Making A Curved Turnout

April 27, 2026June 10, 2026 barkmannLeave a comment

Our Homemade 14'-20' Diameter Curved Turnout

Welcome back to planet Unobtanium! If you thought finding Aristo-craft #6 or wye switches was difficult, or anything in stainless steel for that matter, good luck finding anything curved. As rare as they are on the prototype, it’s no wonder they’re nonexistent in garden scale. If you know of anyone who makes them, or made them, please leave a comment and let me know!

For the longest time I’ve struggled with how to “complete” the downtown wye. Due to space constraints, a standard switch won’t fit. We’ve designed ourselves into a corner, so to speak. In this case, a 14′ diameter semi-circle of track, and a need to escape it at the quarter circle mark to join with the diverging leg of the wye.

We “cheated” before by replacing one of the 14′ diameter sections of track with a 20′ diameter section, connected directly to the diverging route away from downtown. This left no way to enter the downtown leg of the wye from that direction. That leg was still accessible from the direction of the actual wye switch, but now nothing more than a dead end spur.

Necessity’s A Mother

The wye switch was removed as well. The leg into downtown from the south has a wide radius switch, but that was also rearranged to better fit continuous operation. That entire section to the south leads to the lower loop around the deck. To avoid the need for a reverse loop controller, automatic or otherwise, the switches are placed “toe-to-toe” rather than “heel-to-heel”.

This one’s definitely going to need a picture (or three). I’m waving my hands over here trying to describe it and can already see the blank stares… We’ll get to that shortly. For now, let’s just say we side stepped this issue in favor of continuous running. Eventually we’ll need that auto-reverser, but that’s another project all by itself.

We’ve finally reached the point of needing that curved turnout. Which means it’s time to design one and start making it ourselves. To that end, I resurrected the homemade #5, an old tangent to 14′ diameter switch design I started drafting up ages ago. I shelved it when I realized I was in over my head, still a novice with the SketchUp software and 3D printing.

Wye South Leg Toe To Toe Switch Arrangement

A New Hope

I last touched that design in early March of 2020 and it shows! I’ve gained a lot of experience in those six years though. Now I’m putting it to the test on the homemade curved switch. All my time has been devoted to this new design, when I’m not working on replacing the rotted stringers that is, which means anytime during the week when I’m not working my day job.

All that dedication paid off. In a little less than a week the preliminary design is complete and the prototype tie strips have all been 3D printed! Test fitting the tie strips for the heel and point rail ties suggests the fit is “a bit snug”. And by a bit snug, I mean I had to use the tack hammer to “tap” the inside 14′ diameter stock rail into position.

The remaining tie strips are printed and all the support material removed, all but those on the frog ties. Some background on the design of these tie strips. Each tie is connected to the next by a strip of material in order to keep them spaced apart and in the proper position relative to their placement along the switch. Hence the name “tie strips”. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Technical Difficulties

Ann tells me this is probably too technical for folks that haven’t looked at turnout (switch) design before. Too many unfamiliar terms and a bunch of hand waving around them without any kind of visual reference to help understand what I’m talking about. Let’s address that. The term “switch” refers to just a portion of the actual “turnout”, but the names are commonly used interchangeably.

Hopefully the diagram will be helpful. When discussing the stock rails, it means the two outside rails. The point rails are actually the switch part of the turnout, meaning they switch the route through the turnout, normal (usually the straight path), and reversed or diverging (usually the curved path). The closure rails are a continuation of the point rails, past the hinge point, as they’re closing in on the crossing (frog) of the diverging rails.

The frog has wing rails and guard rails help to guide the wheels through the frog. The idea is the wheel tread slowly leaves the wing rail as it also slowly begins to ride on the frog, smoothly transitioning from one to the other, starting around the point of the frog. That’s probably enough about switch design and far more than most folks would care to know about it. Again, hope this helps clear up any confusion.

Size Comparison Between An Aristo-Craft #6 Switch To Our Homemade Curved Switch

Closure Rails Tie Strip With Supports Still Attached

Closure Rails Tie Strip With Supports Still Attached (Bottom)

Closure Rails Tie Strip With Supports Removed

Design Considerations

The tie strips are designed to be around 12″ at the longest, mainly due to 3D printer build volume constraints. The new 3D printer, an AnyCubic Kobra S1 Max, arrived not even two weeks ago and has a build volume of 350mm x 350mm x 350mm (13.77″ x 13.77″ x 13.77″). Needless to say I’ve been anxious to put it through its paces and see what it can do.

I’ve already encountered the “out of filament” event. An event that revealed what a total piece of crap the “old new” Sunlu 3D printer is when it comes to filament management. It certainly detects when it’s out of filament. It complains about it and asks for the filament to be replaced, but then loses its mind after that, requiring a power off reset to recover from it!

The AnyCubic? It functions the way the Sunlu should have. When it detects it’s out of filament, it homes the print head, remembering where it left off. Then it prompts to confirm refilling the slot in ACE cabinet. Once it detects the new filament is inserted it primes the system and awaits the request to resume printing, which it does, right where it left off! It’s a dream come true.

A Poor Assumption

It’s not all rainbows and unicorns though. As I mentioned, the fit is a bit snug. The ties are fragile, cracking and splitting along the layer lines when pressing them onto the rails. But by far the biggest drawback of the initial design is all the support material. It takes about half an hour to remove all the support material from each tie strip, using needle nose pliers no less!

Let me step back and describe the original design approach before we go much further. The design is “copied” from the original Aristo-craft switch ties. The thought is it worked for them for years, so it should provides clues where to start, and should be a good jumping off point for our design. Well, that was a poor assumption, at least for the ties themselves.

There are other limitations to the Aristo-craft switch design, but we’ll get to those shortly. Their tie design was meant to address injection molding and manufacturing constraints that we don’t have. We do have constraints, just not the same as those. Our constraints are related to 3D printing and the materials available that can survive the heat.

Closure Rails Tie Strip With Some Supports Removed

Closure Rails Tie Strip Detail Of Hollow Tie Supports Partially Removed

Closure Rails Tie Strip One Hollow Tie And Rail Foot Clamp Supports Totally Removed

Closure Rails Tie Strip All Hollow Ties And Rail Foot Clamp Supports Totally Removed

Differing Design Constraints

The Aristo-craft design uses “hollow” ties with thin walls and openings on the tops of the ties where the rail “foot clamps” live, presumably to conserve the amount of material injected per part into the molds and facilitate the release of the parts from the molds. Parts in this case refers to the tie strips, not just single ties.

The Aristo-craft injection molds themselves provide the “overhang” support for the underside of the top of the tie. We don’t have that luxury when 3D printing. Any overhang of more than a 50° angle from vertical will cause issues. With nothing to support the molten plastic, it droops and deforms. Those familiar with 3D printing will know it as “bridging”.

Successive layers above the area of bridging depend on those previous layers for support, now missing and drooping because of lack of support beneath them. Again, those familiar with 3D printing know that supports are “waste” material. They get printed along with the desired part, but are only there to bridge the overhangs and support the layers above.

Refining The Design

After printing is complete, the supports must be removed, usually tossed in the trash. Wasteful, but necessary when the desire is to print as one piece, not many that need joined together in some fashion. For tie strips, we could certainly print a dozen or more separate ties, then print two strips of rail foot holds, one for each rail, and glue them all together.

I’ve not tried that approach, but have to think it would take just as long to glue a tie strip together as it does to remove all that wasted support material inside the hollow ties. A better approach would be to just redesign the ties to be “solid”, that is to say a defined number of walls in thickness with a certain percentage of infill inside them.

The ties don’t need to be hollow to begin with. That was an injection molding constraint. For not much more material than would have gone into printing the supports then thrown away, what used to be waste material is now incorporated into the tie itself, producing a much stronger tie in the process. If it’s going to get used anyway, may as well add it to the part!

All Tie Strips Plus Frog And Integral Guard Rails On Frog Tie Strip

Coming Together With All Tie Strips And Frog For 20' Diameter Route

Further Refinements

I kicked off printing the frog tie strip before getting out in the Barkyard, working on more stringer replacements. It’s more than a five hour print, which gives me plenty of time to refine the design for solid ties and put together a couple more PVC stringers. The tie strips for the diverging routes all use a single tie model, so updating the design fixes those eleven ties all at once. The rest of them? Not so much…

The print of the frog tie strip had long since finished by the time I knocked off for the day from replacing stringers in the Barkyard. I hadn’t planned on being out there all day, but managed to correctly re-construct the two wye legs that had been plagued by my previous misguided assumption about the wye switch. With the needed curved switch about to become a reality, it made sense to correct the mistakes of the past.

I removed frog tie strip from the build plate flex sheet and kicked off printing those diverging route tie strips. When they were done printing, I started the process of removing all the supports. This time it’s limited to just the connecting strips, which easily break off by hand, and the rail foot clamps. Those still require the needle nose pliers, popping them out from the top into the hollow area beneath. Quick and easy!

I tried removing the supports from the frog tie strip, this time concentrating on removal of just the supports for the foot clamps. The rest of the support material in the hollow of the tie can just stay there. It’s not visible, so why bother? I stopped short of removing them all though.

Further Refinement Considerations

Those diverging route tie strips are much stronger with infill and the ease of removing the supports is another vote in favor of this redesign. Another consideration for refinement is the tight fit of the foot clamps on the rails. I had already eased the fit by ten to twenty thousandths of an inch (¼mm – ½mm) in places where the rail angle compared to tie is large.

I forgot to add the supports for the foot clamps for the redesigned print and accidentally discovered they’re unnecessary! It’s a Bob Ross “Happy Accident” moment. So now we’re down to just the strap supports, which are easily removed in a minute or two. That’s a helluvan improvement over the half an hour for the previous designs.

Let’s rewind to the original design idea for this curved switch to better understand that last statement about rail angles and foot clamp clearances. Even with standard tangent to diverging curve switch designs, on the diverging route the rails fall at an angle to the ties. Eventually toward the end of the diverging routes, the ties resume their normal perpendicular orientation to the rails when they no longer interfere with each other.

Now consider this is a curved switch and regardless of which route is taken, we’ll call them them normal and diverging, since tangent doesn’t really seem to fit, both the normal and diverging rails will always be at an angle to the ties, save for those final diverging route ties. Given both routes are curved, one way to minimize that angle is to arrange the ties to the average curvature.

Tie Layout And Spacing Using Average (17' Diameter) Curvature

Tie Layout And Spacing Using Average (17' Diameter) Curvature With Toe Ties Added

Final Tie Layout And Spacing Based On Average (17' Diameter) Curvature

Initial Design Constraints

In our case, midway between the 14′ and 20′ diameters is 17′. Starting with the original tie design from way back, they are arranged every half degree for the full 22.5° curvature of an entire 20′ section. I made this a constraint to avoid the tragic outcome from my previous mistaken assumption that the Aristo-craft wye switch was a full 20′ diameter section. Ours is an entire 20′ diameter section long, coming in at around 4′.

When a full 22.5° 14′ diameter section is placed over the 20′ section, it’s only long enough to meet where the frog will sit! Anything less than a full 22.5° section of 20′ diameter track would be less than a complete switch. I arbitrarily added an additional 7.5° to the 14′ diameter route to ensure the ties from sectional track segments won’t interfere with each other.

What can I say? A hold over from my HO days where the #4 switches need a 1/3 18″ radius section for the switch to replace a single 18″ radius 30° curve section. Those legs of the wye already use flexible track segments bent to fit properly. Worst case is an extra 7.5° needs removed to fit with the new curved switch in place.

Additional Design Refinement

Getting back to the design decision to use a 17′ diameter tie layout, each tie needs to be adjusted because of this decision, more so than if it were a tangent / diverging route switch. Both routes need to be adjusted, not just the diverging route. By adjusted, I mean the length of the tie and the position of the foot clamps based on rail position as well as interference fitment.

That’s where the 10 to 20 thousandths figure comes from. Each of those 48 ties needs careful consideration, from centering the foot clamps over the rail foot, to sighting down the length of the rail from the inside to verify clearances from the tip of the foot clamp to the web of the rail. It’s like using X-ray vision to eliminate any interference between them.

One other outcome of running out of filament is the brittle nature of the replacement filament. Don’t even look at those foot clamps wrong or they snap right off!. Finding out why this filament was so inexpensive. Definitely not a bargain. Never buying that stuff again. I’m guessing what I’d been printing with before was PLA+ and this latest stuff is just plain PLA. Dunno. It’s just plain crap for sure.

Zooming In Using "XRay Vision" To Look Inside The 14' Diameter Stock Rail For Interference

Real World Considerations

The brittle nature of the filament coupled with a lack of complete support removal is a sure way to snap it right off when attempting to test fit rail. So one more refinement will be to back off the foot clamps another 10 thousandths as well as raise them all by 10 thousandths. It’s also a vote to just reprint those other ties strips using the design refinements.

