We are and will be thinking of you Dave, just as we always do. All our hopes for a speedy recovery.
Brent
"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."
Layout progress is on hold for a while. My red blood cell count is really low and it is falling rapidly. I am feeling very weak. Apparently there is internal bleeding. I will likely end up back in the hospital.
Ho hum,
Cheers!!
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Great to hear of the progress! Also nice to know you are feeling somewhat better. Good news!
York1 John
Our nephew Joe is coming back next weekend to help me better organize all of my rolling stock that is in boxes. He has already helped me get the huge stack of boxes off of my workbench, but we didn't sort them properly. Right now I have similar cars in both the garage cabinet and in a cupboard in the basement. The goal will be to gather all of the similar cars into one location either in the garage or in the basement. We also have to move the locomotives into a different cabinet with metal shelves because the combined weight of having them all on one particle board shelf is causing the shelf to sag.
We also have some more work to do in the garage. There is an area of pegboard that will be replaced with slat wall. I will have the contractor install the slat wall but I want to have Joe remove the pegboard. We are also going to do more drywall repairs, both of which hopefully will reduce the contractor's price. There is also a heavy cable that feeds the hot tub that the electrician who installed it decided it would be perfectly fine to run right down the middle of a wall. Hopefully we can make that look less obvious.
A little about Joe - he has been accepted into the Canadian Navy as a communications officer. His basic training starts Sept. 2nd. He has a university degree in communications and he speaks French so the navy was pretty happy to get him.
Good for you, Dave!
I'll be watching for those pictures.
I don't post often, but I do visit every week or so to follow a few threads, like this one.
Mark P.
Website: http://www.thecbandqinwyoming.comVideos: https://www.youtube.com/user/mabrunton
We have made lots of progress in the garage over the last couple of days. All the new cabinets and shelf units as well as my new tool chest/workbench are in place. I got all of the model boxes off of my workbench in the basement and moved them into a 36" x 18" x 72" cabinet in the garage. The cabinet is nearly full!
We still have a bunch of boxes and totes on the garage floor which have to be sorted through and the stuff moved into cabinets or onto the shelves.
One thing that surprised me is that there is a lot more space around the train table than I thought there would be. I'll have to go back and measure the garage again.
I'll post some photos once we get the boxes sorted out.
One thing that has made me happy is that the air conditioning in the garage works great!
I decided to buy two power supplies for the tortoises, one 15v and one 18v. The reason for the two different voltages is that some of the tortoise circuits have more LEDs in series than the others. I'm hoping that the different voltages will compensate for the different numbers of LEDs which should make the tortoises themselves operate at about the same speed. At least, that's the theory!
I just bought 10 - 100' spools of 20 ga. solid wire in various colours from Digi-Key. Good thing the shipping was free!!!
While I'm waiting for the contractor's quote I'm going to do an inventory of the supplies I already have on hand for the layout. I have a couple dozen spools of wire, some of which may be useful, some not. I have a ton of wall warts but I suspect that half of them are not the right voltage. I'm not even sure if I want to use wall warts at all. They seem like a messy solution. I have a large 12v power supply which is capable of 20 amps but it is actually 10 - 2 amp fused supplies in one unit. That, along with suitable step down circuits, would make for a very clean installation and I can get whatever voltages I need from it.
One thing I need to determine is how many volts I am going to run the tortoises on. I have a lot of LEDs in series with the motors and only 12 volts may make the tortoises run pretty slow. I may invest in a small 16 or 18v power supply.
Your opinions on my power supply plans would be greatly appreciated.
Hi rrebell,
Thanks for asking. I am feeling much better than I was when I left the hospital. I felt well enough today to drive to our grandson's 1st birthday party in Barrie. I only stayed for an hour or so. By the time I got home I was exhausted. I'm going to have to do some strengthening exercises for legs. Right now they are pretty weak.
Next step with the layout is to have the drywall/lighting contractor in to do a final quote. I haven't a clue how much that will be. I have set a pretty high budget so I don't think I'm going to suffer from sticker shock.
So how you been feeling?
Not as bad as I thought.
The reset removed some software like 3rd PlanIt. I managed to reinstall 3rd PlanIt and voila!, the missing file contents were right there where the should have been! One problem solved.
The reset removed a bunch of other programs as well so I will have to find them on the internet and download them again.
