Justice City Dioramish

[deemery]

I'm looking forward to what you do with this.  One of the talks today at the NMRA meet I attended was on building and kitbashing HO vehicles.  Some of those were as simple as replacing toy tires with scale tires.  One took a specific model of tractor and bashed into a road grader made by the same company.  All that was too modern for my era, but still inspiring to see what a bit of inspiration could produce.

dave

[Zephyrus52246]

Looks like a Dune Buggy.  Be great for a junkyard, it's already weathered.  

Jeff

[GPdemayo]

Just caught up with your progress Marty. Great looking scene at the riverfront & neat chimney, well done.....

[ACL1504]

Marty,

Looks like you have been very busy. Nice find on the car. Looking forward to you continued progress. I love the dock scene.

Tom 

[MartyO]

Here is a quick update to something that makes my life easier.

To turn on the power for the diorama I have to stick my hand under the baseboard and fumble for the on/off switch on the power bar to get the diorama powered up.

Well, I had a Eve Smart Plug lying around and decided to connect it to the power plug of the diorama power bar. After a bit of setup in Apple HomeKit, all I have to do is say "Hey SIRI turn on the diorama". A couple seconds later I am ready to play.

No more fumbling and breaking my back.

Another neat trick is I can setup an "automation" in HomeKit that can detect motion with my Ecobee sensor when I enter the room and then turn on the diorama without me having to talk at all. The greatest power feeling I get being the king of the diorama. (Karen, stop laughing at me!)

On to more serious things...

[ReadingBob]

Geez... I feel so old reading this.

[ACL1504]

Geez... I feel so old reading this.

My too, I was lost when you said Apple. 

Tom

[MartyO]

Geez... I feel so old reading this.

You are just a youngster, I am 6 years older. 

[MartyO]

Opps, I forgot to add a couple photos from the smokestack build.

Boy am I an idiot or what?  I had connected the smokestack to my lighting bus and turned on the power. Then there was a loud "pop" as the smokestack red warning light lite up and then ceased to work. Dang!

I had forgot to connect it to a NCE Light-it controller board. What a pain!

I had to cut off the old LED and pull the infinitely thin wires up and re-connect a new Mini Red LED. In the process of doing this I accidentally pulled the red wire down from the top of the steel tube. An hour later, after multiple tries to push that wire back up, I soldered the LED in place. And would you know it the red and green wires were reversed so the "+" was green wire instead of the green wire.

After monkeying around I did manage to get a Light-it connected and it working with a random on/off flash.

So it is now "completed" and the that adventure is complete, until I need to change it again.

OK, back to the Run About hacking.

[MartyO]

OK, back to our original broadcast...

When looking carefully at the car I kept on finding "issues" that needed attention and or exposing more. True to my dumb beliefs I though I could get it back into a reasonable state. So this is a the story of the trials of a despair man.

There were areas of the hood that were corroded that could be easily patched up. So I dug into my dark past cupboard and found some body filler paste. It was dry and crumbly, but it seemed to be an option. So the hood was given a coating and I tried to put some on the roof of the buggy. Lets say it did not go so well.

Ok then tried to fix the hole in the engine compartment with it and it was a disappointment.

Read the next post to see how crazy I was.

[MartyO]

Back to the hole in the engine...

Steel wool, crazy glue and stuff into the hole, wait for it to dry, sand down. Yea sure! That will work?  NO! Well maybe.

Let's just ignore I said all that and move onto something more interesting.

[MartyO]

Maybe this is more interesting?

There was a corner missing from the roof of the Run About. I tried to bond it and carve it to the roof line, but it did not work after a few tries.

I then resorted to maybe melting solder on it would rebuild the structure. NOPE!

So I took a viewers suggestion and cut off the roof and turned it into a "Dune Buggy".

Sloppy me, I cut off one of the front window posts, so it is now a windowless dune buggy. Wow! A free spirt care, Yippy!!!

[MartyO]

Since I was doing such a hack job on this priceless toy, I decided to go all the way and cut off the wheel Axel supports and replace them with scratch built. This work still in progress as the metal of the toy is very hard and has pot marks all over it. I will be using some Testers glazing to fill the holes.

This is going to have to wait until I get over my sadness of having to destroy the toy; now to rebuild it to some sort of glory.

[deemery]

When I was working on my ball signal/crossing controller, I was careful to use different size wire for the 12v and 5v circuits.  (12v fed several 12v->5v converters).  And sure enough, I hooked up the one relay board to the 12v, and let out all its magic smoke. 

Good luck with the dune buggy....

dave

[MartyO]

It seems that I am jumping around in this build. It is because I want to finish a scene to the point that I can reasonably called 90% done. The final details will be done when most of the diorama is 90% done, sometime in the future.

So today I got the dock scene to a point where the docks and waterfront is looking more like I want it to look like. There are details I sure add at this point, but I fear they will break off when I work on the waterfront street.

One of items I needed to get done, was attaching rubber tires to the piers to prevent boats from crashing into them, or at least not ruining them. I took kitchen cotton string and unravelled from 6 threads down to one thread. It is a close approximation to a 1" rope in HO.

This applying a light layer of white glue on the pier, I tied the tire to the string and wrapped the string around the pier. A dab of CA behind the tire kept it in the right place.

In stock, I had a number of painted dock tie downs that were CA'd to the dock deck. The remaining were in raw metal. I sprayed them with flat black paint and dusted them with a random mix of brownish chalks. Then these were add to the larger slips.

The dock looked very boring and not at all realistic. So I took that challenge on. In the next post.