Wichendon Machine Shop (restart)

[deemery]

A quick update today between Dr/Dentist appointments.  I've ordered a couple sets of belt hangers as part of their belt drive kits from Crow River, some different belt pulleys from BEST Trains, and another copy of Gustafson's Sierra RR Machine Shop book. (I can't find my copy, I'm sure it'll show up after the replacement arrives.)

I also sent a message to the Henry Ford Museum asking 2 questions about their machine shop:  (1)  How do you start up the system?  Is the drive shaft disconnected from the motor?  If so, how do you do that?  (2) does each machine have a belt shifter or other mechanism to disconnect it from the drive shaft?  

In the meantime, I'm pondering how to do belt shifters, how to cut down cone pulleys (about half the machine tools need cone pulleys on the drive shaft to match the cone pulleys on the machine tool, and how to actually assemble the shafts.  And I need to decide if I position the machine tools (and operators) first, or do the drive shafts first.  I think it's the latter.  

So once I'm home from the dentist this afternoon, I think I'll start work on the interior walls, adding the studs.  That's something I can do independent of the work on the ground floor's contents.  

dave

[deemery]

A question for Swisstrain:  How hard would it be to build this so the roof is removable?  I -think- after going over the instructions, that should be doable.  It would be a somewhat tight fit with the eave returns on the gable ends, but I don't think there's any overhang.  My thought is to make the roof removable so that one side could also be removed.

dave

[jbvb]

Home Shop Machinist had some articles on belt driven machine tools. I think the most common method of starting a main shaft is to let the motor come up to speed with the shaft's drive belt slack, then apply a tension roller to accelerate the shaft.  May have seen that in an article on someone's large home shop. I expect it would be visible in a video tour of the Lowell weaving room.

Seems to me you should be able to approximate a cone pulley with slices of telescoping brass tubing.

[Dave Buchholz]

That makes sense to build up the momentum of the driveshafts and the flywheels before a load is applied to them via the machine clutches and belts.

[deemery]

I have some cone pulleys in the Crow River set.  I was thinking "most of the tools have a 3-layer pulley, the pulleys on the shaft should match."  But (a) that's a nit, (b) I could argue that the largest layer is just there as a flywheel   

One interesting thing about the LM3 kit is that most of the wall stud pieces are -pre-cut-.  Plan is to check the windows, assembling the double-windows (trimming and gluing 2 Tichy castings together), and then use those to double-check the stud locations that are laser-engraved on the wall panels.  The laser cutting on this kit was done from the back, and there's very little laser scorching on the window openings, etc.  

dave

[swisstrain]

In terms of removable, the issue that I faced was that even if I made the roof removable, that didn't really get me too much, since now I would have been just looking at the attic.  I don't think just making the roof removable would be too much of a challenge, so that is definitely doable.

I think you are on the right track thinking about making one of the (long) sides removable. The challenge is to have the wall studs perfectly line up (or at least not interfering) with the framing that is carrying the first and the second floor (a bit of cursing will be in order when you try to line up the walls on each side).

The other issue is likely some warping, since those sidewalls are rather large, and the provided wall studs are not providing any bracing. I corrected the warping by adding some bracing (not foreseen in the instructions) that fit around the framing for the floors.  If you want the wall to be removable, you would absolutely have to do that, I believe, to have a good fit for the wall to the building.  Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures of my installed braces.

Urs

[deemery]

Urs, thanks!  I find the instructions to be lacking in some significant details.  A good kit, but definitely not a kit for beginners.

While digging through my boxes of parts, I found 3 bags of Rio Grande Models belt drive parts.  VERY Nice stuff!  I'll see if I can use these with some of the other parts I have on order. 

For this kit, I need to glue together 2 Tichy window castings to fill the large double windows.  I did a jig to hold the windows, and i'll glue a piece of Evergreen strip between them to hold them together.  I need 17 pair of those. 

dave

[swisstrain]

Yes, I agree, not for the beginner, and while generally, the fit of the parts is rather good, there is some interpretation needed when following the instructions.  Also, I found that some of the framing breaks rather easily, same with the roof trusses.

