IIRC someone offers a photoetch fan blade assembly but my CRS isn’t allowing me to access that memory file right now. Anyone else? Does that sound familiar?
Saw that Scoop has a new compilation available of video of his old HOn3 layout and several of his animations in HO and O scale from a few years back.
The technical twist to much of this animation is his hacking of various F keys in DCC so that they control motors instead of the lights they typically are applied to.
20 years ago, the last time I had an actual layout up and running, I kept thinking… at the Texas station, a phone boot, a string from it to a damsel tied to the tracks, with Snidely Whiplash by her, and the train coming would release a weight on the other end of the string… and you know who would come flying out of the phone booth and grab her off the tracks before the train got there.
My dream has always been an animated harbor scene at Port Orford. As night lightens into fog (from theater fog machines and controlled lighting), the harbor comes to life. A train arrives with loaded lumber and log cars from the mill and log loaders. Lumber and logs are loaded from the car into the hold of a dog hole schooner. Sailors chanting as they turn the manual winches and capstans to do the loading with the schooner’s booms as their cranes. Over at the saloon, workers are replacing the glass windows broken in last night’s fights.
The sun burns away the fog as we get well into the morning. The empty lumber and log cars depart. Another train arrives and the cycle repeats.
In the evening, the fog starts to roll again. A “passenger” train arrives with the workers from the woods. Sailors and loggers gather in the saloon, singing and drinking together. We cut away before the fights start.
On Sunday mornings, the woods and harbor and saloon are quiet. A train with the only real passenger cars the Port Orford & Elk River owns hauls the townspeople, sailors, and loggers in their Sunday best up the hill to the church. Church bells are ringing, followed by the singing of hymns. Sunday afternoon, the Sunday special heads into a clearing in the woods for the Sunday picnic for all the families.
just a dream to somehow animate some of this…
Fred W
…modeling foggy coastal Oregon in HO and HOn3 where it’s always 1900…
Had to jump in on this thread and put in a plug for my 1st train mentor. Bill Day is a nationally-known for this field. He has done so much animation that puts Disney to shame! He helped me work on a coal tipple that actually worked. Before we could finish we had to get many small parts and balance multiple schedules.
Pls send me a private message should you want to talk to him.
Well I received the Woodland Scenics Aermotor Windmill kit, that will be my last kit from WS. More work repairing bent parts than starting from scratch. It will take a lot of work to just make it usable. The only piece in the kit that doesn’t have major bends is the fan. The top mount is so badly bent it might not make it.
I’m not a quitter so maybe a week or two before it will be ready for Mel animation can be added to it. I think it’s doable.
This model appears to be a wind powered pump, all the Aermotor windmills I saw in the mountains were 12 volt generators, thus the motor in the name. Farm lighting was 12 volts where I came from if they didn’t have commercial power. I was planning on having to hide the fan drive shaft but this kit came with a .025” (2-3/16” to scale) piece of wire for a pump shaft. I’m planning to use 1mm shaft (3-7/16” to scale) with a 2mm to 1mm sleeve in the worm drive to the fan.
As an HO modeler, I thought the windmill and an accompanying farm in N- scale would be a great forced perspective item in a distant corner. The operating windmill would draw in the viewer’s eye and make a better model.
I was planning on two windmills (before I received the WS kit), both were going to be about a foot and a half from the edge of my layout so N scale won’t work for me.
If this one turns out good enough it will be next to this house.
If I can find another windmill it will go next to these houses.
