White Christmas ~ Thursday, December 24, 2020

Definitely a Night to get the Telescope Out! ~ Monday, December 21, 2020

Trolley Diner ~ Saturday, December 19, 2020

This is the Red Wagon Cafe in Shafter, CA. It's made out of a PE 500, according to the American Chicken Coop Project.

I hope this place survives to reopen as a dine-in restaurant. The Yelp Reviews look promising. Enormous pancakes!

On the Road ~

Last Wednesday we flew out to Las Vegas to retrieve our car, which we'd left there before Thanksgiving due to a breakdown (fortunately covered by warranty).

On this one-day trip we saw quite a few odd and cool things:

• Atomic bomb test crater
• Plane with peeling paint
• LAS people mover
• Car covered with cool stickers
• Defunct roller coaster
• Jet-powered car
• Graffiti garden
• Active and defunct solar power plans
• Utility pole digger
• Giant sundae
• Mountains of Mordor
• Rusty ship in the middle of the desert
• The Mojave airplane graveyard
• Also at the Mojave airport/spaceport: The Virgin Orbiter. NASA plane used to test Space Shuttle landing gear. F-4 Phantom turned into an experimental drone
• Lots of freight trains
• A very lost caboose
• The Tehachapi Loop
• Track-laying machines
• A trolley-car diner

Too Doggone Small ~ Monday, December 07, 2020

Elf Breakfast ~

San Jose Light Tower ~ Friday, December 04, 2020

Second Cider Batch ~ Thursday, November 12, 2020

Putting Skills to Practical Use ~ Monday, November 09, 2020

Vote! ~ Tuesday, November 03, 2020

Happy Halloween ~ Saturday, October 31, 2020

Take what you Need! ~ Saturday, October 17, 2020

To take part in an activity organized by our church to create random acts of kindness in local neighborhoods, we have posted these "take one" signs around the neighborhood.

Cider! ~ Monday, October 05, 2020

Corner Hotel ~ Friday, September 25, 2020

With the hotel structure done, I turned to adding a few details and interior lighting.

The lights are white LED's salvaged from a string of Christmas tree lights. Note that you need to put the LED's in series with a resistor or they will literally explode. You could build this resistor into the power supply for all your buildings, but (a) you might want to have lighting or animations that don't need this current-limiting, and (b) it'd be way too easy to accidentally hook things up wrong and make all your structure lights explode simultaneously. So I'm planning on every illuminated building containing it's own resistor, as needed. I used a 330Ω resistor. Here is an article which recommends 470Ω for a 12v supply but as you can see I'm using 9v.

I put some figures and minimal interor details into the first floor lobby (the furniture is just simple painted wood shapes). On the 2nd and 3d floor I skipped doing interiors and made curtains out of tissue paper.

Adding lighting isn't that much work, but definitely adds to the atmosphere of a trolley layout.

Bricks in N Scale ~ Saturday, September 19, 2020

For years I've heard of a technique for modelling brick walls where you first paint the walls the basic brick color, and then run thinned white or gray paint into the mortar lines. This was the first thing I tried. When you're applying the mortar paint, capillary action draws it into the grooves between the bricks, and it looks great. But I kept finding that as the paint dried, the effect disappeared. I guess as the water evaporates, the paint particles redistribute and instead of a thick paint line in the groove you end up with a very even and very thin coat over everything.

On Youtube, I found a demonstration of another technique: brush spackling pastte or joint compound (the gray stuff you patch holes in real-life walls with) over your model and wipe it off, just leaving the mortar lines filled. An interesting idea, but seems like it could go wrong and ruin a model. But I tried the same basic idea using thick white paint ($0.99-ish craft paint), and here's the results:

Click to see larger.

I'm pretty happy with this but I feel like the white lines "pop" a bit too much--next time I'll try the same idea but try either gray or a terra-cotta red mortar (like the 1905 building in my previous post).

I made a few changes to the kit as I assembled it. First, I cut out a section of the long walls to chop it down to my standard city lot size. The front "stoop" has been positioned to rest on the sidewalk instead of being even with the bottom of the walls. I also added some partial floors and interior walls in preparation for lighting (those giant holes in the ground of the layout are for running wires).

Brick Walls ~ Friday, September 18, 2020

I'm getting back into model building, and my first new project is a Life-Like Downtown Hotel kit that's been sitting on my shelf for a while.

I seem to still remember how to cut, sand, and glue plastic kits together.

But one thing that's always been a challenge is painting brick buildings with believable-looking mortar lines, so I decided to take a closer look at what they look like in real life.

A possible benefit of the current lack of entertainment options (this was actually early in the pandemic, when things were really locked-down) is that kids are bored enough to help you with projects. When I asked Nate, "Wanna bike around town and take pictures of brick walls?" he said "Sure!"

So here's some selections from our survey:

Our chimney, circa 1950.

Actually a modern building. I watched them build it with big pre-fab panels of brick-colored tiles. Looks pretty realistic, though.

This, on the other hand, is the oldest building in Redwood City. There's a parking garage behind it now, but the back side used to face a creek, where merchandise was unloaded from boats.

An interesting building whith paint over the bricks, peeling away. Note that the purple section in the top picture is structurally part of this brick building, but seems to have been taken over by the one to the right.

A fairly nice and well-kept up office building downtown.

The Sequoia Hotel, a local architectural landmark which is stubbornly defying the gentrification of downtown.

One thing I learned from some discussion in the nscaletraction group on groups.io is that, although we stereotypically imagine mortar as white or grey, in earlier times it was often colored to match the bricks. The "1905" building shows this nicely.

Last Apple ~ Friday, September 04, 2020

Stuffed Chicken? ~ Sunday, August 30, 2020

An Enigma Wrapped in a Mystery ~ Monday, August 24, 2020

45 Flxible ~ Sunday, August 23, 2020

Crossing our Fingers for Some of our Favorite Places ~ Thursday, August 20, 2020

The CZU Lightning fire is creeping close to Memorial Park and Pescadero, some of our favorite places to go.

Donner Pass ~ Monday, July 27, 2020

On the way back from a family trip to Lake Tahoe (boating, biking, hiking, and lots more fun stuff) we took the original Donner Pass Road instead of Interstate 80, and stopped to see some historical sights here.

The oldest thing to see here are petroglyphs.

They are faint and hard to see; for enhanced versions see this Donner Summit Historical Society page.

Up above is the original right-of-way of the transcontinental railway (it now passes under this point by way of a newer tunnel). There is a long stone retaining wall called the China Wall after the laborers who originally built it (by hand).

On either end are snowsheds,

which lead into actual tunnels, blasted out of solid rock:

At one point there is a hole in the roof of a snowshed, which lets sunlight in. There's some interesting graffiti in there.

Donner Pass Road is an engineering feat itself too, with an impressive concrete-arch bridge, and some amazing views. But drive carefully!