I wish, when I’d been working on the Pola railway station and the Forces of Valor farm cottage, that I’d used epoxy instead of Plumber’s Goop. If I had, I could have yelled “epoxy on BOTH your houses!” Alas, my wife would have said it’s an old joke and my seven year old wouldn’t have gotten it and my 18 year old daughter would have rolled her eyes but told her friends. Alas.
I’ve been thinking a lot about electricity…you could say my thoughts were fairly buzzing! Getting it from Paris to Peking will be quite a challenge, but I think I’ve come up with the Power Pole Design that will serve:
I bought a bunch of 1/4″ dowels for something…I think it was actually for building these power poles. It’s funny…I’ve been using them for so many things I rather forgot that I bought them for this project! Anyway, they’re three feet long, so I can get two power poles from one dowel. I reckon I’ll Rust-Oleum ‘em to keep them from warping. If they’re 18 scale feet high, that’s twelve real inches. With six inches stuck into the ground, that’s a half of a dowel right there. I figure Zorro the Wonder Dog can’t knock ‘em over if they’re six inches into the ground!
I actually built one of these things, sort of.
Now, back when I was thinking all excitedly about the locomotive conversion I’d gotten myself all worked up over 1/4″x1/4″ strip wood…sticks? I actually started on a combine in 1/18th scale, using the strip wood for the cross bracing on a plywood chassis. Yes, it looked cool, but now I know a chassis built to the monstrous dimensions I cooked up will never fit on the railway.
There’s an adage about looking before one leaps: forget that one. Just jump right in there with both feet and let the chips fall where they may, that’s my motto! Scale shmale! Clearance shmearance! It’ll all work out in the end.
Anyway, now I have a nice supply of 1/4″x1/4″ sticks. Ahem.
I routed out a nice little curvy schwoop in the back of a 3 inch piece of stick and epoxied that to the pole. I thought it would be more scale like to drive a nail through the crossarm and into the pole. CRAACK. On my second attempt, I drilled a hole into which to drive the nail. But my nail is smaller in diameter than my drill bit…I know, it sounds like a personal problem…and my nail fell out. Lord, why does this have to be so hard?
The real problem comes in getting the bead insulators to stick to the crossarm. I figured to drill a hole in the crossarm and thread a tiny wire loop around the insulator. The insulator is epoxied to the underside of the arm for strength while the wire pokes through for show and stability.
Look at this little gem of a plan here:
I thought and thought about how to get electricity into the China Section using these power poles, and that, my friend, is my plan. Pretty cool, huh?
The next challenge: figuring out how many of these darned things to make.
Epoxy on both your houses. That’s pretty good…