But that’s not as easy as changing one model to fix all of them like it was with the diverging route ties. Every one of those remaining switch ties is unique. Most have two additional rail foot clamps beyond the original two the model they’re based on came with. The exceptions are the approach ties to the point rails and the ties under the point rails. just sixteen of them out of the 48 switch ties.

I’m going to cut this one short for now. If I somehow manage to make substantial progress tonight, then I’ll come back and update this post. Otherwise, stayed tuned for Part II. There’s plenty more to be done to make this an operational switch, but so far there aren’t any show stoppers that would interfere with that goal.

Question? Concerns? Leave A Comment!

If you’re interested in obtaining the STL files to print your own curved switch, leave us a comment and we’ll be happy to email them to you. Also, if you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to comment on this post. In any case, you’ll need to create a user account to do so. We don’t use any personal information for marketing or to spam you (see our privacy policy). You’ll receive a verification email. Reply to the link provided to verify your email address. It’s all automatic. No waiting on moderator approval! No spamming your inbox with useless advertisements and “Special Offers”. None of that nonsense.

More to come. Stay tuned for Part II!

New Stringers – Part II

April 24, 2026June 9, 2026 barkmannLeave a comment

Welcome back! We’re still welcoming Spring with new PVC stringers. If you missed our first post, you may want to start there first. This is a continuation of what we started there. Except now it’s well beyond the first day of Spring, nearly the end of April at this point, and we’re still working on replacing stringers! This post covers another three weekends of effort.

This is taking much longer than expected, but continued improvement each weekend brings us closer to our goal of running trains. We left off with all the elevated sections painted and installed. In addition, the downtown mainline, station siding, and long siding are installed. Those took longer because those stretches are on the ground and more rotted stringers needed dug out first.

The track is installed as well, with the one exception of the stretch where the bridges will go. For now it’s just a straight elevated section waiting for track and bridges. Originally the thought was the approaches would be of trestle construction, but now I’m leaning toward laced steel girder supports and plate girder bridges. That can wait until later. We can run trains without any of it.

Another 20' Diameter Stringer Ready For Paint And Placement

Fixing The Wye

Hadn’t really planned on doing anything more than what’s necessary to replace the 20′ diameter track section and wye switch with 14′ diameter sections. Essentially we want to “hardwire” the Downtown loop to return to the mainline, reducing the layout to its original “dogbone” roots with two loops, one Downtown, and one over the deck.

The thinking was maybe we’d restore the wye in the future. Well, the future is now. What prompted this change? It all started with having to replace the stringers on the 20′ diameter section of the Downtown loop. It ended with finding the old homemade #5 switch design and bringing it out of mothballs. Somewhere in between we discovered that fixing the wye would be easier than not.

Since the track was still in place over the 20′ diameter section, the assumption was the stringer beneath was still in good shape. That was a poor assumption. Oh well, we’ll just make another 20′ diameter replacement while we’re at it. Slowly but surely that stretched into the next 14′ diameter section, then the next, and another after that.

Working toward the wye switch it became apparent all the wye stringers were rotted and need removed. Replacing each new section of the 14′ diameter stringers, it soon became apparent the posts weren’t arranged in a 14′ circle either. Turns out we’ll need another 14′ diameter stringer to reach the wye switch as well, once the remaining rotted stringers are removed that is.

Digging Out The Rotted 20' Diameter Stringer

Removing What's Left Of The 20' Diameter Stringer

If It Doesn’t Fit, Force It…

Force fitting those 14′ diameter legs of the wye may have made sense at the time, but now leaving them that way is more trouble than making it right. Time to break out that wye switch and take some measurements. We’re trying to locate the centers of those 14′ diameter circles, one on each side, based on the true geometry of the wye switch. But we’ll need something straight at least 7′ long.

Hmmm…. What do we have that is both long enough and straight enough? We have a whole stack of 8′ long PVC 1x2s not yet assembled into new stringers. One of those would certainly fit the bill. Marking out the centerline on the turf with a sharpie is close enough, but reminds me of previous opportunities lost without a more permanent center marker.

There has to be a better way to do this. Time to find one of those spare “turf nails”. Found a bunch of them in one of the drawers in the toolbox, and two different sizes no less! The idea is to “pin” the center with one of the larger turf nails. Beyond that, by attaching one of those 1⅝” spacers to one end of the 1×2 and drilling a hole to fit the nail marking the center at the other end, we have an accurate compass.

With our new PVC “compass”, we can “sweep” a 14′ diameter circle, holding the stringers in place with that spacer. It fits nicely between the two sides of the stringer and holds it in place while confidently driving a post into the correct location. That involves pulling out the existing incorrectly located posts with a set of Kleins then accurately smashing them back in with the sledge hammer.

Using Our New "Compass" To Lay In The New Stringers

View Of The South Center From The North Center

Starting From The Correct Diverging Route Angle

All Kinds Of Wrong

As helpful as our new PVC compass is for laying out the curved stringers, it also excels at pointing out all the mistakes in our original geometry. Both legs of the wye were off by more than twice the width of the track! No wonder the track refused to cooperate and go where it was supposed to without a fight. All kinds of wrong.

On the North leg of the wye, the closer it gets to where we need that curved switch, the more the radius relaxes into a wider curve. On the South leg, the closer it gets to those toe-to-toe switches, the tighter the radius gets! If you look closely at the pictures, you’ll see how far off the black edging is now. Good thing we’re using flex track for both curved legs!

It may take some time with the rail bender to finesse the wonky curved flex tracks to fit properly, but it’s totally worth the effort. Both stringers now follow a smooth curve that fits the desired geometry. I just wish I’d painted those stringers before fastening them together! Nothing some strategically placed masking paper won’t handle.

Ran Out Of Time To Replace The Straight Leg This Weekend

SPOILERS: Future Home Of The Curved Switch

Took Friday Off To Get A Jump On Finishing The Wye

So kind of a funny aside. A while back I asked Nick to pick up a couple cans of brown spray paint for me from Lowe’s. He got me two of the fancy adjustable nozzle Krylon brown and two of the 2X espresso color. I used those up weeks ago. The next time I was there, Lowe’s was out of the 2X espresso I wanted, so I got three with the fancy nozzle in dark brown. They’re also gone now.

Last time there I bought all the 2X espresso they had, the three left on the shelf and the remaining case of six I had to have an associate fetch from the rack high above using the huge rolling ladder thingy. After painting those wye stringers, I’m down to my last four cans! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The only reason we’re talking about painting in the first place is because of protecting the PVC from Ultra-violet (UV) radiation, which breaks the bonds in the flexible long chain polymers, making it more and more brittle over time. Paint is a means of protecting the PVC from the UV degradation of baking in the hot Florida sun. An added bonus is it looks much better than bright white!

Hurricane Dropped Part Of The Tree On This Totally Destroyed 3' Track Section

The Remnants Of The 10' Diameter Loops Behind The Shed

Learn The Art Of Track Repair At Home - Repaired 3' Section

Time To Take A Fence Break

We almost got the wye finished, but had to stop and make sure we’re ready for the new fence to go in this coming week, the first full week of May (2026). So we also spent this last weekend pulling out the rest of the track and rotted stringers from behind the shed in preparation for the fence builders to come in and replace the fence. Wasn’t much left but the track itself and just a single 10′ diameter wood stringer still in fairly good shape.

Even that totally destroyed 3′ section of track came out, the one that hurricane Milton blew down a big chunk of the tree on that caused all the damage. Speaking of that destroyed 3′ section, I managed to get both rails straightened out and the tie strips back in place and screwed securely to the rails. Like it never happened! I was amazed that just sighting down the rails and some time with the rail bender was all it took.

But that wasn’t the only piece of track repaired. Add two 5′ sections to the list from yesterday. Just about every piece of track needs disassembled and the tie strips “reseated” over the foot of the rails before the track can be put back in place. Anyone who’s ever dealt with those annoying little Aristo-craft screws knows what a pain they are. My big hammy hands make it even more difficult, inevitably losing some of those fumbly screws in the process.

As an example, one of those 5′ sections was missing every fourth screw. I have some replacements but they only thread in a little over a turn before binding, like they’re the wrong thread pitch, so I gave up on that. Some are better than none. When you get right down to it, are they really necessary at all? Those Piko tie strips for the flex track have none and still hold the rails just fine.

Fence Break’s Over!

Fixing the track is about all we’re able to do while they remove what’s left of the old fence and basically build our new board-on-board fence in place, from scratch. I say they, but it’s basically one very dedicated individual, John, and he knows his stuff! Over the course of four days he nearly single handedly built our new fence. He had a “new hire” one day, but he quit and left early on his first day! We’re simply amazed by the quality and craftsmanship. And it looks awesome!

Judge for yourself. All but one of the pictures so far show the old, dilapidated fence in the background. Those pictures that follow will have the new fence in the background. Ann’s already out there stringing up the lights, and doing it the way she wants them done this time around, stretched straight and level. No sagging allowed! We even rerouted the dedicated extension cord around the back of the garage instead of draped over the track in front of the shed. Much better!

Time to get back to replacing the stringers. All the curved stringers we need are already finished, painted, and installed. Time for a bunch more straight ones. Two for the bridge section by the deck, two for the straight leg of the wye, and another to complete the station siding. Another weekend, another set of stringers installed. All but the straight leg of the wye. That’s going to take a LOT more work to finish.

Not only does the dirt need dug out, but there was turf under the old stringers, meaning it will need cut out of the way first, just to be able to get to the dirt under it! We’ll save that for next time. For now the progress is impressive. And more than we originally planned. But to make the wye a reality, we’ll need that curved switch. Good news everyone! That’s already in the works. I spent the week the fence was installed working on the design, captured in this post.

Somebody Order A Bunch Of Freshly Painted Stringers?

The Only Thing Missing Is The Track And Bridges

Finishing Out The Station Siding And The Bridge Stringers

Nearly Completed Wye - Just Need To Dig That Straight Leg In

For A Limited Time Only

I’d been gathering the footage of the progress from the surveillance cameras, thinking they could be spliced together into a sort of time lapse montage. But then I missed the window to grab the footage from a couple weekends now. I’m surprised by this since I’ve been able to go back more than a week in the past. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t able to. Oh well, I’m down to my last 3GB on a 4TB drive, not sure where I would have put it anyway!

Add the footage of the fence installation to that and we broke the bank, so to speak. I hastily rearranged data on the network storage server and removed duplicated items to make space for this video and more. I’m not real comfortable with the single point of failure state that left a lot of the existing captured video in, but I haven’t done anything with it years later, so chances are I’ll never do anything with it anyway and it’s just wasted storage. Time will tell.

For now, we’re busy with a single goal. Get. Trains. Running. Will we get there by Memorial Day? We’re definitely cutting it close with just one more weekend until Memorial Day weekend. I hate to leave you with a cliff hanger, but if you want to find out, you’ll have to stay tuned for Part III. I will admit we’ll be pushing it just to get all the stringers replaced, let alone all the track relayed.

Question? Concerns? Leave A Comment!

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to comment on this post. In any case, you’ll need to create a user account to do so. We don’t use any personal information for marketing or to spam you (see our privacy policy). We do it this way to avoid scammers spamming our posts. You’ll receive a verification email. Reply to the link provided to verify your email address. After that, it’s all automatic. No waiting on moderator approval! No spamming your inbox with useless advertisements and “Special Offers”. None of that nonsense.

More to come. Stay tuned for Part III!

Welcoming Spring With New Stringers!

March 22, 2026June 9, 2026 barkmannLeave a comment

Welcome back! We’re welcoming Spring with new springers, er… stringers. To celebrate the first day of Spring, we got out in the Barkyard to begin the annual stringer replacements. Well, technically it’s the second day of Spring, but close enough. We never expected this to become an annual event, but that’s what it is now.

Learning the hard way that modern wood products just don’t stand the test of time out in the elements. Not even when heavily treated to do so. Those wood stringers offer a sturdy base for our track and elevate much of our rail above ground. Inevitably those wooden stringers rot. Last fall, we decided to try using PVC to replace a few rotted sections.

There are advantages to using PVC trim over pressure treated (PT) lumber. First is reduction of effort and waste. To construct wooden stringers, we rip a 2x4x8′ stud into not quite a dozen ¼”x1½”x8′ slats. It’s labor intensive considering the time spent at the table saw and it’s wasteful as each rip turns ⅛”x1½”x8′ into sawdust. That’s one third of the raw material converted directly to waste!

Another advantage of PVC stringers is ease of assembly. Each side of the stringer is now a single ⅝”x1½”x8′ PVC trim piece, not three slats that all need trimmed to different lengths when using the curve templates. I built those templates to help ease assembly, wrangling all six slats and a dozen spacer blocks into some semblance of order.

