Morning. 2+ mile walk with Wifey. Now off to lunch meeting. Judging Womanless Beauty Pageant tonight.

Have a good one.

Good Morning Blue
Friday 13th
Just thought you ought to know.
The temp is 55 with clouds and a north wind. Hi in the 60s today.
This is our eat out day but granny has not told me where she wants to go yet.
Sorry no train news.
S.J.

For the past three and a half hours I've been working on the new F3 and almost none of it was on the outside. The extent of the work on the outside was making and installing a handrail to replace the one that was missing from the fireman's rear side door.



The rest of the centered around adding weight to this beast. It's going to be the lead on an ABBB consist and I want it to be heavier than any of the B's. With them all being metal Varney B units that's a tall order. I'll be providing links to photos as I go along so I won't be cluttering up the post with photos.

First off I cut down an Athearn superweight to the desired size and shape so it will fit inside the Varney F3 shell.

Cut down superweight on F7 blue box chassis.

The inside of the Varney shell had to be altered to make room for the weight.

Parts of the shell were cut away.

Next the shell was mated with the weighted chassis. This was harder than it looks. Lots of small cuts had to be made. And there's still plenty of room for a decoder in there!

Gordon Varney probably never thought of this!

The roof insert had to be altered so it would fit over the weight.

Altered roof inser

The end result is what I call the F3 Super. A rough weigh in, weighing the pieces individually puts it at twenty-eight ounces or 1.75 pounds. Definitely a heavyweight.

Varney F3 Super

Been busy today working on a Varney F3A. Got an Athearn drive in it, did some surgery on the shell, put in a cut down Athearn superweight, fixed some handrails. Maybe tomorrow I'll get around to drilling out the headlight and the portholes. I tore it down so I could weigh it on an antique postal scale my father has. It's old but it's accurate. Shell, roof insert, drive, weight. After adding up all the readings I came up with 29.12 ounces. That's 1.82 pounds. That officially makes it the heaviest Varney rebuild in my fleet. It'll be a little lighter after I drill out the portholes and headlight but not by much. It's gonna take a stout decoder to stand up to the power required to get it moving not to mention the weight it'll be pulling. It shouldn't be too bad though. There'll be four of these monsters on the head end. An A and three B's.

My father made cheese burgers for dinner tonight. They were enormous! The patties were 1/4 pound AFTER cooking. I could just barely get two down. If Mickey D's served burgers like that they'd go broke.

Thunder storms came through earlier tonight. Lots of lightning and thunder but no rain. Weather guesser says it's almost a 50% chance for tonight. I'm thinking we won't see a drop!

That's it for tonight. See y'all tomorrow.

I updated my blog with some pictures of a diorama I built of a small engine repair shop. The details are items I design and either had 3d printed at shapeways.com, or printed on my Afinia printer. <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://nvrr49.blogspot.com/2013/09/lawn-mowersmall-engne-repair-shop.html">http://nvrr49.blogspot.com/2013/09/lawn ... -shop.html</a><!-- m -->

nvrr49 Wrote:I updated my blog with some pictures of a diorama I built of a small engine repair shop. The details are items I design and either had 3d printed at shapeways.com, or printed on my Afinia printer. <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://nvrr49.blogspot.com/2013/09/lawn-mowersmall-engne-repair-shop.html">http://nvrr49.blogspot.com/2013/09/lawn ... -shop.html</a><!-- m -->

That looks great!!

Very good work there.

Good Morning All.
Not much to report from the land of Buckeyes other then falls knocking at the door and its getting close to time to clean my fishing gear and straighten out the tackle box and place them in the closest till next year..I have several pounds of catfish,walleye perch and crappie in my freezer.The catfish came from the conservation league lakes and average 3 pounds-the ideal eating size.

Modeling and forum wise hasn't been much of that going on but,over the coming weeks I will post photos of the MDC car kits I built and my newest engines in the WPF thread.

The good news is I regain around 80% usage of my right hand and I can almost make a fist-the only digits that isn't working as they should is my thumb and index finger but,they are slowly improving.

I shall have a cup and look over the forum.

Have a good'un!

Morning. Pretty day. Fall like temps. Off to the 2 miles walk. Then dress in my engineer's "uniform" to drive the train for the kids. During break, judge the bar-be-que cook off. What a day.

Good Saturday morning from the arid deserts of Arizona. We had our share of rain, but sent most of it up to Colorado. A really bad scene up there and I hope for the best that they can recover quickly. As an old Jersey lad who spent a lot of my youth on the boardwalks on the Jersey shores, what happened in Seaside has to be devastating. The last word yesterday was that the fire's origin is "suspicious". Why would anyone do this on purpose is beyond comprehension.

Brakie, glad to see your getting more and more control in your hand. It's been a long time coming.

Kent, very nice modeling. Thanks for sharing.

I hope everyone's weekend is a pleasant one.

Greetings, gang.

Sunny and not quite as cool this morning. Right now it's 55 degrees after an overnight low of 48. The high for today is predicted to be in the mid 70s with winds up to 23 mph.

The shower door was installed yesterday with little difficulty. I didn't even have to screw it to the wall. It's all held in place with tension.

The only thing on today's agenda so far is college football at 11.

Larry - congrats on the improving dexterity. It takes a lot of hard work to get there. I went through a lot of therapy after my back surgery to regain control of my foot so I can appreciate what you have done to improve your hand.

All stay safe.

Tom

Good morning. It's 70° with 70% humidity. The high will be 92° and will feel like 97°.


Well today I guess I'll drill out the headlight and portholes on the F3 then see what comes up from there. No other plans for today, yet.

Good Morning Blue
45 degrees this morning when we woke. 68 in the house.
We still have a few tomatoes in the garden so I enjoyed what will soon be the end of a real BLT for another season.
Tonight is our first fall meeting of the detroit3railers club. Another sign that summer is over.
The Lionel catalog's have arrived at the dealers, not much in this one but hey, it's a new catalog.
S.J.

I got the headlight and portholes drilled out. Portholes are OK. The headlight is another matter. I used a larger bit in an effort to drill out most of the blank area but the thickness of the top of the nose prevented that, therefore the hole is slightly lower than I wanted. Oh well. I can work with that. I still have to clear the holes of burrs. Later I'll see about making handrails for the rear ladders of the other F3.

Here's your laugh for the day. Maybe a few of them. Last night I was here at the computer when I heard one of the two mousetraps in the kitchen go ka-snap. So I went to the kitchen, opened the lower cabinet door just to the left of the oven and what do I see? The tripped trap is laying on it's side and there's a mouse sitting there pretty as you please, completely unscathed happily munching on the bait. Then the little cuss looked up and grinned at me! Shades of Mouse Hunt! Right then I wished I'd had a hammer with me. That's the SECOND time that trap has sprung and there's been no mouse in it. I bet that little varmint has learned how to trip it without getting caught. I put new bait in the trap, reset it and put it back where it was. If this happens a third time I'm putting a glue trap in there. I might even put a little piece of cheese in the middle of it. The last meal for the condemned. Today it came out in the open where the cat could see it and led her on a merry chase along the base board of the great room wall to several seven foot sections of 1.5" PVC pipe standing in a corner. The mouse did a tight high speed turn between the pipes and the wall and went back in the opposite direction right between the cats legs. The cat was already going pretty fast and tried to do a fast turn on an Italian marble tile floor and totally loses control. She slides into the corner, hits the pipes and complete wipe-out! The pipes came crashing down and the cat looked like a huge bottle brush. The mouse was under a massive colonial trestle table grooming itself. I wonder how smart that little thing is.