Greg@mnrr
Section Hand
Finished the mulching job and I'm getting too old for that type of projects. I rather be building bench work in the basement.
Raincoat2: I did Excel Spreadsheets for all my locomotives and started one for my rolling stock. I left a comment area for each item so I could keep a maintenance recorded of all the equipment. I'll do several cars at a time (10) and check the couplers, the coupler height, the trucks and make a note of what I did for each piece of rolling stock. This is a good time to replace plastic wheels with metal wheel sets.
It's easy with excel to repeat information in the various cells so it cuts own on the amount of time needed to do the entries. So if the procedure was the same for each car, then a simple key stroke with add this information for each piece of stock. The worst part was physically doing the inventory of the rolling stock and manually writing it down to later enter into the spread sheet.
It's surprising what you find when you start checking the rolling stock.
My next small future project is making Lilly pads for two of the wet areas on the layout. I watched Gerry Leone make a bunch of pads in a video and the process is simple. Painted paper and a paper punch to make the pads and then cut the "V" notch in each leaf and apply the pads to the "water" using white glue. Everyone likes Lilly pads. He also made some cat tails.
I like Gerry Leone's matter of fact way he does projects in his videos.
Yesterday, I started cleaning up the terminal blocks on the layout's wiring by changing the way I use spade terminal connectors with two wires per connctor and now attaching two wires to a connector rather than one wire. This makes for a cleaner look to the terminals and more wires can be added to each position on the terminal block. I use telephone spade connectors for the hook up wire and the telephone wiring I use for the lighting.
I know a model railroader who was a telephone field tech and his layout and locomotive decoder wiring was perfect. No bird's nests and everything was labeled.
Later.....
Greg
Raincoat2: I did Excel Spreadsheets for all my locomotives and started one for my rolling stock. I left a comment area for each item so I could keep a maintenance recorded of all the equipment. I'll do several cars at a time (10) and check the couplers, the coupler height, the trucks and make a note of what I did for each piece of rolling stock. This is a good time to replace plastic wheels with metal wheel sets.
It's easy with excel to repeat information in the various cells so it cuts own on the amount of time needed to do the entries. So if the procedure was the same for each car, then a simple key stroke with add this information for each piece of stock. The worst part was physically doing the inventory of the rolling stock and manually writing it down to later enter into the spread sheet.
It's surprising what you find when you start checking the rolling stock.
My next small future project is making Lilly pads for two of the wet areas on the layout. I watched Gerry Leone make a bunch of pads in a video and the process is simple. Painted paper and a paper punch to make the pads and then cut the "V" notch in each leaf and apply the pads to the "water" using white glue. Everyone likes Lilly pads. He also made some cat tails.
I like Gerry Leone's matter of fact way he does projects in his videos.
Yesterday, I started cleaning up the terminal blocks on the layout's wiring by changing the way I use spade terminal connectors with two wires per connctor and now attaching two wires to a connector rather than one wire. This makes for a cleaner look to the terminals and more wires can be added to each position on the terminal block. I use telephone spade connectors for the hook up wire and the telephone wiring I use for the lighting.
I know a model railroader who was a telephone field tech and his layout and locomotive decoder wiring was perfect. No bird's nests and everything was labeled.
Later.....
Greg
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