But I think you are off to a great start, and once you have resolved how you want to layout the shop, you will make progress quickly.

[deemery]

The instructions call for trimming the sills and gluing the 2 window castings together.  But I think it's stronger if you do a styrene center post.  I constructed a set of windows with the .060 x .040 styrene strip center post, and did a test fit.  (bottom)  That fit fine, just a little sanding was needed to get a nice tight fit.  

Since I needed to do 17 pair of glued-together windows, I built a little jig (top)

I trimmed the sill off one side of a window casting, scraped off the paint and lightly filed down to remove any crud, and did the same to the other side of the casting.  I then put the two castings into the jig (face down), cut a piece of 0.60 x .040 styrene, and glued into place with MEK.  I pushed the castings towards the bottom of the jig and together, the jig makes this process quick.  What I SHOULD have done was constructed these windows BEFORE painting, and it would have gone a lot quicker...

I cut out the window and door openings.  In a couple of cases, the window openings were too tall, so I glued some wood spacers at the bottom.  I'll sand those down if needed to get a tight fit for the windows.  

On the gable ends, there's a very thin, and very fragile, piece of clapboard between the two narrow window castings at the attic.  I broke those off, and I'll do a similar deal gluing the window castings and a piece of probably .060 x .060 styrene as the center post.   I also glued the truss to the two gable ends, and that's currently drying under weights.  

Finally, since all the studs are pre-cut, I opened each bag and put the contents into its own container.  That's about 20 different containers of itty-bitty pieces of wood.  

Tomorrow I'll start the interior framing.  

dave

[Jerry]

Nice job Dave.  And a nice little jig.

Jerry

[PRR Modeler]

You're starting to make good progress Dave.

[deemery]

You're starting to make good progress Dave.

As Swisstrain pointed out, once you get into the actual kit assembly, things should go quickly.  I don't know how LM3 cut all those tiny pieces of wood so cleanly.  Each size was separately bagged up with an identity tag, I emptied each bag into a container for when I start assembly.


dave

[Philip]

Nice work Dave!

[deemery]

Here's how I did the double windows at the top of the gable.  I positioned the two window castings in the opening and measured the distance.  I then went to my stash of Evergreen strips, and pulled out .040 x .125 (.125 is the gap.)  I glued two window castings with the .125 wide piece between them.  Then I flipped the assembly over, measured and filled the distance between the two window -frames-, which was .060.  I did have to cut off the bottom sills to get that .060 square to fit.    

Then I framed around the openings, using the window casting to make sure the framing pieces were correct.

Finally, I glued two pieces of wood 2x6 to the .125 strip center piece, to complete the window framing.  For that, I used a bit of Testors Tube Glue, which works well for wood-to-styrene bonds.   Here's the result, front and back.


To assemble the interior framing, I lined up a thick straightedge, taping that to the workbench.  I taped the material to the workbench, to keep it from moving.  I glued the studs so they align to the straightedge, and used that small square to keep things vertical.  (I got that from Lee Valley, its normal use is setting up saw cuts at 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 heights.  But it works great as a small square.)


Then I started on the sides.  At first, I thought "huh, I'm short studs."  But then I realized that the studs on a single floor (ground floor or 2nd floor) are NOT ALWAYS the same length.  Some are shorter, to clear the framing.  What's annoying is that better labeling on the diagram would have made that clear.  I may have to go back and cut some studs on the 2nd floor on the wall I assembled, where I cut more pieces of what I thought was the correct length and glued them into place.  I caught this in time to not do that mistake on the ground floor, but that's where I said, "done for the day."  

This is a complex kit, and it would have benefited greatly by having a modeler take the draft instructions, build the kit, and tell the maker where to add instructions.  

dave

[GeorgeD]

I'm late checking in, Dave.  It looks like you have a tiger by the tail, but I'm sure you'll have the beast tamed before long.  Remember that you're seeing the interior details through windows.

George