Whew!!!
Hi gang,
Most of you know that I am prone to suffering disasters. Well, I may have done myself one better!!
I was having some trouble with my computer so I decided to reset it. I chose the option that would save all my files but guess what - it didn't! It saved all the files but the vast majority are now empty. That includes 90% of my model railroad files.
I will take the hard drive to a computer shop to see if they can undo my stupidity.
The good part is that I have spent so much time refining the plans that I know most of them by heart.
Dianne is back on Wednesday so at least I have that to look forward to.
Dave. Our Thoughts & Prayers for a speedy recovery.
David & Dawn
To the world you are someone. To someone you are the world
I cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought
Well the good news is the liver can regenerate, as long as you get rid of what damaged it. There were medicines to help it along at one time but don't know if they are still used. Hope you feel better, these things keep cropping up as we age, don't I know that.
Continued thoughts and prayers.
I'm back in the hospital. Last Thursday night I started to feel lousy again. Extreme weakness, loss of balance, foggy brain.....I called an ambulance early on Friday morning.
I thought it was low sodium again but that wasn't the case. The doctors believe that the symptoms were indicative of toxins built up in my body and brain thanks to my liver not working properly.
It is now Sunday afternoon and I am feeling better but not quite 100%. Hopefully I will be out tomorrow.
You just save the file somewhere on your drive, and use "file explorer" to copy the file on a USB stick. The complicated part is getting the PDF file.
Simon
He has figured out how to "print" a PDF file. What he needs to figure it out is how to move the PDF file to a memory stick.
Rich
Alton Junction
Hi Dave. Are you using Windows? If yes, you should be able to "print" a PDF file. Go in your track design software, click on the print function, but before clicking on PRINT, you need to change your printer (your default printer should appear somewhere on the print window). Change your printer to "Microsoft print to PDF". Select that, and when you click PRINT, it should ask you where to save the PDF file.
Anyway, that's how it works on my computer.
What I did to make sure the plan worked in 1-1 is I got old cheap brass secional track and laid out the curves on the layout and just set my turnouts where needed and used straight peices too to start the long runs like in sidings etc. This worked out great and didn't take to many peices as i did one section at a time, of course it was not 100% on but got me very close and I could verify clearances for sidings to make sure the could hold what was needed. I used a sharpy to mark the centerline of the track for laying of the cork. This method kept me in the ball park of what was needed and helped me modify what needed to be. Used this on the trestle also but there I got a large peice of paper and just spray painted the track and used it as a template for the curve.
Thanks Rich. I'm such a dinosaur that the thought never occurred to me!
hon30critter richhotrain Dave, click on the link below which will take you to a groups.io thread. One poster refers to an earlier link that he had posted. Further down in the thread, that link is included in a subsequent post. No guarantee that it will provide your answer, but give it a try. Hi Rich, I was able to figure out how to get the layout plan printed as a pdf., but what I haven't figured out is how to get that information onto a memory stick so I can take it to the printer. I'll keep trying. Cheers!! Dave
richhotrain Dave, click on the link below which will take you to a groups.io thread. One poster refers to an earlier link that he had posted. Further down in the thread, that link is included in a subsequent post. No guarantee that it will provide your answer, but give it a try.
Hi Rich,
I was able to figure out how to get the layout plan printed as a pdf., but what I haven't figured out is how to get that information onto a memory stick so I can take it to the printer. I'll keep trying.
richhotrainDave, click on the link below which will take you to a groups.io thread. One poster refers to an earlier link that he had posted. Further down in the thread, that link is included in a subsequent post. No guarantee that it will provide your answer, but give it a try.
I was able to figure out how to get the layout plan printed as a pdf., but what I haven't figured out is how to get that information onto a memory stick so I can take it to the printer. I'll keep trying. If I can do that I'll get the track plan printed simply because it will be a whole lot easier to transfer the plan to the layout. I'll use wallpaper paste to glue it down.
Hi guys,
Thanks for all the suggestions!
A few points:
I printed my first track 1:1 plan for this layout on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper and taped them all together. As has been said, things did not line up perfectly but they were close enough that the track plan wasn't badly affected. They were accurate enough that the track could be laid following the printouts.
