I got a little frivolous with my table saw while cutting some triangular pieces of mdf for leg braces and had my first real kickback. Fortunately I am a geezer with a geezer's gut to absorb the brunt of the blow, but the suddenness, the force, and the mid-level pain have me behaving much more cautiously around that saw.
Pete
"You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light." - Edward Abbey -
How about using a nail gun [brilliant!] to put some basswood uprights together, and only realizing too late that a] Use a vise! or b] Use the right length nail in the gun! My finger healed quickly...
mersenne6 Years ago Model Railroader published an artice about layout construction with a focus on removing those bothersome house support beam so that you could put that yard and those curves exactly where you wanted them. After considerable effort I managed to modify the house to permit the removal of the supports and I started working on the layout. One evening about a year into the layout construction the power went out, the motor to the air compressor died, and the house, which had been floating on a cushion of compressed air collapsed into the basement. We salvaged what we could from the wreck and after moving into a new house I went back to look at the Model Railroader article to see what I had done wrong. It was only then that I realized the article had appeared in the April issue for that year.
Years ago Model Railroader published an artice about layout construction with a focus on removing those bothersome house support beam so that you could put that yard and those curves exactly where you wanted them. After considerable effort I managed to modify the house to permit the removal of the supports and I started working on the layout. One evening about a year into the layout construction the power went out, the motor to the air compressor died, and the house, which had been floating on a cushion of compressed air collapsed into the basement.
We salvaged what we could from the wreck and after moving into a new house I went back to look at the Model Railroader article to see what I had done wrong. It was only then that I realized the article had appeared in the April issue for that year.
WINNAH AND LIFETIME CHAMPPEN!!!
My paltry accident pales by comparison! I didn't get as tight a seal as I thought I did before I poured the fast drying polyeurethane to make my ocean. The linoleum is permanently discolored.
Becky
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
While building the latest layout I have had a couple...1. I had a full train on the transition track from level 1 to level 2. I need to work on a section of the layout that required me to be standing near the transition track... well I stood up and my later large postior knocked the brand new Lionel Legacy NG GP9 off the track, cracked the shell and broke the gangplank off the rear.2. I have had to build, tear down, rebuild one side of the layout 3 times due to poor planning
Does a hurricane count? As I had a layout that kept getting wet because of broken windows upstairs in the four story condo I lived in at the time. Fortunately the insurance company paid me to take down my layout to keep from getting more wet. This was August of 1992, right after hurricane Andrew.
My next worst catastrophy was a cat knocking stuff over on my layout, so I had to build a doorway to keep him out, one damaged caboose and three slightly damaged hopper cars. Found the cat sleeping in the corner of the layout, moved the stuff so he could sleep.
Lee F.
I can identify with your situation. My wife agreed to allow me to take half the garage to build a G scale layout in if she could still get her car in also. We got the benchwork set up but not completely screwed together and them I decided to pull the car in. Thankfully it fit. Not really an oops but could have been one.
This goes back many years, but definetly falls into this category.
I had just gotton out of the service and had gone back to school. After almost a year, I decided to move out of the apartment, and get a house. Found a small house, only 600 sq ft., it was built in the early 20's and I got if for $17k. Now that was a deal. It had a 1 car garage, and I had a friend or had a friend that hat a S gauge layout they were going to trash. So I took it. It was 10x8. So I decided I would suspend it in the garage on a pully system. Needless to say I should have spent more time in physics, before I started it.
I hung some pulleys, and tied some knots, and thought I would have it made. That thing was sooo heavy it was almost impossible to lift it up by myself. I could but it sure squelched the desire to use it much. Then when I did have it down, guess what....... It was "floating" all over the place. The trains would run and sway back and forth. It was a challenge to see how long I could run them before they would derail from the lateral movement. If I wanted I could always have the layout rest on a series of saw horses, for stability, but who wanted that?
Those were fun times, the house had a Murphy Bed, Ice Box (that was loaded from the outside), foundation had settled and it was slopping toward the front. Ended up living in it for a year and half, and sold it for $35k. The train layout end up being cut up somewhere, still have some of the trains and accessory pieces.
Don
vsmith........simple fix. Convince the wife she deserves something HOT to drive that is a tad smaller/more nimble, faster, sportier, more expensive, and beautiful to better match her personality and stunningly good looks. It's a fix, albeit an expensive one.
Jack.
IF IT WON'T COME LOOSE BY TAPPING ON IT, DON'T TRY TO FORCE IT. USE A BIGGER HAMMER.
I built, tore down and rebuilt an indoor G layout 6 times in the last 10 years, the biggest D'oh catastrophe was early one when I built the layout with the promise that my wifes car would still fit inside with the layout, got the benchwork done and the track down when I realized that I was over a foot short in clearances for the car to still fit and that as it was the door wouldnt close with the car inside, requiring a complete rethink and rebuild of one side of the layout...Oops!
Have fun with your trains
I just added my own recent goof to another thread on spilling a bottle of matte medium on the spare bedroom carpet and It got me to thinking about all these wonderful photo essays where everything comes together like precision clockwork..well, either I am Mr Knucklehead, have poor decision making skills, born with fumble fingers, it seems the best laid plans on every layout I have done, have at least one glitch to them, perhaps others can share theirs..what was yours? Probably the dumbest thing I did was have this brainstorm of building a G gauge indoor layout in my basement, using a trough like framework and using only natural materials, rocks, gravel, dirt etc. Great, looks good. Sell the house?, it will never happen. Famous last words. Bucket after bucket laboriously went back up the stairs and by this time I was no longer a kid....huffing and puffing. All along thinking, why didn't I put this outside?
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
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