Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more Model Railroader Construction Kinks left on the planet, host Gerry Leone just unearthed the final remnants — a.ka. The Missing Kinks! Learn from these timeless workbench and layout building insights, and enjoy Gerry’s helpful demonstration of their usefulness.
Off The Rails: The Missing Kinks, Episode 53
Will there be anymore Off The Rail series
Gerry
I needed some HO scale bottle brush trees approximately 80 scale feet tall (11-12″) to hide an window Air Conditioner cord. Ended up cutting a piece of 3 1/2″ PVC pipe in half length wise and putting PVC boards cut down to 2″ wide by about 6″ and glued on the ends of the half tube. Provided excellant base to hold the glue tube from rolling around. Use PVC cement from plumbers supplies, added sideboards to cut down on glue splashes by using the same 1 by (3/4″) boards 3″ wide on the sides.
Works on trees down to 2″ or smaller.
I have the metal fishing wire for cables on an overhead trolley crane that unloads logs from log cars. It works great around pulleys down to 1/2″ diameter. The jaws on that picks up the logs I made out of brass. Easier to work with than steel and slightly heavier than steel. Single cable on each side of the double jaws keeps jaws from twisting around. Copied the design of a Tonka toy truck with a clamshell bucket on the back. That way I only need the single cables to open and close plus lift and lower the bucket. One of the few things on my layout that works nearly every time.
The logging camp uses a crane that picks up logs from a pile. Powered by two Tortoise switch machine motors. One to raise and lower the boom on the crane, and one to open and close the jaws. Plus a re-purposed printer carriage motor that swings the crane to drop the logs off on the log cars.