Solid State

 

An unassuming gray box holds the key to worry free motor tool excellence.

This has to be one of the best investments I've made in my hobby tool set. The Dremel Solid State Motor Speed Control lets me dial the motor tool speed down to a near crawl.  I've shattered countless cutoff discs and melted too much plastic with the high rpm built-in speed control Dremel tools.  This vintage beauty combined with an old Weller motor tool lets me use a spinning grinding and cutting tool the way I always imagined - with careful precision - to do fine work.

Note: this variable speed control was made for single-speed, on/off motor tools only.  Fortunately they, like the speed control, can be found readily online.  Not sure where I picked up this Weller but I'm glad it survived the latest round of tool purging.  I found the speed control box on eBay in its original packaging, with spare fuses, for under $30.  Of course the low speed operation doesn't have much torque, but for grinding and shaping soft material this is definitely the way to go.

 

  

A Pane-ful Job Made Easier

Yes, you read that correctly.  Pane-ful instead of painful.  Regular readers of this blog may know my disdain for installing window glass.  I have reached the point in the Trail Drive challenge where I'm installing window glass in the cabeeses.  There are sixteen windows on each caboose.  Fortunately the Tichy windows I used in the cupolas come with pre-cut clear styrene that drops perfectly into the window.  But that's only six windows per car.  The remaining ten in the body will need to be cut from clear styrene sheet.  Thankfully the cuts on these don't need to be precise and they're all the same size.  

However the real challenge isn't the fit of things; rather, getting the little buggers into place without smudging glue all over and having to curse and try again.  Enter blue-tack.

A tiny blob on the end of a dental tool allows me to pick up a pane and set it precisely into place deep inside the caboose body, just where I want it.  Once the glue has grabbed I can gently roll the tool to release it from the pane.  No swearing, weeping, gnashing of teeth or rending garments.  Why didn't I think of this before now?

Turnout Trials TWO + Tools

More turnout work, but this time with tools.

On another blog (I forget which one right now) I read about track tuning and checking the level across the rails.  Sure enough, the curve coming into this turnout from the left is banked slightly towards the center, which is fine, but the turnout is flat through the points.  Actually, it was slightly banked away from the center, so I could see how that sudden change in level might cause trouble for certain finicky rolling stock or locomotives.

My solution was to shim the turnout, seen above as the white strip beneath the ties in the lower center of the image.  This did the trick, eliminating most of the incidents of derailments in this location.  The only thing remaining that might cause an issue is the funky taper on the ends of the point rails.  Atlas clips the corner off the top of the point rail, which is already a pressed-metal quasi-rail to begin with, so it becomes a tricky thing to file without doing damage.  A gentle touch is required.

Work continues on a mini scene for a Railroad-Line forum challenge, and when that is complete sometime before tax day I will return to the benchwork for this railroad in earnest; hopefully sooner than later.  Also on the wish list is helping my oldest son with a project this week that might become a post if we get anywhere with it, and maybe even some rolling stock work.  We'll see.