Good stuff! Giving me ideas for something to do with the spare tank car ends & domes....

Finally caught up for now!

This is a mock-up I took last night with the wood frame on the concrete base with the old platform and tanks on that.

I will be carefully removing the tanks from the old platform. It came to me looking at this .. this morning .. that I need to cut the stringers for the tank supports to length and install the tanks to them as a sub-assembly before attaching to the bents. The tanks have little wire (pin) feet that fit into holes in the stringers. I can remember doing the original model and how frustrating it was to try and align up pre-drilled holes in the stripwood with little wiggly pins .. with one eye closed and using foul language.

This concrete base is re-purposed from some older structure .. I need to add old brackets and pipes and such to show that. The top of the stairs need to turn left. I have an idea how that might have been done .. pre OSHA you understand. The left over bit of space will contain something like a pump, filter, combo, shack, bin ...

Here I rotated the jig around so the bent sill stops can be seen. Like I said I only did this one side .. both sides would be better.

Yeah. Need to go back and touch up raw wood and places the stain did not take the first go around.

I want to state categorically .. I hate putting the NBW on. Some peel and stick NBW would be great!

So. Next was assembling the bents. In the past I have just run with it using a metal ruler and a lot of cursing to do this but since this was so small decided I could do better .. possibly.

I created a jig to hold the bents in place while I glued on the diagonals. This is where I think an additional jig just for locating the diagonals on the bents would have been helpful. There is absolutely no room for error as the ends of the diagonals on the bents and the diagonals that tie them together tend to intertwine. I almost made it without having to use a razor blade to remove a diagonal so I could adjust the position to another.

I also forgot to fix a stop for the ends of the sills. I added one afterwards to one side .. in retrospect were I to do this again would do that on both sides of the base to lock the bent sills in place.

Final look at Ver 3 of the jig with a bent in place. Honestly I was happy with how well it worked. I did learn that another jig for adding the diagonals would be useful .. but more on that later.

Here's a look at the jigs and bents from an angle. I forgot to mention that the guides are only half the height of the timbers.

The evolution of my bent jig ...

(1) This was the original .. ok .. original-ish version. There is always some shrinkage when 3D printing so my very first version had all the guides spaced exactly .125"/3.175 mm apart. This didn't work but making the spacing 3.275 mm did (Ver A of the bent). That is ~ .004". I also at this time realized that I could improve the jig ..

(i) Add some holes over the glue points. If the wasn't any jig plastic where the stripwood glues together then there would be much less chance of gluing the bent to the jig (honestly .. the only way would be to use so much glue that it squeezed out like from a toothpaste tube).

(ii) I also needed holes to push out the finished model from the jig. Prying from the side just seems so .. unsophisticated.

(iii) Excess plastic ..

(2) Version 2. I did everything I mentioned above and was happy with the result. The bent I had produced in Ver 1 fit nicely into Ver 2 and .. yes .. the glue points were clear and I could extract the bent from the jig easily by poking a toothpick into the holes. Success!!

Well. Mostly. I realized that I hadn't thought about how people were supposed to service tha tanks via a platform of some kind It seemed to me that by extending the cap of the bent out on either side would provide the support for that platform. Call that Ver 2.5 ... which looked like Bent B but with a long cap on either side. I slept on it and it bothered me that I had the cap (platform support) extending past the trackside side of the concrete base .. which was as close as I dared to the track. Sure .. it was about 16 ft above the track but .. yeah .. decided to stop that support beam even with the edge of the concrete. This meant I would have an asymmetrical bent. So?

(3) This resulted in the final form of Jig Ver 3.

The upper horizontal .. the cap is to size as it the bottom sill as they simply need to be sanded to fit between the end guides. With them basically locked in place on three sides I could then fit the supports between them. Once I had all my stripwood cut, sanded and in place I glued everything up which gave me bent B.

Earlier I posted a photo of a jig I 3D printed for gluing up the bents that will sit on top of the concrete base. Like others I have in the past used drawings of a bent which I used to cut and fit the various parts of the bent on top of and then used pieces of stripwood glued to constrain these pieces so I could duplicate the bent.

This works we all know but if you are not careful you can glue to bent to the paper etc. etc.

My thought was that 3D printing the jig would mean you could be very precise .. very exact and possibly catch errors before you found them while gluing up (that worked mostly ...)

Ed great job you did on the wall.

The tutorial I used ... https://youtu.be/CZRgQi2qupY

I agree with the others, amazing looking concrete.

Bob

Excellent work!

The paint and weathering of the concrete is amazing!

I'm with the others, nice looking concrete.

George

I agree, the concrete looks very realistic.