I've been working on the railroad

In a stark contrast to yesterday when I spent the day inside in the air conditioning, I decided to go down to the Zig Zag Railway today and sweat a bit. Or a lot. More like a lot.

We decided to replace a couple more sleepers along middle road that have become damaged. This contraption is a sleeper puller that makes this job much easier. All you need to do is pull some levers and it will pull out the old sleeper. Then line up the new one and push it home with the power of hydraulics.

The way this machine has been built is quite simple. A petrol fueled hydraulic power pack that is just connected on the the valving. This meant that during construction an off the shelf part could be used. Eliminating the complicated and fiddly design and set up of petrol motor, hydraulic pump & reservoirs and cooling for each.

Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with the fuel pump. Once we had pretty much finished the first sleeper we started having fuel starvation issues. With the motor stumbling then picking itself back up again. Eventually it died and we finished off that sleeper by hand. We were able to get it started again by getting the fuel filter filled. However that only lased a few minutes before we had to fill it again. Eventually we did get both sleepers changed and are now in place ready for baseplates & spikes.

Heading back down for lunch. He seems to be pretty keen for it!

Cheers,
Rex

I'm Glad something was warm on the weekend

On Sunday we managed to find the warmest thing in town, and a good thing too. It would've been a fairly miserable, cold day otherwise.

That's one very big heater. This is the NSWGR Beyer Garratt 6029 which was running tours out of Bathurst over the weekend. We decided to drop by and have a look. I also managed to grab some video of it starting and also of it climbing the hill at Tumulla.

This is a piece of burned coal that managed to get caught in my hair when we actually rode the train. It was fair getting going so there was a good bit of draft. With a stronger draft the fire is made hotter but it also causes stuff like this to get pulled out of the chimney.

This is a video I took of it starting from the platform at Bathurst:

And here it is going up the hill at Tumulla. I didn't have a tripod for my phone and my hands are far too shaky to hold a camera for this sort of video so I sat the phone on top of a star picket as a kind of monopod. While not being perfect I think it dis help greatly.



That's all for now. I'm off to find another heater though.

Cheers,
Rex

Another project on the go

So after watching this Youtube video. My brother and I have decided to build him a computer based on the same principals as in the linked video. That is using slightly outdated top end or server hardware to build a computer on the cheap.

In this case the goal is to be able to run N3V Games' Trainz: A New Era with reasonable performance. The parts we have selected will allow us to meet the recommended specs for what could be the first time of any of this franchise.

We have only just begun procuring parts for this. But I am very excited about it and I am looking forward to assembling a computer that is more than just the best of the parts I have lying around the place. To find a list of the parts we're using follow this link to see the e-bay collection for the parts we have selected.

We have to wait for the parts to arrive however and there are still some descisions that can't be made until the parts arrive like PSU, case. But stay tuned because this build will enjoy exciting performance for an equally exciting price.

If you have any suggestions or questions please comment below with them so we can all benifit from the discussion.

Cheers,
Rex

Apparently I can weld

Not my first weld of the day.

I spent some time down at the local Miniature Train club doing some maintenance on the weekend. This time we were building a frame to hold some spare steel that we are keeping in stock for repairing the track as it ages. Seeing as we were making a steel frame I figured that I would take along my 220BZ Rossi Welder I bought from ebay a while ago. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to buy gas or MIG wire so I had to borrow some rods to use. This did have the advantage of letting me compare this welder to the tiny bit of welding I have done before which has been predominantly stick welding on older transformer based machines.

Pros:

• This thing strikes an arc much easier than the old school transformer based welders I have used.
• I was using a lower current than the other machine that day (a 20? year old CIG)
• It was light and easy to move around.
• It was easy to remove the spend rod and put in a new one.
• The air coming out the fan at the back of the case never got hot despite being in the sun.

Cons:

• I seemed to get the rod stuck to the workpiece more than I remember doing so in the past.
• The earth cable was so short that it barly reached straight up to the bench I was working on. I don't really like the idea of my welder being too close to my workpiece lest any spatter or slag get into it an short or something.
• Similarly the stinger was a little shorted than I would have liked. However if the earth lead was about the same length it wouldn't be as much of an issue.
• When breaking the arc off it lasts for a long time and often leaves a sooty residue before it quenches. A bit of a nit pick really because it comes of easily enough.
• The earth clamp feels a bit wussy and seemed to have twisted at some point through the day.

Interesting points:

• When the rod sticks to the job there is no buzzing like a the transformer units do.
• Everyone commented on how quiet it was. The only noise that you could hear was the noise of the arc itself. This was in a reasonably quiet outdoors area.

All in all there was nothing that should be a dealbreaker I don't think and hopefully I will be able to find somewhere to get a longer earth lead. If you want to have a look at some of my welds, stick around after the break.

Oil Burner Atomiser

Due to some offcuts of 12mm square bar from the frames of our Heisler loco becoming avaliable I'm going to make some small test runs of making some atomizers for it.

I can't find any open source CAM software for outputting to a lathe so I'm going to be writing the G-Code by hand in gedit. I'm getting the design from here which I've found to be a very good resource for info in the shay and heisler locomotives. I am making some changes to simplify construction with the avaliable tools (rounding to the nearest metric drill size).

I can post up some CAD files of the proposed design and the G-Code if anyone is interested.

Cheers,
Rex