Oct 23, 2020
Oct 22, 2020
Same road #, but a radically different machine; this is Key System 578 at the Piedmont & 40th stop in Oakland, CA, on a SF-bound train in 1936.
—orc Thu Oct 22 11:33:56 2020
Oct 19, 2020
When your masking tape doesn’t want to stick to the previous coats of paint, it becomes a lot harder to properly do complicated mask work.
—orc Mon Oct 19 21:55:34 2020
Oct 18, 2020
On the (indirect) way back from Trader Joe’s
—orc Sun Oct 18 20:48:41 2020
Oct 16, 2020
Dust Mite found an old PC keyboard
—orc Fri Oct 16 21:44:29 2020
Oct 15, 2020
♪ ♪ I’m going to the courthouse and I’m going to be voting ♪♪ ♪
—orc Thu Oct 15 13:27:37 2020
Oct 14, 2020
I’m (fabricating parts for/building up for test riding) a handmade mini-longjohn (here I’m bringing it back home) and as part of the process I’m doing all the frame prep that the original framebuilder didn’t bother to do. One of the bits of prep the framebuilder didn’t do was to ream out the handlebar post (they’d put in vent holes that were about ¾" diameter, which isn’t quite big enough to fit a 1" steertube) so I had to dig out a hole saw and go to town.
I cleaned out the handlebar post, but alas, it did horrible horrible things to this Starrett hole saw. It started out as an 18 tooth saw, and it ended up as a 14 tooth saw. Sigh. It may still have enough teeth to properly notch tubes for the ST<->BB<->DT junction, but it most certainly doesn’t have enough teeth for anything more substantial.
If I win the lottery, I think that I’ll be getting some proper high-tooth-count cutters, but until then I’ll just keep using these disposable circular razors.
—orc Wed Oct 14 23:39:44 2020
Oct 12, 2020
Ozymandias & Thor on a lazy monday morning
—orc Mon Oct 12 20:42:15 2020
Oct 09, 2020
Checking the shopping list to make sure we got everything we needed.
—orc Fri Oct 9 23:53:22 2020
Oct 08, 2020
Sadly, there is no soup in my shopping bag.
—orc Thu Oct 8 18:18:55 2020
Oct 07, 2020
I believe this is a (re)builder’s photo of #578 at the Alco works in Schenectady. I don’t know for certain that it is, but if it was a picture taken by the Milwaukee Road it would have been taken at the Menomonee River shops, which don’t have that background no matter which way you look in the valley, the paint wouldn’t be quite so clean after being shipped across country to Milwaukee, and that strip of light-colored gravel in front of the track certainly looks like it was set down there to reflect a flash up into the undercarriage of any locomotive that was sitting there, and that wouldn’t happen unless you’ve got a lot of locomotives you want to photograph.
So my headcanon is that this is a builder photo, taken just after 578 was rebuilt into the platonic ideal of a diesel road switcher and before it was shipped back to the Midwest to make me into an Alco fanatic at an impressionable age.
—orc Wed Oct 7 13:38:37 2020
When I built up the disco travel bike I goofed and wrapped one side of the bartape backwards, and after a year of thinking I needed to fix it I finally went out and bought some new (and oh so sedate) tape and did the deed. Not fluorescent pink, but still a very shockingly vivid pink verging on magenta.
Not camp at all, really, it’s quite sedate. Trust me.
—orc Wed Oct 7 10:38:34 2020
Oct 02, 2020
A little midnight snack
—orc Fri Oct 2 08:18:20 2020
Oct 01, 2020
578 pulls a freight on the Stillwater (Stillwater<->Hastings) branch in August ‘69.
—orc Thu Oct 1 13:35:53 2020
Sep 27, 2020
Stopping at Water Tower Park (in Milwaukie) on the (indirect) way back from Trader Joe’s.
—orc Sun Sep 27 18:53:31 2020
Sep 26, 2020
I was coming back from QFC (via a short but scenic route) when this train of S70s passed me as I was coming up the ramp towards Fuller Road station.
—orc Sat Sep 26 21:39:08 2020
Sep 25, 2020
Dust Mite inspects a broken IndyFab Club Racer that I’m considering repairing and 650bifying.
—orc Fri Sep 25 20:10:05 2020
Sep 19, 2020
Harvesting about 10 pounds of figs from one of the giant street fig trees near our house. Street figs are not quite as good as farmed figs, but they (a) are figs and (b) $free, so we’ll just eat the super ripe ones and convert the rest of them into jam or quick bread ingredients.
—orc Sat Sep 19 15:36:46 2020
Sep 18, 2020
I spent 5 minutes taking a saw to the rs32 snoot that’s going on 578 so I could shorten it by the ~10" needed to reduce the deathtrappedness of the front walkways. The first step of many tiny steps I need to do to make this model a closer replica of the platonic ideal of a diesel road switcher.
—orc Fri Sep 18 23:46:45 2020
Dust Mite helps me clean the rust and remaining bits of flux off the traditional randonneuse’s frame & fork so I can primer it tomorrow. (I’m going to try for a split block paint job in pink & green, where the pink panels on one side have matching green panels on the other. fluorescent pink & green, of course, for that added touch of “OH MY GOD MY EYES ARE BURNING OUT” :-)
—orc Fri Sep 18 22:36:13 2020
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