When I was working on my old club's layout I plotted the three points of each turnout and the track positions on a smaller grid and it was fairly easy to transfer those positions to the actual layout using x-y coordinates. 3rd Planit made it easy to plot the positions for each piece of track.
My reason for using the large printouts is that I am trying to follow Peter Lloyd-Lee's method for laying track on large layouts. He uses 3' wide printouts x however long is needed and it seems to work well for him.
I'll let you know which way I decide to go. Right now, plotting the points seems to be the most economical but it is time consuming.
BATMAN richhotrain rrebell I have always found in our hobby that 1-1 layout templates except in small doses (once had a curved trestle that it helped with) did no good, to many varibles and being ever so slightly off on one area can affect the other end of the layout. Also sometimes things need to be adjusted for varius reasons. Agreed, and I have always found the easiest method to be a pad of quadrille paper and a pencil to rough out the layout plan. Rich Not to hijack Daves's thread but I also agree. Having helped put track down from a computer-generated plan, it needed just as much fine-tuning as a pencil and paper plan would have. I have done both, I enjoy messing around with the computer-generated layout plans, however, give me a pencil, graph paper and kitchen table any day over the computer in the office. I bought this giant pad of graph paper for $7.00 at Staples. Each square is 1" and represents 1' of the room. My thinking is that if my plan was on the computer I would reference that as I laid down the track just as I would with the graph paper. I am however one of those people who can easily do things in their head from building plans to math equations so that may make a difference.
richhotrain rrebell I have always found in our hobby that 1-1 layout templates except in small doses (once had a curved trestle that it helped with) did no good, to many varibles and being ever so slightly off on one area can affect the other end of the layout. Also sometimes things need to be adjusted for varius reasons. Agreed, and I have always found the easiest method to be a pad of quadrille paper and a pencil to rough out the layout plan. Rich
rrebell I have always found in our hobby that 1-1 layout templates except in small doses (once had a curved trestle that it helped with) did no good, to many varibles and being ever so slightly off on one area can affect the other end of the layout. Also sometimes things need to be adjusted for varius reasons.
I have always found in our hobby that 1-1 layout templates except in small doses (once had a curved trestle that it helped with) did no good, to many varibles and being ever so slightly off on one area can affect the other end of the layout. Also sometimes things need to be adjusted for varius reasons.
Agreed, and I have always found the easiest method to be a pad of quadrille paper and a pencil to rough out the layout plan.
Not to hijack Daves's thread but I also agree. Having helped put track down from a computer-generated plan, it needed just as much fine-tuning as a pencil and paper plan would have. I have done both, I enjoy messing around with the computer-generated layout plans, however, give me a pencil, graph paper and kitchen table any day over the computer in the office.
I bought this giant pad of graph paper for $7.00 at Staples. Each square is 1" and represents 1' of the room.
My thinking is that if my plan was on the computer I would reference that as I laid down the track just as I would with the graph paper. I am however one of those people who can easily do things in their head from building plans to math equations so that may make a difference.
I'm in agreement as well. Computer generated or laid out manually, you either like what you see from the starting point, or ya don't. With anything, some changes and tweaks always come later.
TF
hon30critter The layout and garage improvements are in a bit of a holding pattern right now. I'm waiting to get a quote for all the drywall and electrical work, and I'm waiting to make sure that our nephew is free of covid before I bring him back to help out. In the mean time, I have found a local printer who can print the track plan 1:1 on 3' wide paper. They are surprisingly inexpensive. The only thing I have to do regarding that is to figure out how to convert the 3rd PlanIt drawings to a pdf. I have asked Eldorado Software (3rd PlanIt) for hints on how to do that, but if anyone here has the answer I would greatly appreciate your help. Cheers!! Dave
The layout and garage improvements are in a bit of a holding pattern right now. I'm waiting to get a quote for all the drywall and electrical work, and I'm waiting to make sure that our nephew is free of covid before I bring him back to help out.
In the mean time, I have found a local printer who can print the track plan 1:1 on 3' wide paper. They are surprisingly inexpensive. The only thing I have to do regarding that is to figure out how to convert the 3rd PlanIt drawings to a pdf. I have asked Eldorado Software (3rd PlanIt) for hints on how to do that, but if anyone here has the answer I would greatly appreciate your help.
https://groups.io/g/3rdplanit/topic/printing_to_pdf/31823586