After - Soon To Be Rotten Wooden Stringers

Let’s Do This The Easy Way

Now it’s just a single pass with a pair of the PVC 1x2s, drill and screw each to the spacer blocks, then trim either end and done. It still takes about an hour to assemble an 8′ section of stringer, but it saves about another hour of ripping a 2×4 into slats, not to mention the countless hours of removing rotted sections and replacing them every year.

Speaking of those jigs, they’re not really necessary when using PVC. Assuming the posts are arranged in the desired pattern, circular or otherwise, just attach the spacer blocks to one side then fasten that in place along those posts. Attaching the remaining side is easy enough using clamps to hold it in place while fastening it to the first side and posts.

So far we’ve used the 14′ and 20′ curve jig. The 10′ diameter curves could be a different story. We skidded the shed out from the fence another 8″ a while back with the hope of fitting larger curves to replace those tight 10′ diameter sections. They were enough to get us up and running originally, but now we have flex track and a rail bender to fit any size curve.

Building 14' Diameter Stringer - New Stringers In Background

Left End Overhang - One Leg Needs Trimmed

Right End Overhang - One Leg Needs Trimmed

Getting A Head Start

Every year there’s a push to get trains running again. This year we’re starting earlier than most, in the past usually waiting until May to get trains running by Memorial Day. Some years that even stretched to July 4^th. And every year it’s the same thing. Replace the rotted wooden stringers. As we said, it’s become an annual event.

Those concrete roadbed “bricks” we’re experimenting with work, but are much more labor intensive than posts and stringers, and nowhere near as sturdy and immoveable as we thought they’d be. Still working on how to streamline that process… Comparing the ease of replacing the rotted wooden stringers with PVC ones with the amount of effort using concrete bricks, it’s a no brainer!

So far we’ve replaced about 100′ of stringers, both straight and curved sections, but we’ve also taken up more than 300′ of track where the stringers had already rotted out over the past year or so and no longer held the track. We’re still behind the curve for getting trains running by Memorial Day, but we’re working hard to make that happen.

Corner PVC Stringer In Place And Painted Next To Wooden Stringer

8' PVC Stringer Next To "Plastic Wood" Stringer

Corner Stringers From The Inside This Time

Yet Another Inside Look At 8' PVC Stringers

Inside Look At 8' PVC and "Plastic Wood" Stringers

20' Diameter Curved Stringer And Rotted Stringer Disposal

Just Enough

The plan is to replace just enough track to have a continuous loop trains can run on. This would consist of the downtown loop, that North leg of the wye loops around through downtown along the mainline back to the elevated sections. The elevated sections need bridges in place to run trains past the deck and back to downtown.

The lower loop around the deck and the other legs of the wye will have to wait. Essentially the mainline Downtown connects to the wye switch (West). The diverging legs of the wye arrangement go left (South) to the deck and right (North) to the downtown loop. The only thing missing to make it an operational wye is a switch connecting the North leg to the straight leg to the West.

But a standard switch doesn’t fit. When I first laid out that downtown wye section, I thought the Aristo-craft wye switch replaced a full 20′ curved segment of track. I found out the hard way it didn’t. Trying to fit those 14′ diameter curves to the diverging routes of the wye switch didn’t work as planned.

The angles were off just enough that it didn’t fit without having to resort to flex track and bending a tighter radius to make it fit. Without the wye switch in place, the 14′ diameter segments fit just fine. It may be better to redo that section to make it fit right while we already have it apart and all torn up anyway. We shall see…

Making Progress

Amazing what was accomplished in a single weekend. All of the elevated sections are in place and painted with the track repaired and installed. That was easy compared to what’s next. The ground level sections, starting with the mainline and siding switches to the station siding. And there’s a reason for starting there.

Because of the “hiccup” with the wye switch not quite aligning with the diverging legs of the wye, that becomes the most important location on the layout. Everything has to be measured against and fit to that point. Why? Because the station siding just fits using 10′ diameter curves and the two wide radius switches. And that has to be the starting point for the wye switch.

Another consideration is the height of the mainline crossing Main Street into Downtown. The original track height is too tall by about the thickness of a concrete block cap, roughly 1⅝”. The quick and dirty way around that in the past was to just line Main Street with concrete block caps, simulating curbing, sidewalks and building foundations.

It’s A Dirty Job…

Time to start digging out what remains of the rotted mainline and siding stringers. I need someplace to put all the dirt and gravel while test fitting the yet to be assembled replacements, but somehow I’ve managed to use all the five gallons buckets for something else.

A number of unused 16qt storage bins with lids are sitting in the garage, so they’re pressed into service. Fitting the new replacements fills two of them! I hadn’t planned on fixing anything more than the station siding, but as the digging exposes more and more of what remains of the other siding, the danger of exposed screws is apparent. Better fix it all while we’re in here.

Those 10′ diameter stringers have always been right at the edge of being too tight of a curve for any material, wanting to spring back to their original straight shape when removed from the jig. Thankfully we only need two sections (~60°), not an entire quarter circle (90°). It’s still straining to maintain its shape against the posts, and the screws are pulling out of the twisting spacers.

Station Siding Site And Mainline Main Street Crossing

Mainline And Siding Lowered For Main Street Crossing

Repairing The Track

About as common as replacing rotted stringers is having to repair the track. It seems that just looking at the track wrong will cause the rail to pull out of the simulated tie plates and spikes. Now consider three good sized German Shepherd “pups” constantly pounding on them. Add to that constant UV bombardment from our hot Florida sun baking them brittle and prone to breakage.

Just about every piece of track needs disassembled and the tie strips “reseated” over the foot of the rails before the track can be put back in place. Anyone who’s ever dealt with those annoying little Aristo-craft screws knows what a pain they are. My big hammy hands make it even more difficult, inevitably losing some of those fumbly screws in the process.

In the past I’ve tried to patiently coax the ties back around the foot of the rail using tiny screwdrivers and other tools with limited success. What usually ends up happening is the another tie gets pushed off the rail while struggling to hold it in place and fix the first tie. Anyone that knows me knows what little patience I have doesn’t last long with fiddly things like that.

Track Waiting For The New Fence Install To Be Finished

Track In Need Of Repair Above And Repaired Below

Relaying The Track

Anyway, each track section is laid back in its place as it’s repaired. SplitJaw™ rail clamps are then installed to connect it to the previous section. Learning from past mistakes, when securing a single tie with a screw to the stringer beneath, either the screw pulls through the tie or the tie gets ripped free from the rail, now uselessly still mounted to the stringer.

We recently switched to using zip ties every so often to hold several ties to an joiner block of the underlying stringer. It’s much more forgiving using this method. The track usually has enough give that it simply shifts to the side when absorbing impacts. That’s not to say that the track can’t still be damaged, but it certainly takes a lot more effort to do so.

Pulling the zip tie too tight is a quick way to cause damage. The most difficult part is placing those zip ties when the stringers rest directly on the ground. It’s a struggle to feed them down through the ties, underneath the spacer block and then back up through the ties to secure them. But at least now the mainline and siding tracks are fully restored and in place.

The Most Important Place On The Railroad

What The Future Holds

Another weekend, another part of the Barkyard restored. The next big win would be to get the rest of the ground level track in place, including the rest of the wye. That’s most likely a future thing though. As it stands, the wye really isn’t a fully functional wye arrangement. The downtown loop doesn’t have the option of returning to downtown and looping back to the elevated sections.

It’s only connected to the straight leg of the wye using a 20′ diameter track section in place of the 14′ diameter section. That straight leg does have a switch at the other end, allowing trains to run along the lower loop around the deck and then along the South leg of the wye back to downtown and the mainline heading East.

What we need is a 14’/20′ diameter curved switch to connect the straight leg to the other leg of the wye. It’s not clear in those screen captures though. They don’t make 14’/20′ diameter curved switches. At least not that I’m aware of. There’s not enough room for anything else to fit. I’ve designed myself into a corner.

Spoilers

Back to the drawing board! Years ago I had started designing a home made #5 switch to connect a diverging 14′ diameter route with a 3′ long tangent route. I think I originally had the downtown wye in mind. I’ve put all the details in this post dedicated to the new switch design.

There’s a new discovery in there as well. One that could have MAJOR impact on Downtown! Let’s just say I can’t wait for my new 3D printer to get here! It’s due to arrive in the mid April timeframe. I ordered it back in November of last year (2025). Think of it as “next generation” printer technology compared to my other “first generation” technology printers, where everything is manual.

I’m looking forward to not have to manually swap spools of filament mid print while crossing my fingers that something doesn’t screw up. This new one can handle four different colors in one print. The printer actually supports up to 16 colors at once, but I opted for just the four in a single ACE cabinet to begin with. Not sure where I would put the other three ACE cabinets anyway.

For A Limited Time Only

I had been gathering the footage of the progress from the surveillance cameras, thinking they could be spliced together into a sort of time lapse montage. But then I missed the window to grab the footage from last weekend. I’m surprised by this since I’ve been able to go back more than a week in the past. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t able to.

Oh well, I’m down to my last 3GB on a 4TB drive, not sure where I would have put it anyway! I was waiting for the 8TB NVME drive prices to come down, but with AI and all the global upending lately, that ain’t happening. It’s DOUBLE what it was last year! They want $200 more for the 4TB drive I already have! Also nearly double! And they want more AI and more data centers?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Grandpa Simpson shouting at the clouds. I’ve used AI in increasing capacities at work since before the Large Language Models (LLMs) emerged. AI has its uses, but it’s not the panacea it’s made out to be. It’s wrong more often than it’s right. And when it’s wrong, it still takes a human to detect those mistakes and retrain it to reduce their frequency.

At some point those rough cut videos will reappear, but not right now. We’re making too much progress toward getting trains running again.

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More to come. Stay tuned for Part II!

Happy New Year!

January 14, 2026March 31, 2026 barkmannLeave a comment

We hope you’re having a wonderful new year 2026. Ours is starting out in productive fashion, getting out in the Barkyard and getting things done! While I could make a list, I find my lists quickly become so detailed, they’re overwhelming by the time I’m done. But I’ll try to give the bullet points anyway.

Speaking of overwhelming, my lists pale in comparison to getting the Barkyard operational again. Now that the holidays and all the work that went in to getting the other house sold are in the past, it’s time to get back to work on the Barkyard. But at least we’re moving forward and not backward.

When I say backward, I’m talking about having to tear up track and remove rotted stringers, basically taking things apart instead of putting them together. It’s pretty bad when it’s been nearly a year since we’ve run any trains. I should probably check on that figure and see how long it’s really been… Time flies and all that.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So where do we start? Without getting into too much detail, all that backward momentum together with all that “stuff” that came over from the other house has consumed any space left in the garage. Bins and boxes of screws and nails and hardware and motorcycle parts and tools and… You get the idea. All the leftovers from the other house.

Now stack all that together, more like on top of, all the track and switches and PVC to make replacement stringers with and we’ve got quite the disaster of a mess to deal with before we can even think about gaining forward momentum again, let alone getting back to operation.

I’ve had my eye on a new shed. One that’s more than twice as big as the old one. I’ve even done some “what-if-ing” to see how I can fit something that big into our track plan without disturbing what we already have too much. After all, we’re trying to get things operational again, not tear up even more track!

A New Shed

There are a number of drawbacks to that new, larger shed. First is what to do with the old shed. Next is site preparation. Where the old shed sits now is already level. Who knows what we’ll run into preparing the new site? Then there’s the old fence that needs replaced first. And the dying tree behind the fence that needs cut down before that.

As much as I want that new shed, it’s a losing proposition when all the “has-to-be-done-firsts” are added up. Too many dependencies. Too many things to go wrong. All this before considering the large price tag that goes along with a large shed.

While we’re talking about disadvantages and drawbacks, the old shed has its own set. At slightly less than 7’x7′, nothing that’s longer than that can go in there unless it’s stacked tall instead of wide, like 4’x8′ sheet goods. Basically anything much longer than 6′ can’t lay down flat. It needs to stand vertically.

And now that I have those 8′ long stringers from the old HO layout that came over from the other house, they have to stand upright at the roof peak just to fit! But at least they do fit. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

A Better Idea

Ann came up with a better idea, buy a smaller shed instead of that large one. That’s right. A smaller shed for just the lawn and gardening equipment. Because it’s smaller, it can sit next to the house along the driveway. Much more convenient than having to walk all the way to the back of the Barkyard for what’s needed in the front yard!

The Christmas blog was all about 3D printing all those snowmen, but we did a LOT more over the Christmas break than make Christmas presents for friends and family. Ann had a number of things on her list, and the new shed was only one of them!

