What's New on the PRR Panhandle Division?

[G3750]

Updated 1/14/2014:

You'll probably find this amusing, but one of my offbeat sources for MRR scratchbuilding supplies is an R/C car and airplane shop called The Hidden Hangar. They used to be truly hidden (like in someone's garage on an obscure country road), but they are now on a main street in the suburbs east of Harrisburg. Anyway, I stopped and picked up some thinner (1/8" vs 3/32") copper tubing for use as the arms on the lighted telephone poles. When I got home, I tried fitting my twisted pair of wires (with the LED attached) through the hole. It fits! We are another small step along in the planned assembly of telephone poles.

I am trying to do any and all prep work for this assembly (making slots for wires - see post above, painting, cutting, gathering of required tools, jigs, photos). My plan is to set up an assembly line and make all quantities (27) and varieties (6) of poles for the City of Weirton module.

So Rufus - I saw in the one photo that you painted your Keil O-scale lamp shades black. Is that your recommendation for color? Any one else have a suggestion?

Thanks,

George

Food for thought/a few comments. Street light mast arms are usually 2" or so in diameter. As far as the color, I remember green (a nice forest green), silver or gray, and black. The topsides of radial-wave reflectors were usually green. The ex-Baltimore ball-globe fixture that I have is painted in the green mentioned above. Post a few pictures of the work in progress, please.

Dave, I don't have any photos yet. You'll probably see them around the middle of next week if I make sufficient progress. I wish I could manage 2" scale diameter tube (.003472", I think), but I don't think that's practical, at least not with a pair of wires in it.

George

[J. S. Bach]

Dave, I don't have any photos yet. You'll probably see them around the middle of next week if I make sufficient progress. I wish I could manage 2" scale diameter tube (.003472", I think), but I don't think that's practical, at least not with a pair of wires in it.

George

More thoughts; how about a single wire inside with the tube being the other conductor?

[G3750]

Dave, I don't have any photos yet. You'll probably see them around the middle of next week if I make sufficient progress. I wish I could manage 2" scale diameter tube (.003472", I think), but I don't think that's practical, at least not with a pair of wires in it.

George

More thoughts; how about a single wire inside with the tube being the other conductor?

Dave,

I did think of that. But I didn't want a complicated joint where the tube meets the telephone pole. Soldering is not my thing and this seems to solve the problem. Also, I seem to recall light pole arms being a bit bigger than 2" in diameter. I think this is one of those "good enough" situations.

George

[G3750]

Updated 1/16/2014:

A lot of progress, some of it directly related to modeling , happened yesterday:

• Double-checked and finalized the placement, type, and quantity of utility poles for the City of Weirton module. I looked at a number of prototype photographs and identified the specific poles and their components. The module will have 28 utility poles with 12 variations.
• I did some of the preliminary work for the 10 lighted telephone poles (2 variations). These were put in a carpenter's clamp and then a ~ 1/16" wide slot (about 5" or 20 scale feet long) was cut using a MicroLux table saw. These came out nicely.
• Supplies (paint, lampshades, LEDs w/ 14" leads, putty, etc.) were collected.

The plan is to do the rest of the assembly (cut / bend tubing for light arms, painting the light arm, LED and lampshade installation, running the wire in the slot, applying putty to fill the slot, smoothing the fill, attaching cross-arms to poles, and painting) for these 10 poles.

I'm hoping to have some photos of this if it goes well.

George

[rogruth]

George

More thoughts; how about a single wire inside with the tube being the other conductor?

Andre,who used to post here and did a lot of brass work did it like thaty and sold them for a while.
I had forgotten about his stuff.He did a lot, of interesting stuff.
He left here when Frank53 left.

[G3750]

Updated 1/20/2014:

I am in Erie, PA taking care of my parents over the long weekend. I finally got a chance to do some modeling work today and managed to get 8 telephone poles pretty close to completion (they still need some putty & touch up paint). I have 2 others in progress with some work to do on the transformers (the one's I cornered the market on, John ). Here are some photos.

Utility_001.JPG (78.83 KiB) Viewed 3026 times

Utility_002.JPG (74.98 KiB) Viewed 3027 times

Utility_003.JPG (72.48 KiB) Viewed 3026 times

George

[jlong]

The poles look good George. When do I get paid?

[rogruth]

I see why you had a problem finding them.
I don't think those short cross arm poles were very common.
Looking good.

[Berk765]

Those polls look great.

[G3750]

The poles look good George. When do I get paid?

Soon. Any day now...

[G3750]

I see why you had a problem finding them.
I don't think those short cross arm poles were very common.
Looking good.

Roger,

Thank you! These are the Weaver telephone (or line) pole kits originally designed by my friend Neal Schorr. The cross-arms have up to 10 insulators each and you can have 4 cross-arms. I just clipped the arms to make them shorter (4 insulators) like the prototype. I will fill in the remaining holes on the shaft of the pole and paint and Dullcote them.

George

[G3750]

Those polls look great.

Thank you, Berk! Building them from the kit is not too hard. Deciding what each should look like has taken the most time.

George

[rogruth]

I assume you looked at the ones from Weaver.
They looked nice but you would still need to cut the cross arms.

[G3750]

I assume you looked at the ones from Weaver.
They looked nice but you would still need to cut the cross arms.

Yeah, the ends were cut with a sprue cutter. It made a neat cut, which I dressed with a file and will touch up with a little paint.

George

[jlong]

I assume you looked at the ones from Weaver.
They looked nice but you would still need to cut the cross arms.

He said they are Weaver. Walthers is just a distributor.