Phone Booths

Added a quick coat of paint over the black primer to Robert's SLA phone booths:

Look forward to installing these line side next Friday.

More Car Float

Got a chance to add a few more layers of weathering, touched up some of the metallic details, and took a couple of shots before packing it in for the night.

I'm really happy with the way this is looking— next step will be detailing and adding the pilot house.

Car Float Progress

Had some time this weekend to do some painting!  I started by base coating the model with Citadel "Chaos Black":

I followed up with an uneven overspray of Tamiya Dull Red, and a few washes of Citadel colors to vary the tone:

Phone Booths

My buddy Robert gave me a few of his home-SLA printed HO Scale Southern Pacific Telephone booths.  They will find a home at Silicon Valley Lines.

Paper Layout

With some professional deadlines met, I had some time recently to get back to the China Basin project.  My challenge was to create a plan which would fit into my rather compact car.  This meant breaking up the design into sections no wider than 36", and 2'x3' would be best:

As soon as I had a design that I liked, it was time to print out a full-scale version to check things out:

One of the best things that doing a full size printout gets you is that you can "play test" using equipment and check to see if the track work will actually fit.  Part of the learning process was understanding how the CAD package representation of a switch played out with the actual FastTracks turnout templates I was planning on using— the photo below shows pretty clearly that I'm best sticking with very tightly trimmed #6 switches (I had hoped to "goose" #7 turnouts instead):

Another discovery of this experiment was that the fouling point of each yard track needed to be about 1" in from where the track became parallel.

The finalization realization was the need to construct 40+ #6 turnouts.  I'm telling myself I GET to build them.

TurNouts

Thanks to the start of College Football, I finally got into "assembly line" mode building with FastTracks assembly jigs. These turnouts will be part of the Christopher and Luchessa blocks on my friend's layout.  I still have one more #12 to build, but it is getting too late.

#10s and #12 N-Scale Turnouts