Before the assembling the shed came the new shower doors. We managed to get those installed in a day. Less than a day actually. That in and of itself self is amazing. No yelling. No arguments. No harsh words or hard feelings. Just a sense of accomplishment and a Christmas present to ourselves that keeps on giving.

Assembling Ann’s new shed took the better part of the next day, but we’re two for two now. Two projects complete in two days! With that finished, Ann moved all the lawn and garden equipment from the old shed to her new one, freeing up much needed space for everything in the way in the garage, soon to have a new home in the old shed.

Skidding The Shed

Not so fast! First we need to replace the rotted plywood floor and framing under the old shed before everything can be moved to the shed. To do that, we need to skid the shed off of the rotted floor onto a set of 4x4s, then remove all that rotted wood to the curb for trash pickup. And before we can do that, we need to empty the shed.

That all goes smoothly. And quickly. We began to pull up the rotted plywood. But that left us with irregularly shaped pieces, too big to fit in the trash barrel. Turns out the plywood was so rotted I could use the flat shovel to chop it into small enough squares to easily bag up and drag to the curb. There isn’t much left of the 2x4s…

The site already level enough from when we first put the floor in place. That’s not accounting for any settling, but the HexPave will contain the gravel and gravel will pretty much self level itself once the shed is in place over it.

We decided to lay down landscape fabric to help keep the gravel from sinking into the sand. After that, it’s a matter of fine tuning the levelling and placement of the fabric and HexPavers. Finally the many bags of gravel get poured in and the new base is ready to skid the shed back in place.

Skidding the shed back over its new base proved to be much more difficult than skidding it off the old, rotted one. It takes repeated, coordinated, focused shoves from both of us to slowly nudge it into place. But once it’s done, it’s done. And done in a day no less! We both slept well that night…

Finally Moving In The Right Direction

And that’s what got the ball rolling. Finally. Forward momentum. And we managed to get it all done over Christmas break! Three projects complete in three days! Actually there were more than that, but those three were the big ones that mattered.

Now the stuff that’s always in the way in the garage can go out to the shed. All those leftover cabinet grade plywood pieces. All the storage bins full of plumbing pieces and parts under the long bench along the back wall now neatly fit on the shelf unit just inside the doors to the shed.

And now I can actually see the floor and vacuum up all the sawdust. That space freed up beneath the bench is now the home of the router table and other items from beneath the casting bench. That leaves room to get the old Super Magna engine up off the floor and on the shelf where the router table used to sit.

I’ll need to build a “crate” to mount that engine to and move it out to the shed eventually. But that can wait. It’s out of the way. Now I can deal with that bag of concrete we ripped open just trying to get the engine into the garage. Neatly tucked into a five gallon bucket, the stray dry mix on the floor gets vacuumed up along with that sawdust.

More Stuff?

All of that just to make room for more stuff. But that was the idea. The shed is already full and now the garage is overflowing yet again. And I still have more in the bed of the truck that needs a home! But there’s hope. Most of what’s in those bins can go in the garage wall cabinets or out to the shed once sorted through.

Now I can sift and sort through all the bins of this and that and whatnot that came over from the other house, no longer living in the bed of the truck, and organize it all together with like items already here. For expedience, all the motorcycle parts get condensed down into as few bins as possible and go straight to the shed.

That leaves room to sort through what’s left of the garage items in the large 90qt bins. Those are slowly condensed down into smaller 6qt and 16qt bins, freeing up a couple more of those 90qt bins. The trick is to find the time to do the sorting. I’ve taken a few lunch hours to get through a major portion of it.

The unspoken truth is there’s more than sorting to be done. Plenty of reorganization to the storage layout in the wall cabinets will go hand in hand with that sorting. The electrical items had already expanded from one to two cabinets. And now there’s more from the other house! Looks like the fasteners cabinet is due next.

Reorganization?

Thinking about it, all of them are due. I already have a few things in mind, like 3D printed saw blade storage and other such organizational aides, like 3D printed compartmental dividers to segregate all the raw materials to build trestles with into like sized pieces parts.

Speaking of those trestle parts, that was another major victory over the Christmas break. Moving ALL those containers with ALL those trestle building parts down from the shelf over the carriage doors and onto the bench. From there, the like sized parts were placed together in the bottom of a 90qt bin, using the 3D printed dividers to organize them.

Three things were soon apparent. First, the need for taller dividers. Second, the need for a second layer. Third, the 90qt bin is way too tall for the job. I searched for like sized, shorter bins and soon found a six pack of 41qt bins and ordered them. They’re about the same length and width, but much shorter. Just the ticket.

That frees up yet another 90bt bin. The only thing keeping this from completion is the lack of a layer divider of sorts. Those 3D printed dividers will need a redesign to make them more like stackable trays. Several containers of parts still sit on the bench until then, but it’s a good start.

The shelf space that freed up is now home to a multitude of 6qt and 16qt bins with seldom needed stuff, some already in the garage, and some moved there from the office now that there’s room for it. And it’s all up out of the way yet readily accessible using the short green ladder. Just add labels…

What’s Next?

Even with a stack of those large 90qt bins sitting in front of the table saw, there’s still much more room to move around in the garage. But enough about all the stuff in the garage already! What’s next? Preparing the taxes. Ugh. And acquisitions of course! Yay!

What do those have in common you ask? Not much, other than looking up eBay purchases for record keeping. And that sets the trap! Once on eBay, I’m reminded of all the things I was watching, like Aristocraft steam engines and other garden scale railroad items.

I’ll just briefly mention some of the items recently acquired. More to come in future posts! We already have two Aristocraft B&O Pacifics and a Milwaukee Road Mikado. Each has its own quirks and missing pieces. So why not add a third B&O Pacific as well as a New York Central Pacific?

And while we’re at it, how about three more Mikados? Two more Milwaukee Road and an oddball custom job that’s supposed to be a Grand Trunk Western unit. The most irritating thing about all of these is none of them included the tenders! I was hoping to score another Phoenix sound card in at least one of them, but no such luck…

I’ll save all the good stuff for the next post. And there’s plenty of it too!

Question? Concerns? Leave A Comment!

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More to come. Stay tuned!

Packing Up Decades Of Memories

August 17, 2025October 26, 2025 barkmannLeave a comment

The Current Situation

It’s the end of an era… The kids are finally all moved out of our home of 20 years in Wekiva. And even though Ann and I have been here in Mount Dora for more than a decade now, we still have more than two decades worth of memories stored there. Or rather, I still have memories stored there. Memories I have no place to store here in our two bedroom, single bath bungalow.

That all changes now that the kids moved into their own house. It’s heartbreaking when we look at what used to be our beautiful home of 20 years, only to see it totally run down, unloved all these years later. The kids never did much to make it their home. From the looks of it, they didn’t do anything. Not even basic maintenance. But enough said. The issue now is how much money our “retirement fund” is going to lose because of the state of disrepair it’s in now.

Perhaps lose isn’t as accurate as how much less money we’ll get now than we could have if it still looked as good as when it was our home. That’s not to say we couldn’t choose to hire contractors to fix her up, but we’d stand to pay as much to do that as we would get back from the boost in the sale price. Beyond that loss, add the immediate sting to our pocketbook to pay the price for someone to come do all those things the kids couldn’t be bothered to do for all those years.

Our home of 20 years - 10 years and $3500 of "deferred maintenance" later — Our home of 20 years – 10 years and $3500 of “deferred maintenance” later

More Distractions

Why does this seemingly never ending theme of always something else that needs done first matter? It’s really starting to wear on me. I’m ready to get things squared away in the Barkyard, but ever since my last post, I’ve literally spent every weekend over at the other house in preparation to list it for sale. Ann and Nick have spent even more time over there. Cleaning up all the trash and yard debris, but mainly getting the pool sparkling blue from thick green.

It’s a half hour trip there from Mount Dora. Multiply that by two trips, morning and night, and it adds up to two hours lost every day to nothing but travel, not to mention the fuel cost. Two hours a day that the kids spending two minutes a day could have saved us by simply checking the chemicals and cleaning the filter. But enough sour grapes. Soon it will be someone else’s treasure, ready to be transformed into their dream home.

We bought it as a “fixer upper”, with plenty of potential. When Ann first saw the view from the back yard, she said, “I don’t care what the inside looks like, we’ll take it”. We remodeled every room except for two of the bedrooms. We even remade the patio around the pool, adding a pool slide and a bar complete with a Gen-Aire grill. Now it’s someone else’s turn to take that potential and turn it into their treasure.

It would be different if my day job didn’t take every single minute I’m logged on from me, distracting me from what I’d rather be doing, working on my garden scale pike. The Barkyard has been on the back burner ever since I went back to work, more than three years ago. And for far longer than I ever imagined it would. And tragically, it shows! Plot twist, now my long lost HO scale empire is the reason it remains on the back burner.

My HO scale empire under construction in the corner room (circa 2006)

Packing Up Memories

My job now is to get the corner room cleaned out and packed up. Everything I want to keep from what I’ve accumulated over a lifetime. I lost count of the number of trash barrels I filled with old and outdated computer and electronics parts. Magazines from the ’80s and ’90s. Basically a bunch of “stuff” that had a place there, but is no longer useful to me, or anyone else for that matter.

It breaks my heart to throw away all the chips and now otherwise useless components that were meant to be used in projects for my HO scale model railroad. Projects that never materialized. Hundreds, if not thousands of TTL logic level chips, like the 7400 series. Old 8 bit microprocessors and support chips. Even spare 8Kx8 replacement dynamic RAM chips from when I repaired my Commodore 64 after our home in Palm Bay was struck by lightning and zapped it.

Hopelessly Useless Discrete Integrated Circuits

With things today measured in gigabytes and terabytes, it seems comical to even think about something in the kilobytes. Parts with top speeds of ten or twenty megahertz can’t compete with today’s multiple gigahertz clock speeds. The really sad part is I can buy something off the shelf that’s already fully integrated and does what I want for a handful of dollars. Why would I waste my time designing and building it from discrete, obsolete parts?

Considering how much real estate a discrete component implementation would require compared to the postage stamp sized Arduino that could perform the same functions, and more, it’s a no brainer why these obsolete parts are now useless. The only exception would as replacements for failed parts in an obsolete piece of equipment. But then the question is how useful is that obsolete piece of equipment compared to its modern equivalent?

Decades of Memories - My Office "Dispatcher's" Chair (circa 2006) — Decades of Memories – My Office “Dispatcher’s” Chair (circa 2006)

My HO Scale Empire (Or What’s Left Of It)

A bit of history… I had a huge HO scale layout, spanning two bedrooms, one of which I called my office. The other used to be Nick’s bedroom, until he moved into his sister’s room when she moved out. I even cut tunnel passages through the drywall between the office and the corner bedroom. That all changed when we moved to Mount Dora and the kids moved back in there.

I’m hoping that just because I’m not talking about my garden scale pike, this HO scale discussion will still be of some interest. If not, it’s understandable. Anyone who’s ever started a model train layout knows it’s never finished. It’s a given. But this is going in the wrong direction entirely. Backwards. Having to dismantle everything I worked years to put together is not something I thought would be at the top of my priority list.

I had to dismantle the part of the layout that occupied my old office so our son-in-law could make it his office. That, too, was heartbreaking. Pulling up all the track and cork roadbed, removing track feeders, wiring and controllers. Then the real work began. Dismantling all the framework and carefully storing everything away in the corner room, with the understanding we would use that room for storage.

The plywood and L-girders were simply functional, meant to someday be covered with a beautifully stained veneer to match the ornate shelf brackets, with sweeping curves in the diagonal braces, crafted to mimic old railroad station architecture. Most of those pieces already made it to our Mount Dora home. The track and roadbed and HO scale structures remain there in the corner room.

Now defunct office side HO layout over the desk (circa 2006)

The Last Of My HO Scale Empire

That was then. This is now. I had forgotten all the track and roadbed is still there on the bookshelf layout, high along the walls of the corner room. There are remnants of track and roadbed that remain where the coal mine used to sit on the main level along the wall to the office, complete with the holes for the tunnels in the drywall, still there after all this time. I patched them on the office side long ago.

Beyond all the trackwork, I have models of buildings and trackside structures, many of them kits still in their boxes awaiting assembly. The assembled structures I’ve had nearly my entire life, since grade school anyway. The coal mine for instance. The brewery. The rolling lift bridge. And many more. Those already assembled structures present the challenge of how to best store them in the smallest possible space… Without damaging them.

Beyond that are all the miscellaneous items, distributed across a diverse set of containers, including old Athearn blue boxes, assorted electronics cases, and even an old Dannon yogurt container. When I say miscellaneous, I mean tools, hardware, pieces parts of rolling stock, leftover model kit sprues, model train power packs, wiring, terminal strips, etc. Everything I’ve collected over the years for my HO scale empire.

