much started yet (hence no picture) as I’m waiting on supplies (the size boxfile they use isn’t terribly common in the US) and I’ve got vague memories of various things I’ve seen on blogs that I saved away somewhere for when I did a project like this… and have no idea where I saved all these things but expect to see more here soon.