Pat,
In the area for avatar,joined date etc.. Is it possible to move the "start of line ?" a couple of spaces to the left, to create a larger divide between that information, and the "start of line" of the posted text? There appears to be only one character space between, right now, and there seems to be room to the left that could be used. Kind of like adjusting margins in print preview?
Pete
OK, my minor rant for the day. Maybe it's aimed at you, but probably not. If it is, then take it personally, because you annoy the heck out of me!
I find it hard enough to read messages on this board. The text colour (light on a dark background) is hard enough on my eyes, nevermind the technicolour headers, footers, icons and so-forth. hock:
If you haven't got the energy to hit the "shift" key and the period to start and end a sentence, or hit "return" to start a new thought, I haven't got the energy to wade through your stream-of-conciousness text to figure out what the heck you're talking about. :evil:
Unless you're e e cummings (which your writings suggest you definitely aren't) you've got no excuse except perhaps laziness or illiteracy. Since you can apparently spell more-or-less correctly, I'm guessing it's the former.
You want help from people? Make it easy for people to help you. Type so people can read what you're saying. I have to read enough badly-written crap by allegedly educated people, I'm not going to waste my time trying to wade through yours when I'm trying to relax.
Bah! Humbug! Arrrgh!.... And for all you bleeding hearts that think I'm being unfair and unreasonable, I just kicked a kitten and bit the head off a baby too!
anyone know the type of plastic used in atlas handrails ? need to modify several sets and was wondering if there is a solvent or do they require heat welding?
Jim
I signed up for this new online E-zine. he first issue is out now and I just read through a couple of the articles, and skimmed the rest of it. Some of you guys might find it very interesting. I have been subscribing to and reading an automotive E-zine titled Winding Road for about 3 or 4 years. I wondered when someone would do the same thing with model railroading. For those worried about spam, the magazine makes it's money by selling advertising on the pages of the magazine just like Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman, etc. Because it is online the cost of printing on paper and mailing is eliminated.
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To resume the ( long story ):
My 80 years old mom went to visit our family in Belgium and brought me back ( as a birthday present ) a HO Marklin engine , the same I used to have as a kid 50 years ago.
The engine sat on the bookshelf for about 1 year.
Then I decided it deserves a better place to stay and while visiting a LHS here in Montréal I saw the Woodland Scenics HO scenery kit.
I had no previous experience with scenery so I purchased the kit and built it.
I'm glad I did , because even if that kit is a little expensive, it's a great way to introduce a model railroader to scenery and it contains all the materials required to build a diorama.
This will be my official layout-building thread. I had a thread at the old forum, and not much significant has been done since then. I've been slowly building the trackwork up the hill, but most of my modeling has been done on projects that I can work on in front of the TV (football season ) The reality, though, with home improvements and maintenance, automobile work, holidays, and other hobbies, it seems like the best way to fit in railroading is in front of the television while watching football.
So... here is a Woodland Scenics' "Pharmacy" kit I picked up at a train show a few months ago for about two bucks. It is a white metal and wood kit. My plan is to work on buildings and rolling stock so that when I finally get the track layed and the scenery in place, I can populate the layout quickly. I painted this building with standard craft store acrylic paints, and am pleased with the results. I still need to decide what this building will be, weather, and add signage.
I picked up an i-Phone a few weeks ago, and placed an leveling application on it called called "Clinometer" (the i-Phone has a three way accelerometer in it, which is used by the leveling application). I chose this particular leveling app because it can display incline in, among other formats, percentage. The lightbulb went off - I can use this to determine spot grades on the layout!
There are places on the layout that I can't reach easily, so I decided to build a cradle for the i-Phone that could be carried on a flatcar. The cradle "feet" are about 1/8" narrower than the NMRA clearance template (a little less than 2"). The vertical pieces that make up phone cradle itself is offset about 1/8" toward the camera in the photo below to account for the i-Phone being back-heavy - presumably due to the battery location. The opening in the back is to allow the phone to be extracted with a thumb and a forefinger pinch.
Phone in place. The "L" shape of the feet is enough to keep the phone from slipping through the bottom.
Loaded on the flatcar. I'd like to do two additional tasks to complete this project; one is to add some positive locating pins so the cradle is held in place by more than gravity, the second is to devise a mechanism to stablize the load surface. This is a fairly heavy load with a high center of gravity, so the car tends to tilt.
The question you may be asking is "why"? A good question, and the best answer I can give is "because it was possible"! I did find that I had two sections of 5% + grade that I wasn't expecting to find, so I've found further justification!
Well, I have a tax refund burning a hole in my pocket... and a 2' x 12' unfinished section of my layout, so i decided to go nuts and have pre-ordered ALL the buildings in the Walthers Ashland Steel series!!!
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The series includes a blast furnace, rolling mill, coke oven, blower engine house and Hulett unloader. There are also 3-packs of slag cars, bottle cars, and ore cars.
I have always loved the blast furnace, but because there was never a steel mill in the area I'm modelling (Toronto circa 1956), I thought it would be wrong for my layout. But then I got to thinking -- there's nothing totally accurate on my layout anyway. I'm playing fast and loose with the locations of things, the configuration of the yard, and so on. So why deprive myself of a potentially awesome scene? Why not let that section represent Stelco in Hamilton?
Another thing is that layout progress has been stalled for months now, and I think this is just the sort of exciting project to inspire me to start working on it again. And now I'm really glad that I never finished the track laying in that section - maybe this is why!!!