From HO Scale Empire to Bare Office Walls

Extraneous Information

So why all this extra information? To explain the lack of progress on the Barkyard. Why once again something else has taken higher priority. The good news is this “distraction” will help pave the way for our comfortable retirement. We stand to triple our money when we sell the house. Ann’s already retired. I’m not. I can’t wait, but I’ll have to, continuing to squirrel away 25% of my paycheck until then.

More good news is the progress in the garage here because of this distraction. Nowhere complete by any means, but many baby steps in the right direction. All the trestle making pieces are now in a large 90qt. storage bin, ready for organizer design and 3D printing. They were taking up all the “real estate” on the shelf over the carriage doors. Space that is now dedicated to storage bins that hold items seldom needed but not yet useless trash.

Some of those seldom needed items occupy most of the more valuable storage space above the wall cabinets over the work benches. While there’s not a whole lot of room to spare over the cabinets, what room there is would much better serve frequently needed items than seldom used ones. Items not used since going up “over the rafters” have been purged as well, making room for all the plastic stringer materials, just laying on the floor in front of the workbench.

Collateral Improvements

The garage is just one of the many “collateral improvements” underway, all thanks to needing more storage space. The only way to get there is to better organize the limited storage space available. Our Closet Lighting post details the addition of closet lighting, but doesn’t really touch on the amount of storage space that was freed up by cleaning out the closet.

The office has undergone a number of reorganizations too, incrementally wringing a bit more storage space here and there. But the biggest improvement yet was triggered by making space for the tall file cabinet coming here from the other house. The two “half sized” file cabinets have been here pretty much since we moved here. The time has come for the tall cabinet to move here too.

For the longest time, the color laser printer sat atop a stack of three large storage bins, full of HO treasures from previously dismantling the office portion of the layout. It sits at the end of the long stretch of cabinets in my office. This has a number of negative consequences. First is obstructed access, both to the bottom of the bookcase and the HO items stored in the bins beneath because of the printer sitting on top of them. Second is the lack of space for the printer anywhere else.

In preparation for that tall file cabinet’s arrival, the plan is to stack the two short cabinets atop one another and slide the tall cabinet in next to them. Same footprint on the floor, but twice as tall. Actually a little more than twice as tall, but you get the idea. There’s an assemble it yourself bookshelf unit that sits on top of the short cabinets at the moment, so the contents will need to go elsewhere and the shelf itself put out to the curb.

The Printer's New Home On Top Of The File Cabinets — The Printer’s New Home On Top Of The File Cabinets

Storage Improvement Phases

Now we get to a third consequence for the printer. Where does it get power? The wall outlet will be blocked once the file cabinets are in place. The solution is a new surge strip with a “wall hugger” cord, just long enough to reach the printer on top of the file cabinets. Phase one complete. Bookshelf gone, contents elsewhere, file cabinets stacked, and printer relocated. That eliminates one other negative consequence. Now the front panel is at eye level. And legible!

Phase two is sort through the HO treasures and reduce the bin count from three to two. The plan is to stack those two bins on top of the two large storage bins already in the corner of the bedroom next to my dresser. There’s room for six more bins, including the two everything gets sorted into now. Stacking them in the corner reveals these new 90qt. bins are larger than expected, but thankfully there’s still enough space for them.

Phase three is sort through the lower, sliding door section of the bookcase, now that moving those bins has restored access to it. There’s quite a bit of wasted space, even with all those CDs and DVDs in there. The original thought was access was seldom needed, so why not store them where access is difficult or limited at times. New plan. Move them elsewhere and store the plastic model kits in their place to take up that wasted space.

Those plastic model kits were the last things to come over from the other house and are now sitting on top of the bookcases. While all of them may not fit in that lower space, most of them will, freeing up the space on top for things that need more frequent access. Those models will have to wait until I have the time to spend on them. Like once I’m retired. At least, that’s the plan.

Model Kits' Temporary Quarters — Model Kits’ Temporary Quarters

Future Distractions

Eventually I want to “remake” the bookcases. Those bookcases were designed and built to be “massive”, because they occupied either side of the massive stone fireplace at the other house. And while they do provide a huge amount of storage space, they were never designed to fit the space they occupy. If anything, the exact opposite is true. The space they occupy was designed to fit around them.

Where they sit now influenced the size and design of the new bedroom closets here in Mount Dora before they were even built. Each bookcase is 32″ wide. I allowed a bit over twice that, 65″ total, to leave some “wiggle room” between the outside wall and the back of the closets. When the closets and the back porch remodeling were finally completed, it was apparent I’d forgotten to take into account the width of the baseboards and the bookcase trim pieces.

Massive Bookcases Bracket The Massive Stone Fireplace

Some “minor” rework with a backsaw and problem solved. The larger problem is how to redesign them to better suit that space? Maybe it’s better to say rework them into a design that reuses as much of them as possible, if possible. The bookcases aren’t quite 22″ deep, and there’s only about 18″ between the end of the cabinets the bookcase on that side. Where they meet is a blind corner cabinet situation.

The main (structural) shelf is lower than the cabinets too, 30″ vs. 36″ off the floor, so simply extending the countertop to the bookcases won’t work. But that’s a future distraction. If it’s not apparent by now, it should be obvious why it takes so long to get anything done on the Barkyard. In this case, coming up with the design, finding a place for everything sitting on the bookcases, then disassembling and reassembling them to match the design.

The Next Distraction

Unfortunately, the next higher priority item is filing the taxes. We always file for an extension, which is why the deadline is October 15^th, and not April 15^th as you would expect. Hopefully it goes quickly and smoothly. As much as preparing for the sale of the house has been a source of friction between Ann and myself, it doesn’t hold a candle to tax time. It’s always guaranteed to bring those “suppressed emotions” to the surface.

Always something else that needs done first!

Leave Us A Comment

If you made it all the way through to the end of this post, thank you. I hope you understand why this is important to us. Even if we didn’t really discuss the Barkyard all that much, other than to explain why we still have no progress to show all this time later. Call them excuses. Call them what you will. Soon we’ll have all the time that was taken from us by everything else that was higher priority.

In any case, leave us a comment to let us know what you think. You’ll need to create a user account to do so, but we don’t use any personal information for marketing (see our privacy policy). You’ll receive a verification email. Reply with the link provided to verify your email address. After that, it’s all automatic. No waiting on moderator approval! No spamming your inbox with useless ADs and Special Offers. None of that nonsense.

Stay tuned…

Infrastructure Improvements

August 18, 2024August 24, 2024 barkmann1 Comment

We’ve made a number of improvements over the Summer. Some we’ve already covered. Some not. We’re making progress, albeit slowly. The main focus is getting trains running again, and to do that, we need to start laying track again, not pulling it back up.

Something that’s been bothering me is the lack of progress on setting the last batch of roadbed bricks in place. It’s been a couple of months since the last batch of bricks was cast and laid in position. That’s mostly on me for not improving the state of the garage. It’s in no shape to work on any project. Not until recently anyway.

I’ll save how the garage and the office were updated with new shelving and other improvements for another post. To say the least, the casting bench is ready for action. And speaking of casting, it’s time to set those roadbed bricks in place then cast more and place them.

Some Filaments Are More UV Resistant Than Others

If you remember from the Roadbed Bricks – Round Three post, some of those 3D printed ballast profile molds had warped and yellowed from the UV exposure. What’s left of them are sitting in a bucket outside the carriage doors of the garage. So the “then cast more” part is going to have to wait.

Setting The Bricks

We’ll get back to that later. Now it’s time to set the rest of those bricks in place. They’ve been lying there on top of what’s left of the artificial turf that needs cut back to make room for them. Time to better protect that 14# power feed cable in the process by “hiding” it under the turf next to the bricks.

My “wheelie cart” helps save me from having to crawl around on my hands and knees. Lately my knees painfully remind me I’m not getting any younger. In the spirit of “there’s always something else that needs done first”, the tires need inflated. They’re not quite flat, but they could definitely use some air.

I grab the Dremel saw bag and the retractable extension cord and get that ready to go while waiting for the compressor to build up pressure. The retractable air hose makes it easy to fill the tires just outside the side garage door. Much better!

The first thing I find once I get going is most of the four bricks are already sitting right on the dirt. If it weren’t for that black “weed control” fabric and just a wedge of turf, they could be set right in place, if the dirt had been moved anyway. Time for the yard cart… Which is full of water!

Well, not all the way full, but Hurricane Debby dropped a good amount of rain on us. Easy enough to dump it out and roll it over to the job site. I made sure when I ordered the new Gorilla Cart™ it came with the solid tires. No worrying about flats!

A couple of quick cuts with the Dremel saw make quick work of that turf wedge. And the black fabric can be pulled out of the way enough to set those first four bricks in place. It takes a few tries to remove enough dirt and test fit the contour for each brick.

Annoyances

That fabric certainly is annoying though. Not only does it NOT stop the weeds from growing, it’s so flexible it’s nearly impossible to cut with the Dremel saw! The one thing it DOES do well is keep the seams between the sections of turf from “puckering”, for lack of a better term.

Puckering describes the way the dirt washes away at the seam and builds up under either side, like lips puckering. At this point, it’s no longer necessary with the bricks in place. The work progresses a brick or two at a time while cutting away the turf and fabric and fitting them in place.

By the time I’m finishing up, the shade has disappeared. The new umbrella Ann got me is working fine to block the sun though. It wouldn’t have taken so long if it weren’t for the post and remnants of the stringer that were in the way and had to be removed.

Unfortunately that left a patch of dirt exposed leading up to the switch. Thankfully a chunk of turf previously cut out of the way covers it and fits the bill quite nicely. It will be good enough until the next batch of bricks is ready to finish that stretch.

But Wait, There’s More

But it’s not done yet. There are three more bricks on the other end of the “cast in place” failure. Alright, it wasn’t a total failure, but it ain’t very pretty and that’s for sure. These three fit between the other end of the “cast in place” section and the end of the previous batch of bricks.

It’s a bit harder to get the turf cut this time because of the surroundings. On one end is the the previous batch of bricks and the other is cast in place concrete. But the most difficult part is the tight squeeze getting everything to fir in that space!

That end brick from the last batch actually had the corner crack off, but it doesn’t want to go back in place without a fight, or leaving a gap. After more finagling, and even more stomping, they finally fit. Probably best not to disturb the bricks already placed last time around.

Levelling Up

Next up is levelling that 4×4 that sits proud of the first batch of bricks. All those 4x4s along the lower loop started out level when first installed. Over time they settled, heaving or slumping in the process. Every one of them sit on dirt with the exception of the one sitting proud.

That 4×4 sits proud because it’s resting on a wedge of turf. A wedge of turf that should have been cut out of the way when it was first installed a few years back. The time has come. But first the 10′ section of flex track that sits on top of it has to be removed.

This allows access for refitting the 4×4 to sit lower and level with its neighbor and the first round of bricks. Turns out not only is there one wedge, there’s two! A convergence, where two different sections of turf meet. This discovery forces removing the first batch bricks, disturbing the pile of rubble they sat on.

After struggling with getting the high spot out of the middle and trying to eliminate the rocking motion, the 4×4 finally sits flat and at the proper level. Getting that rubble and the bricks to sit flat and level is even more of a struggle, but eventually everything lines up.

More Levelling

Unfortunately that 4×4 wasn’t the only one that needed attention. Ann had been working in the front yard, adding pavers and removing dirt to do so. She nearly filled the dump cart and I dumped that dirt where the track leaves the deck. The idea is to build up the terrain there.

After removing the section of track, I backed the heavy dump cart over the 4×4 and released the latch to dump the dirt. Why does this matter? Those aren’t the 4x4s that need levelled! It’s the ones in front of the deck step. Yet another 10′ section of flex track needs moved.

Thankfully this time the turf didn’t need trimmed, but it did need pulled out of the way while adjusting the 4x4s. While I still have the track out of the way, it’s time to trim the turf along the 4×4 that staircases the terrain where the dirt was dumped.

Dirt Terraced And Track Laid On Levelled 4x4s

The cutoff piece of turf isn’t quite big enough cover all the dirt, there’s still an exposed patch, but it’s mostly covered. Time to put the track back together. Of course, the Split Jaw™ couplers needed new socket head bolts to replace the bent, mangled originals.

Thankfully the track just falls into place, having retained their shape from using the rail bender when they were first installed. The hold down screws are left out for now with the idea that some 1×2 blocking will be fabricated to hold the rail in place.

For now, even the end that was uneven drops right into place. It doesn’t even take concrete blocks like it did months ago. It probably would have waited, except the Bozos that installed the new copper A/C line set grabbed them and used them for seats and step stools.

The Track Finally Fits The Roadbed Bricks

Sour Grapes

Definitely some sour grapes there. First of all, who told them they could use those blocks? And they didn’t even put them back where they got them! I had to download the security camera videos just to know whether they took them with them when they left.

