Mini-projects Small steps that give big results/Bob Walker H
ow does one go about eating an elephant? My suggestion is that you take your time and do
it one bite at a time. Along those same lines, the house I live in was built by one man, admittedly over an extended period of time. I do have to confess that he had professional help where more than two hands were required, but it was basically a one-man show. He was building it for himself, and it showed. Every phase of construction was done with care and pride by a man with great house building skills, so you know it was not yours truly. My mea- ger talents run to much smaller build- ings, although I have had a hand in a few garages, a lean-to shed, and one small industrial building my business partner Dennis Storzek called “the lit- tle house on the prairie.” Most huge, intimidating projects can be broken down into “bite-size” mini- projects with the addition of a little planning. That eight-year saga of building a 1″ scale 4-6-0 that I de- scribed a few years ago was basically a vast, extended series of small compo- nent projects. For example, there was a valve located on the fireman’s side of the tender that was modeled in less than an hour using an HO truck tire casting and some styrene tubing. Many of the small components that made up that moose of a model were done in much the same way.
The tender steps were simple strips of styrene with appropriate bolt heads, attached to the tender’s frame. The twist in the vertical step bracket was imparted by heating a strip of appro- priately-sized styrene with the flame of a butane lighter, then rapidly twisting the part while it was soft.
My family usually retired at 10:00
p.m. on week nights, while I hit the hay around 11:00 p.m. or so (the “or so” be- ing when I got tired of what I was do- ing, or just tired, in other words some- times around midnight). In that golden hour or two I usually got something worthwhile done on some major proj- ect. A lot of my “biggies” were accom- plished over an extended period of short evenings (midnights?). Some- times I feel like Woody Woodpecker, just pecking away at some huge oak tree of a project. In my nearsighted- ness, I rarely realize how much is being accomplished until the doggone thing is almost done. Then it’s the “wow, I’m
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Scratchbuilder’s Corner
almost done” light bulb turning on. The Rio Grande Southern had a monster 485-foot trestle at the ap- proach to the famous town of Ophir. I say town in a loose sense because in the era I model, Ophir had a popula- tion of 17. I had built a trestle selec- tively compressed to 240 feet, which was still sizeable for a model railroad
at 60 inches. Yes it was a big model, but it did not give the area the appearance I was aiming for. It was way too small and looked like a cartoon of Ophir, not my intent at all. What I needed there was a foot-for-foot replica of that mon- ster bridge. Part of the charm of the RGS was the rugged terrain that had to be conquered before it could be oper- ated. You got it, folks: I had to con- struct an On3 model just slightly over ten feet long. Talk about dining on a pachyderm! Well, to shorten this saga, the use of fixtures was employed to a great ex- tent, along with other mass production
Patience is a virtue and a necessity when working on a large project (top) such as a tres- tle. Large projects require the modeler to segment work and do it bit by bit. One thing that helps is to build jigs (above) to construct repeated assemblies such as roof rafters.
JUNE 2013
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