Second, but more importantly, who misdiagnosed the leak was in the line set to begin with? Nothing like having to pay $1500 for a non repair! Still leaking and no A/C a day later, in Florida, in the middle of August no less! Ends up needing a brand new condensing coil and we get to pay to have that installed too!

Guess I should be happy we finally got someone that knew what they were doing. So frustrating paying supposed “professionals” to have it done right and I end up knowing more than they do! I’m paying you to fix it so I don’t have to!

But enough whining. I don’t need them to hold the track down anymore, and that was the goal. To keep the puppies from poking their eyes out, I removed the sagging 3′ straight track section and the broken stringer that was no longer holding it up.

I left the plastic pipe to mark where the track goes in preparation for the upcoming trestle work. You can see from the pictures how much more track work remains. Next step is to add back more of the 10′ flex track sections into the roadbed bricks.

Still struggling with the decision to use wooden or metal for the trestle and bridges. It may end up being 3D printed PETG that looks like metal, but still have to experiment with PETG and its durability when exposed to the elements. Time will tell.

“Then Cast More”

I promised to say more about the “then cast more” part of the discussion. One of the things accomplished when making the casting bench operational was to cut the 8′ long pieces of the roadbed brick casting forms into two sets 4′ long.

They’re sitting on the casting bench waiting to be reassembled. I’m still looking for another chunk of 2×6 that’s 4′ long to create a third 4′ long form. I’ve also 3D printed at least three more ballast profile molds for that section, but will probably need more

More to come, so stay tuned!

3D Printed Casting Mock Ups – Round Two

July 2, 2024August 4, 2024 barkmannLeave a comment

This is a short follow up on the original 3D Printed Casting “Mock Ups”. Considering the length of the original post, that’s an understatement. But sometimes it’s necessary to fill in the blanks when progress is low and discouragement is high.

Even though progress has been slow, it’s actually been beneficial in this case. The original design is based on our “fleet” of Bachmann passenger cars, literally dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Some modified with our Passenger Car Lighting systems, some still sporting the original 9V battery twin light bulb version. All of them suffering from flimsy, rubberized plastic handrails.

I wouldn’t mention those handrails except we’re talking about 3D printing. What better replacement for plastic than plastic? Well, metal for one. Brass to be exact, but then we’d need jigs for bending the brass to shape, most likely 3D printed as well.

Design “Flaws”

Just like those original handrails that failed the test, so did our original casting design. Well, at least the mock up did. The first flaw was discovered when first fitting the 10′ diameter curved track section. A redesign doubled the number of segments to better fit the curve. This was discussed in the first installment and it works quite well.

The next “flaw” is genuinely a “new” one, as in there’s not enough clearance for the new USA Trains Heavyweight passenger cars. And before you ask, no, there are not dozens of them. But there is a decade of them. There was a bulk deal on ten of them around Christmas time, so I pulled the trigger, as well as ordering a pair of F7 A-B units for A-B-B-A running.

They’ve been packed away since then, awaiting completion of all these “infrastructure improvements”. After unboxing one of them to test with, it was readily apparent the design was too narrow for these behemoths. The car is longer than the mock up! The wheels just fit on a single curve section though.

The steps and the equipment boxes both will interfere with the platform or the capstones. Back to the drawing board! It took some doing, and some days to do it, but I managed to add a “crude” approximation of the new passenger car to the mock up design.

Back To The Drawing Board

The test fit also reveals a flaw in the “track trough”. Not sure where I picked up that fault, but for whatever reason, the track is sitting proud of the platform rather than flush with it. To give an idea of how the prototype fits together, most platforms are slightly higher than the track, by about 4″ (10cm). In scale, that’s roughly 1⁄6″.

I figured giving the equipment that little bit of a height boost would hopefully compensate for any errors made while measuring their dimensions. Looks like I worried about the wrong measurement errors. Add that to the list of things that need fixed.

I’m back and forth with whether to try to forcibly disassemble the mock ups or just print all new pieces. I say try because the chemical solvent I use to cement the plastic pieces literally melts the two together into one part. Printing all new pieces is going to take a lot longer.

Each 4″ x 7″ retaining wall segment takes 4½ hours to print. Two of the pillars that join the wall segments take 3½ hours. An 8″ long track trough takes 5 hours. It should have been obvious when the curved track trough only took 3½ hours to print.

Anyway, these flaws are certainly obvious now. Not to worry though, the entire reason for all these mockups is to find the errors and flaws before they’re cast in stone, er… concrete.

Time Is Of The Essence

Alright, being overly dramatic, but time certainly is the essence of the conundrum. As in there is not enough of it to get ahead of everything that needs done. So little to do and so much time… Strike that. Reverse it.

Some say if deadlines are not set, they’ll never be met. Tell that to hurricane Debby. Now instead of spending time moving closer to the goal of running trains, it will now be spent preparing for a hurricane.

Retract the SunSetter™ awning. Stash any loose items that will blow away, like lawn chairs and cushions. You get the idea. Now add to that the garage where those items are usually stored is still the disaster it was right after the A/C decided to leak all over everything.

Progress is slow, but progress is progress. The large empty storage bin that used to sit in front of the table saw because there was no place else to put it is now filled with HO scale items that used to occupy a slot on the bookshelves in the office. It will fit beneath the work cell, taking up the wasted space under it.

Next Steps

Immediate steps are hurricane preparation, like dumping the work cart full of dirt at the end of the driveway where it has washed out around the apron and sidewalk, then retract the awning so as not to create a cart full of mud.

Beyond the immediate, back to the drawing board. The track trough and curved section redesign has already begun, old hold temporarily to prepare for Debby. I don’t like leaving the 3D printer sit idle for any length of time, but short of printing more 4″ x 7″ retaining walls, it will have to wait for the new part designs.

The big ticket item is capturing the step by step process for actually creating the station platform from all the separate cast pieces and how to create forms with them for a concrete pour. So far the mockups have captured segments of the final product, but not the process of creating those final products.

The garage needs a few more items completed before it’s ready for casting concrete patch into those retaining wall panels. There’s a stud space or two where the sill plate is totally rotted that could use a new chunk of 2×4 before setting the table saw in front of there.

The new shelves are already installed but need some thought put in to organizing what should go there and what will fit. All the things that haven’t been used and won’t be any time soon were thrown out to make more space.

It continues to evolve, like the wall cabinet for electrical items expanding to occupy two cabinets. Next is going through that cabinet that has all the “might be useful” items for the model railroad, ripe for harvesting more trash that will never be used.

Long Term

Long term is 3D printing with PETG, a more suitable material for use outdoors. Definitely more heat resistant than PLA. Not sure about its UV resilience, but paint can mitigate any shortcomings there.

The first designs will be concerned with ties and insulated split jaw parts. The originals printed in PLA lasted about ten minutes before they started to melt and deform in the Florida heat. Those stainless steel rails get mighty hot in the sun!

Next will be structural items, like window and door frames, “gingerbread” decorations and supports on buildings, etc. The ultimate goal is to create our own switches and turnouts, custom fit to the needs of the Barkyard Railroad.

Stay tuned. Much more to come.

3D Printed Casting “Mock Ups”

June 18, 2024July 1, 2024 barkmannLeave a comment

I’ve been busy 3D printing lately. So busy I’ve gone through nearly eight 1Kg spools of filament so far. That’s almost twenty pounds of plastic and I’m not finished yet! Why so much? Well, that’s a bit of a story, but I’ll try to keep it brief.

I’ve been struggling with optimizing the casting process, or rather, processes. Roadbed bricks. Buildings. Infrastructure, like retaining walls and culverts and such. You name it. I’m struggling with it, and how to marry the castings with pouring concrete using the castings as forms for the concrete.

It’s difficult to visualize how all the parts need to come together to make one final piece. How do all the puzzle pieces fit together? How to hold the castings in place? How much concrete and where? A lot of questions with no answers, even with many design drawings to help.

The photo shows the initial mock up for the culverts and retaining wall of the station siding along the patio. That passenger car looks mighty lonely sitting there all by itself. Why so much mockup? I’ll blame learning curve for that. Learning from the mistakes of the initial design, and iterations that followed, to reach the final design… For the mockup.

And that’s just the tangent (straight) part. The curved portions require their own designs, and one for every different curvature! While one design is printing behind me, I’m sitting at the computer working on the next design element, be it a different part or an iteration of an existing one.

The work bench is littered with inadequate parts from failed designs. Stacks of parts yet to be assembled await the remaining pieces necessary to put the next 8″ unit together. Be it tangent or curved, each unit is based on an 8″ length.

Design Constraints

Why 8″ and not some other length? There are two main reasons why that size was chosen. The first was a matter of print volume. The old 3D printer’s bed is roughly 8½” x 8½”, capable of printing to a height of a little over 9″. All my original designs had to fit within those limits.

The new 3D printer has a print volume of 12″ x 12″ x 15″, so my later designs don’t have that constraint, except for the second reason. The sectional curved track requires a certain number of sections to complete a circle. The smaller the diameter, the larger the track section can be, requiring fewer sections to make a circle.

For example, the 10′ diameter sections are roughly 32″ long, and require only 12 to complete a circle. By contrast, the 20′ diameter sections are nearly 48″ long, and require 16 to make up a circle. So here’s some math for you. What’s the lowest common denominator for those two sizes? That’s right, you guessed it, an 8″ length!

The next choice in the design may not seem so obvious, but it’s time to select the angle occupied by each roughly 8″ section. In the case of the above design capture, it takes three 10′ diameter curve sections to create that 90° arc. It takes four of those 8″ units for each curve section, by three sections, for a total of twelve segments. Each sweeps a 7.5° angle.

While the wood stringers and other structures made up of thin, “laminated” strips may be formed into continuous curves, we don’t have that luxury when it comes to concrete. Granted, continuous monolithic slabs can be formed.

But when multiple, separately cast parts are involved, not so much. The design has to be segmented to allow for many individual parts to be cast independent of one another. And at different times. These cast wall parts are made in assembly line fashion, one or two at a time.

Design Decisions

The whole point of 3D printing these mockups is to better visualize the overall casting approach. Let’s take a closer look at what we’re dealing with. Near the center and moving to the right are the casting molds for a cut stone retaining wall and 8′ diameter arch culvert. Note those additional pieces on either end.

These pieces can be fitted as necessary to create 7″, 7½”, and 8″ long castings, roughly ¼” thick, made using concrete patch. This is very similar to the process used to cast the Downtown Marketplace building faces. Those older castings were made using a brick pattern sheet and crude foam blocks. But that’s another story…

Another piece is precision fit to the arch of the culvert section, knowing the difficulty of slicing a piece of foam to fit that opening. The piece on the very right is meant to cast the “pillars” used to disguise the joints between each of the wall or culvert sections.

The top left portion shows how the various parts, including the casting mockups from the bottom half, fit together. This helps to visualize developing a plan around pouring concrete, the external mold parts, and the steps involved.

It doesn’t reveal all the pitfalls that await, like how to form that depression for the track or how to form the pillar in place over the joints, but it will help to reduce the number of avoidable mistakes before they become mistakes.

Discoveries

That’s not to say I’ll find every problem by constructing these mockups, but it sure does help to get “hands on” experience with parts before the first casting is created. It’s too late to find out the track won’t fit in the casting or the passenger car steps will hang up on the pillar capstones once the concrete’s already set.

I’ve already found that the track won’t fit the curved mockup, we’ll call it a “track trough”, so the design needed modification. Even then it’s a tight fit, but hopefully that will help hold the track from going places, especially with the pups pounding on it.

And while the Bachmann passenger car steps clear the capstones with no problem, I have yet to try it with the new USA Trains heavyweight passenger cars that are nearly twice as long. At almost three feet long, it will require two of those 32″ sections to accommodate testing even one car.

I suppose with a little “modification”, those early sections already assembled with the faulty “track troughs” could be reworked to allow the track to fit. The original straight section was divided into two straight segments at half the angle each.

In other words, if that design drawing above had 24 segments instead of 12, and each 8″ unit included two segments rather than one. Looking ahead at the next steps is much easier with mockups in hand.

Next Steps

Speaking of next steps, what are they? Now that mockups can be made in assembly line fashion, it’s time to address how things need to come together to produce the desired outcome, a more or less permanent concrete fixture.

First is to define the process, from start to finish, and the steps involved. This includes what forms and external rigging are needed, along with an estimate of the amount of concrete needed, optimizing for 60# or 80# bags if possible. Of ultimate importance is how to keep it puppy proof while curing.

Once the process is defined, it’s time to test how well it works, making changes as needed. But even then, many questions remain. This will most likely be an iterative process, experimenting with different approaches before deciding on the final definition.

Will the new, “wetter” mix allow the track relief to be worked in place?
- If so, will a mold need left in place (to overcome slump)?
- If not, will it take a roadbed brick equivalent to be laid on top of the fresh pour?
Will each 8″ unit need to be poured solid or can it be made hollow, like a concrete block?
- If solid, how to allow for segments and/or expansion joints?
- If hollow, could a sacrificial 3D printed insert be used and left in place if necessary? How will that affect simple footing?
Will the retaining wall and culvert castings require a dedicated footing? The designs simply use a block of wood in place of a footing currently.
- No dedicated footing – Simple formed and allowed to run out the bottom as one monolithic pour.
- Dedicated footing – Needs to be poured first then built upon.
Determine how capstones work. Cast as separate piece and placed atop the pour?
Modify designs for “staircasing”, i.e. gradually build altitude above terrain or lose it as terrain rises.
Measure and record terrain height map. See if it can be imported into SketchUp.
- What format for import?

And honestly, some of the next steps have nothing to do with mockups, or even casting at all. It’s been a balancing act between work, home improvement, and making progress toward these Barkyard goals. There’s always something else that needs done first!

Excuses, Excuses!

Work has been absolutely brutal lately, busier than it’s been since I started there more than two years ago. As for home improvement, let’s just say it’s not our goals, it’s our individual goals combined. Ann wanted the raised bed planters along the fence by the driveway removed.

I wanted to get all these 3D printed mockups and jigs complete enough to get the assembly line started, saving all that hard work of removing the planters until Fall when the weather finally cools down from the “feels like 107°” by eleven o’clock in the morning, already here at the start of Summer.

Ann removed one of the planters and even transplanted the ponytail palm herself. She did not ask for, nor want my help. Unfortunately, that left me with bent screws and the aftermath of just ripping everything loose. Not wanting to sound like sour grapes, but not the kind of work I prefer doing in the Barkyard either.

That left behind a large area of dirt in need of turf. I’ve had a 7′ x 13′ roll waiting for placement elsewhere that got “requisitioned” for this task. The hardest part was getting that old chunk of turf out of the way, now full of dirt, and twice as heavy.

Always Something Else That Needs Done First

That revealed the ragged, rotten bottom edge of the 6′ tall fence panels we put up not even five years ago. Add to that one of the 4×4 posts is rotted out right at the ground, allowing the fence to sway with the breeze, and it’s time to replace that fence before it blows over.

And while replacing the fence doesn’t necessarily mean the other raised bed planter has to go, it does mean the dirt has to go somewhere while the fence panel gets replaced. The fence used to be only 4′ tall, but was replaced with 6′ tall fence to keep Brigel from jumping over it and chasing the neighbor’s cats into their yard.

Now that Brigel has crossed the Rainbow Bridge and the neighbor cats are seldom out during the day, we’d like to go back to the 4′ fence. Well, guess what Lowe’s no longer carries in stock and must be special ordered and delivered, to the tune of an added $75? All for three fence panels!

Plan “B”

Time for plan B. B, as in cut off the rotted Bottoms of the 6′ panels to make them 4′ panels! I got set up with the makeshift bench on saw horses, ready to make the cuts and coat them with wood preservative, while Ann and Nick handled wrangling the panels and posts.

We got ahead of ourselves on the first panel. It went up before I could cut the post down. Try as I may, I couldn’t get a clean cut, even with Nick removing the panel out of the way. It wasn’t certain that the rotted post was rotted off until the last screw holding the panel to it came out and the post toppled over.

Nick was able to fish the rest of the old post out of the ground. What was left of the post was just tall enough to go back in the same hole, once I gave the bottom a coat of preservative that is. Cutting those last two panels went quickly, but Nick was having a time of it, getting those two gate posts separated.

That gave me time to cut the gate down as well. One of the gate posts needed cut to length, and both needed a coat of preservative before they went back in the ground. Things kind of went downhill from there.

All Downhill

The drill bit broke off when it hit a screw in the post while Nick was making a pilot hole for the new hinge location. That meant even more work as the entire hinge needed relocated on the gate to avoid the bit still stuck in the post. Then one of the carriage bolt’s threads were stripped when it hit another screw in the post.

But even with all the trouble at the end, we managed to knock it out in just two and a half hours! The only things that remains is installing a new gate latch. I mentioned I may have one in the garage we could use, but Ann was having none of that. She’ll go pick one out tomorrow.

Tomorrow came and Ann went to Lowe’s, only to be disappointed they didn’t have the latch she wanted. Turns out I had the exact slide bolt latch she wanted sitting right there in the bottom drawer of the desk in the garage the night before. Oh well, all’s well that ends well.

If you thought that was the last of the distractions, the relentless things that needs done first, think again. Ann decided to remove the other planter and transplant the other ponytail palm a bit further away from the fence.

Then came the inevitable new turf to replace the old, now inadequate to cover the area required of it. The new roll is sitting outside the fence, waiting on me to cut up the old piece into strips more easily handled than the entire chunk all at once.

But wait, there’s more!

The split unit A/C in the garage decided it was going to flood the shelves, workbench, and table saw beneath it when the condensate line clogged up. I had just spent the last few weekends getting things squared away enough to start using the casting and trestle workbenches again.

Nope. Not this weekend. Now I get to move everything out of the way, everything I just moved out of the way of the casting bench by putting it away! And now I get to climb up and down a ladder with my bum knee just to get thing apart enough to work on it.

In the end the fix was to vacuum out the clog in the drain line. Sounds easy enough, but when the vacuum is on the other side of everything that had to be moved out of the way, now in the way of getting the vacuum out… Can’t win for losing sometimes.

The good news is everything is put back together and working again, without flooding the garage. Again, not so much sour grapes as comic relief for others. Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans indeed!

It’s easy to see why it takes me so long to get anything accomplished on the Barkyard.

Other 3D Printing

And the 3D printing hasn’t stopped with casting mockups. I’ve even designed multiple trestle jigs for assembling the massive curved trestle from the deck to the new bridges and beyond.

Beyond that, it’s time to do something with that PET-G I’ve had for over a year now. Everything I’ve printed so far has been PLA. I bought so much PLA, and in so many different colors, that I didn’t notice my favorite maker, 3D Solutech, went out of business!

They are the only filament manufacturer I’d found that had such a wide variety of color selections. All the other have red, green, blue, black, white, gray, and that’s about it. Maybe yellow and orange. None of them have denim blue or steel blue or wheat or even brown for that matter.

Thankfully, white and gray will do for now, and I have plenty of it. At least another 8Kg anyway.

A New Trestle From The Deck

June 15, 2024June 19, 2024 barkmannLeave a comment

We recently raised up the deck by an extra 3½” with the thought of placing new bridges high enough off the ground so the dogs can safely navigate beneath them, without hurting them or themselves. The next step is to raise up the track to match the new deck and bridge height. The problem is the wooden stringers. You guessed it, they’re rotted.

The wooden stringers were a means to an end, and that end was to run trains. Needless to say it’s impossible to run trains when there’s no track to run on. The track is, well, was secured to the stringers every 8″. But not anymore… With two dogs we could barely keep ahead of them and the maintenance. With three it’s a losing battle.

It’s hard to describe how much destruction the pups have caused to the Barkyard Railroad. Imagine most of the track on the ground from the bridges to downtown missing, parts and stretches ripped loose and removed a little at a time, until there’s no track left. Nothing left but the stringers, if they hadn’t already rotted away that is.

A New Approach

It’s obvious that the previous track arrangement no longer fits our needs. We need a new approach. While the roadbed brick production is ramping up to remedy the situation, we still can’t keep up with the destruction of the track on the ground.

Even so, the roadbed bricks can’t address the elevated stretches of track and stringers that need attention. The plan has always been to replace certain elevated stretches with trestles. The time has come. The old infrastructure allowed us to run trains until it didn’t. No regrets.

We’re no strangers to scratch building trestles. At least not the straight kind. We even scratch built a four foot long Howe truss bridge. It used to stretch across a pond with a waterfall. But like everything else, it didn’t hold up to the dogs or time.

The new part to all of this is the curved aspect. All the jigs and such we made way back when only deal with straight (tangent) sections. If you’d like to know more about the history of the railroad, you can refer to the Bit of History section below.

This trestle from the deck will have both 14′ and 20′ diameter curved sections, along with the tangent sections. So far there’s a design for the 14′ diameter sections, already 3D printed and ready for testing.

There’s added complexity in addition to the curvature. The trestle has to rise at more than a 2% grade, a full 6″ over 23′ of track. From 18″ at the deck to 24″ at the bridge. Previously the ruling grade was kept to 1%, but that’s out the window with the triple decker (re)arrangement of the upper loop.

Trestle Bents With 14' Curve Jig — Trestle Bents With 14′ Curve Jig (Shown in White)

The Particulars

To put things in perspective, each bent must rise above the previous by 3⁄16″, and each bent is about 8″ from the last, for roughly a 2.34% grade. For the 14′ diameter curves there are four bents per track section, 16 per circle, roughly 32″ long and 22.5° per section.

By the time the fifth bent is reached, the track has climbed ¾” from the start. The plan is to make the bents for each section all the same height, and account for the rise by increasing the height of the footings, to be cast of concrete. Each footing will be roughly 2″ x 2″ x 16″ long, adding 3⁄16″ with each successive footing.

The footings are reset to 2″ when the next track section is reached, again grown by 3⁄16″, and height of the bents for that next section increased by ¾”. The photo doesn’t do a very good job of showing it, but there are six 14′ diameter track sections, then a 20′ diameter track section, followed by a 3′ tangent section.

But that’s a lot of talk with no pictures to show what we’re talking about.

Arrangement of Increasingly Taller Footings with Single Height Bents

The previous bridge approach trestles sat loosely on concrete block “caps”, roughly 2″x8″x16″, placed together and leveled. Nothing attached the approach trestles to the block caps. They were free to be repositioned every time the dogs smacked into them.

And smack into them they did! I don’t know how many times I would find the approach trestles upended or cocked at an angle, with the track and the bridges on the ground. We’re hoping to anchor the bents to the footings this time around to at least slow down the “remodeling”, pun intended.

New Needs Means New Jigs

So far only the jigs for the 14′ diameter curves are reality. The design for the 20′ diameter section along with the tangent section will begin soon. The design is made up of a number of identical parts with a handful of unique parts to address the areas where specific size and shape is necessary.

The trestle jig parts either press fit or snap together. The only gluing required is to attach the progressively taller adapters to the standard bases. This is only necessary to allow 3D printing of all the parts without needing supports.

The standard base cradles the bottom of the trestle bent in a 3⁄16″ deep notch. Because the base is only 8″ wide and a standard 20″ tall bent is nearly 16″ wide at its base, the jig has index marks to align with the bent’s center leg.

Each standard base has two legs designed to press fit into the next. Each base is at an angle to the next. Each successive base is 3⁄16″ taller than the last, hence the glued on adapters. The first base has no legs and needs no adapter.

Testing 14' Diameter Curved Trestle Jig — Testing 14′ Diameter Curved Trestle Jig

The design provides alignment for five trestle bents and stretches over 32″. Next are the cross arms that hold the bents vertical. There are two sets of cross arms, one set for the inner curve, and one set for the outer.

Each set has its own inside and outside components that snap together in the middle. These cross arm assemblies then snap onto the legs that connect the standard bases together. The arms have a block, a peg of sorts, that fits in the ½” gap in the horizontal members of the bent section.

Of course, now that I’ve 3D printed an entire set, it occurs to me that this will only work for those bents that have a complete section at the bottom! DUH! But this is why we mock up the models and test fit. Back to the drawing board!

This further reinforces the shortcomings of trying to consider everything from just the drawing board. My need to have hands on pieces to manipulate and consider other options that never would have come to mind is the reason why we’re testing the designs before committing to them.

Close Up of Base and Cross Arm Interaction

Model vs. Prototype Considerations

There are many more considerations, like limitations of models as compared with the real thing. For the sake of this discussion, it’s not limited to just modelling, but modelling a prototypical railroad.

Curves

As with any model railroad, some “allowances” are made for the model compared to prototypical practices. The best example is that of curvature. Most model curves are far tighter than anything in the real world. Prototypical curves are far straighter than anything we have the space to model.

Track also doesn’t just change dramatically from tangent (straight) to curved. The use of easement curves on the prototype helps ease the train into the curve without abruptly slamming everything into a corner. Think of a spiral that goes from nearly straight to tighter and tighter curves.

Our tightest curves are ten feet in diameter, huge compared to the toy like four foot diameter curves. Even so, 10′ diameter curves are really beyond anything seen on the prototype, including the tightest industrial sidings and spurs.

Those 10′ diameter curves are only used where space is at a premium on our pike, like the station spur and the tight fit of the mainline behind the shed. Everywhere else, we simulate an easement by starting with a 20′ diameter curve leading into the 14′ diameter sections.

That doesn’t help much when they’re all 20′ diameter sections though. Other parts of the layout are “flex track” which allows us to bend it to any curvature. Here we’re able to ease in to the curve by slowly increasing the force when using the rail bender, creating a more gradual curve.

Trestles

So why all this talk about curves? Beyond the modelling consequences related to track alone, it also influences modelling the structures that support and convey the track off the ground. In this case, trestles. And because the curves are tighter than on the prototype, allowances must be made for those structures too.

The way the prototype did things, each bent grew from the top down, growing the length of the legs as necessary. This leads to sections of standard height, with only the lowest portion varying from one bent to the next. We chose scale twenty foot section heights, or 10″ each at 1:24 (half dollhouse) scale.

The key take away from this is everything is designed from the track level down when it comes to a trestle, each section depending on the one below it, in a standardized fashion. The reason for this top down design is to ensure the stringers are directly supported by each bent without the need for shimming.

The rail stringers are perched atop the bents directly because the bents are built exactly as tall as required. Shims would diminish the strength and stability of the structure. These stringers are made up of staggered members, whose lengths span three bents, landing on the two outside bents in a joint.

This is to ensure there is at least one solid member at every joint atop a bent, and bolted together, again to increase strength and rigidity. There’s a stringer beneath each rail, generally with three individual members to provide redundancy for failure of any one of them, and each spaced apart to provide an air space so water is not trapped between them.

Making Allowances

So why does that matter to us? It all goes back to the discussion about curves and the allowances we need to make in our models. That staggering works great for tangent track, but not so much for curved track on our model. The prototype spacing between stringer members is around 3″. That’s 1⁄8″ in scale.

Unfortunately, the spacing between the members on the curved sections far exceeds 1⁄8″! At scale, each 8″x18″ member is roughly 5⁄16″ x ¾”. Over the 32′ length, a scale 16″, the overlap would be more than ¾”. That’s more than double the scale 5⁄16″ thickness of each member!

That means the stringer members can only span between bents without a noticeable deformation that would look totally out of scale. Of course, the shorter than prototypical member length will also be noticeable, but not as much so once the tie strips are in place.

Generally the prototype used longer ties to provide a walkway of sorts on at least one side of the track. These longer ties, bridge ties, are also more closely spaced on a bridge or a trestle. That along with a railing made it much safer to walk along the track that high off the ground.

Back in the days of steam, red hot cinders could fall from the ash pan onto the trestle timbers and set them on fire. A fire barrel filled with water or sand was placed every so often along the walkway, on even longer ties so as not to block the walkway, to provide a ready means to extinguish a fire.

Model track comes with one option, standard length ties. For that reason, a slide for the table saw was created that allows notching wooden “guard rails” to fit over the ends of the wooden bridge ties to be assembled into 8″ tie strips, long enough to span between two bents.

Unfortunately, that only works for tangent track sections. It would need reworked to accommodate curved sections if not totally remade just for curves. In this case, I was overly obsessed with true to prototype realism in my modelling.

That’s a holdover from my HO scale days where anything that’s out of scale stands out like a sore thumb, making everything look toy like. It definitely kills the illusion of realism. In the case of the notched tie strip guard rails, not all railroads notch them.

For the sake of simplicity and rapid production, the Barkyard Railroad will no longer notch its guard rails.

A Bit of History

Back when we first moved here to Mount Dora in 2014, we had to tear up all the track we had laid at the old house in Wekiva. There were plenty of projects that took priority over getting the railroad out of mothballs and back up and running. Slowly but surely we renovated pretty much the entire house.

One of the earlier renovations was the garage. With just two stripes of concrete and a dirt floor, it was a carriage house in every sense of the word, complete with carriage doors. You guessed it, they were rotted and needed totally replaced.

But first we had to do something about that dirt floor. It was like silt, a very fine mix of dirt and sand, stirred up into a cloud at the least provocation, sticking to our legs, ankles, and feet. Better plan on taking a shower if working in the garage.

Nick helped us install a plywood floor over the dirt, using the foundation blocks and concrete stripes to support a 2×4 framework covered with ¾” tongue and groove plywood. Benches soon followed along with a new table saw.

About that time we had to replace the dilapidated fence between us and our neighbor to the west. Most of the fence panels were rotted away to nothing, but some of the wood that still had some life left in it was saved as raw material for building trestle bents.

Early Trials

It was a brave new world learning to use the new table saw and fashioning a crude template to hold the pieces of a trestle bent together while assembling it. In case you’re wondering, a trestle is made up of individual trestle bents, lashed together with horizontal girts and diagonal cross braces.

The bents themselves have their own cross braces and other means of securing the legs together which divide the bent into multiple sections. So the crude template used small chunks of wood, strategically placed, and screwed to a chunk of plywood.

Repeatability was questionable at best. That is to say no two bents were interchangeable. Originally each of the legs was cut individually, and required new setups for the three different angles in involved. Getting a repeatable length was nearly impossible.

It soon became apparent that a better quality template was necessary. The new template was custom cut on the table saw to the correct angles, making dado cuts to hold the entire length of the legs in position, along with the horizontal joining members.

Other changes were made to increase productivity as well. The new design accommodates using the template as a “sled” for the table saw to trim all legs to the proper angle and length in one operation. Runners to fit in the T-slots were attached to the back, holding it in perfect alignment with the saw table.

That Was Then, This Is Now

All that seems so far away now, around Halloween of 2015, sitting in the living room, assembling trestle bents into an approach trestle for the scratch build Howe truss bridge. Fast forward to the task at hand today. The simplistic jigs I fashioned back then for holding the bents together did little to align or secure them in place.

And they were only meant for the straight sections to boot. Back then I would have been happy to have even the tangent trestle I built survive, but too many other things had to happen first, and many false starts, before we could think about a permanent garden railroad.

Again, permanent is a relative term. The dogs and the elements would beg to differ with the “permanent” moniker.

There is much more to come. Stayed tuned.

Roadbed Bricks – Round Three

June 8, 2024July 31, 2024 barkmannLeave a comment

So here we are again, talking about roadbed bricks. Third time’s a charm? Well, not exactly…

While this go round is certainly an improvement over last time, there’s still more fine tuning that needs done. And while I’d love to say we’ve moved into the production phase and show how easily all the stringers for the ground level trackage were replaced, that’s not the case.

The wetter mix is definitely the way to go. And even though the release agent was used this time, the concrete still shrank and pulled away from the forms in the same jagged fashion. I’m thinking I’ll take the “draft” out of the 1×4 sides of the form and see if that helps.

Unfortunately, the new, taller dividers I 3D printed for this go round were too tall. Their height prohibited an end to end screeding sliding the shovel along the top of the form. But that’s easily remedied with a new round of prints for the next go round.

How Not To Screed

All things being equal, this time it took two glue sticks to prepare the form instead of one the first two times. I use hot melt glue to attach the 3D printed ballast profile molds to the bottom of the form as well as attach the dividers. It’s not a big deal that it uses two, but the inability to explain why it took two is bothersome.

The beauty of using hot melt glue is twofold. First, it’s not a permanent attachment and easily removed after a pour. Second, I can use the cordless glue gun to avoid tripping over cords. The battery still has plenty of power left after prepping the entire eight foot long form. Time to pour concrete!

Unfortunately while screeding this time around, I end up knocking one of those tall dividers loose, creating a goofy “wedge” slope between two of the bricks. I did this the first time around as well, trying to work the drier mix into the form. Again, not a big deal, as long as those two bricks are used together as a pair.

Taking A Different Approach

The main difference this time around is keeping the concrete wet. The hope is it will prevent the shrinkage and increase the strength of the bricks. I may have gotten a little overzealous while spraying down the excess concrete spilled on the driveway, by not missing the fresh concrete in the form by as much as I should have. Oh well.

I tried to wet the bricks every few hours, but even that wasn’t enough to keep the bricks from shrinking away from the form in the same jagged pattern as last time. Maybe next time keep the fresh pour out of the sun and a tarp? Regardless, the bricks remained in the form for a several days until I finally took the time to free them.

As much as I’d like to blame an uptick in work escalations, the truth is I got a bit lazy about it too. When I saw that same ragged edged shrinkage as last time, even using a mold release agent, it just didn’t seem as important anymore. Once the bricks were carted to the Barkyard, the 3D printed pieces were left strewn across the driveway, haphazardly stacked, for days.

That’s a mistake not to be repeated. The PLA plastic is not all that heat resistant, so it doesn’t take much to guess what happened to them, in June, in Florida, on a concrete driveway. That’s right, they melted. Well, they didn’t really melt, but they certainly became warped and misshapen from the Florida Summer heat.

In a moment of disgust with myself at leaving them stacked atop one another long enough to warp, I decided to lay them out flat on the drive, individually, to see if baking in the sun would flatten them out again. And it did! Talk about surprised. Once they were flat, I stacked them off to the side, where they would be shaded.

So a few more lessons learned on this batch. Don’t leave the freshly poured concrete or the 3D printed mold pieces out in the sun. Don’t have dividers that are too tall. Don’t wait to wash the concrete off the 3D printed pieces after breaking down the forms to release the bricks.

Prepping For Round Four

Along those lines, for next time I’m considering cutting that eight foot long form into two four foot long forms, hoping to be able to more easily move them after a fresh pour. The addition of a third four foot long form should help to avoid the waste when mixing up an 80# bag of concrete too.

I’ve already 3D printed a new, shorter set of dividers, and test fit them to be sure. I may need to 3D print more of the ballast profile molds as well. Several of them were printed with less UV resistant PLA than the others, and they turned yellow and brittle sitting out in the sun for days on end. Some others need glued back together.

The biggest change will be removing the “draft” angle formed between the 2×6 base and the 1×4 sides of the form. Hopefully this will help reduce the amount of shrinkage and eliminate that ragged gap, or at least minimize it.

Are We There Yet?

Not yet. I already bought a couple more 80# bags of high strength concrete mix. Hopefully the next post will show some real progress in roadbed brick laying. There’s much more to accomplish before that can happen, and even more work to be done to run trains again. Baby steps.

If you read the previous post about the casting mockups, you may remember the setback when the A/C split unit in the garage “flooding” the table saw, shelves, and the casting bench beneath it. It’s setbacks like that to take away any momentum I had to start the concrete patch castings for the station retaining wall and culverts.

I had just spent the last few weekends getting things squared away and put back in their place enough to start using the casting and trestle workbenches again. All that work was wasted when I had to move everything back out of the way to gain access to the A/C indoor unit!

Bet you can’t guess where everything was left sitting afterward. Disgusted and discouraged I turned my attention to better organization, both in the garage and in the office. Along those lines, I picked up a couple of 12″ x 8′ shelves to replace the waterlogged and now hopelessly swollen and warped cheapo depo laminated ones the garage.

For the office, I bought a 16″ x 6′ shelf to replace the functional but stupid looking 2×6 over the window. Is it really stupid if it works? Here it would depend on the definition of stupid. If we’re talking stupid looking, yeah, it still looks stupid. Not for long, but that’s another story…

Making Progress… Slowly

I’ve been moving a chunk of furniture grade plywood around the office, generally every time it’s in my way again. Time to remedy that. It’s roughly 24″ x 45″, so ripping it down the middle yields two 12″ x 45″ shelves. One of them is now “floating” above the monitors for the work cell, thanks to the leftover floating shelf brackets from the previous shelving upgrade post.

The other shelf is now above the doorway to the bedroom, in hopes of relocating all the ½” plywood remnants from my old HO layout at the other house. AS part of this latest organizational effort, I cataloged all the pieces and their sizes in a spreadsheet. I went full OCD and captured models of them in the SketchUp drawing of the office too!

But let’s get the Barkyard back in operation before even thinking about yet another layout to build and maintain! The plan is to relocate those plywood pieces, mainly various radii curve sections, from the top of the shelves they are prone to falling off of to an out of sight and out of mind perch on that new shelf.

Speaking of OCD, I took pictures of the trestle bent inventory when last organizing in the garage, and created an inventory spreadsheet with all their sizes as well. This complements the design drawings for the various trestle templates. There is much more detail in the Trestle From The Deck post.

Next Steps

Most everything that needs done has already been captured, but prepping for round four did not include any activities outside of casting more roadbed bricks. The casting mockups for the curved approach to the station retaining wall sections revealed the original design is too narrow to accommodate the new USA Trains heavyweight passenger cars.

Thankfully there’s space for all these 3D printed mockups with all the new shelving, but there’s still more work to do there before we can expand the concrete casting to include those detail castings as part of the forms. It won’t be long now though.

Stayed tuned. There’s plenty more to come!