Appalachian Southern

I apologize for not posting for so long.  I have been preoccupied without about 100 other things, but I am making an effort today to get back to work on the layout.  I just completed a formal transfer of this domain away from word-press to my self-hosted arrangement. If the site disappears temporarily, don’t worry, it will return after the transfer. Now, where is that DCC manual?  :)

I have been finishing up another project over the past couple of months. This project was started around Thanksgiving of 2006!  Anyway, this project was expensive so I had to spread it out over a period of years. It is not something you can do overnight anyway…

Here is what I started with, a 1985 Jeep CJ7.

1985 Jeep CJ7 in November of 2006

Bead Blasted and Painted Frame

A Cool View of the 383

Fitting the Body Prior to Paint

So, fast forward to August 2009. Here is what the jeep looks like after a total frame-off restoration and a bunch of goodies:

1985 CJ7 in August of 2009

I built the motor for the jeep which is a 383 small block chevy. There is a 4-1/2″ rubicon express suspension lift and a 1″ body lift. 35″ Super Swamper SSRs put the power to the pavement. The jeep is completely new. Nearly all new and upgraded parts. A few parts that can’t be replaced were reused, but only after repainting and some time to make them look like new.

Here is a photo of my masterpiece:

383 Small Block Chevy

If you would like to follow the entire build of this project, you can see it all here:

Hutch’s 1985 Jeep CJ7 Frame-Off Restoration

The motor will be cranked for the first time tomorrow, August 28th. It will be an exciting day for sure. Can’t wait!

08/29/3009

Just an update, the motor cranked and ran great. I was pretty excited ! Here is an image of the 383 just after it was started for the first time.

SBC 383 Stroker

I hope everyone likes the new colors of the website. I have been working to get that done over the past few days.

My goal for the summer is to read more books.  Here is what I am reading and have read so far this summer.

Today I spent several hours taking a physical inventory of all of the rolling stock I have for the Appalachian Southern. It was a long boring process to write it all down and then to key it all into a spreadsheet, but it was certainly worth the effort. It gets difficult at times to remember what I have purchased in the past, so the spreadsheet will be very handy when preparing a new order or searching EBay for missing road numbers. It is quite simple to add new purchases as they arrive.

After my data was safe and secure in a Google Docs spreadsheet, I imported the data and created a new page detailing the motive power and rolling stock. You can find the link at the top right of each page entitled ‘rolling stock‘. The neat thing about this page is that you can click on the headings to sort the listings. Pretty cool for a couple of hours work. Have a great Tuesday.

Being that is Friday, I thought I would start my own version of the weekend roll-by. Not that I have a whole lot rolling yet, but here goes. This will just give me an opportunity to play around and take some fun pictures.

Misc Photos

Misc Photos

It is a beautiful Saturday morning here. Feeling lazy actually. I know I have about 20 turnouts that need to be built. They aren’t going to get built with me just sitting here, that’s for sure.  Building turnouts isn’t a thrilling job as you don’t get any immediate feeling of accomplishment. Filing the frogs, stock rails, and closure rails are the parts I like the least.  If I could sit there and just solder all day I would be happy. Or if I could use the airbrush that would be cool, but a little premature.

I like to go to MB Klein and build a wish list of all the rollng stock that I want. I have had a ‘wish lish’ cart accumulating stuff for a few weeks now on their site. I might actually press the order button today. It is going to take a large amount of rolling stock to fill the staging areas on the layout.  Inter-modal and centerbeam equipment is what I am most interested in at the current time.

My goal today is to get at least five turnouts constructed. We will all see what happens I guess.

Tonight I moved appalachiansouthern.com to its own server away from wordpress.com. If you are having difficulties I guess the DNS hasn’t propogated. If you see this, I guess it is working. You should see a new design / layout for the site. Maybe you guys could give me some feedback if this is actually working or not. Thanks.

I have to admit I have lived in my cave for too long. Not long ago, I considered an online forum to be the only useful resource for N scale related projects and ideas.  Once Appalachian Southern came into existence a few months ago, I began to realize that there was a wealth of information available on the internet that I had simply overlooked.

One perfect example is N Scale Limited. With a beautiful website layout and quality content, be sure not to miss all the interesting material you can find there.  Chris Brimley, one of the founders, is a source of some great scratch building ideas.  One in particular caught my attention; entitled Scratch Building 101: Sinclair Station.   I am not exactly a scratch builder of anything except bench work Not only does Chris provided detailed step by step instructions, but he provides detailed research and history regarding the prototype. Very interesting indeed. Great work!

Hopefully this article will help me break into the art of  scratch building structures for my layout. It is likely that I will need a few hundred structures, and it seems most manufacturers aren’t concerned with modern era diesel layouts.

So, today I am going to order the parts and I will keep you updated on my progress. This looks to be a fun project.

The message boards are quiet; the blog comments are very hard to earn.  Yep, spring is here or either what I am doing here really sucks and no one wants to be the first to tell me.   You read all the rants of blog writers who wonder if anyone actually reads all the nonsense they write.  I guess I will have to join them today. I wonder sometimes why I go to the effort to share what I do here. For me it always comes back to getting comments from my peers. I wanted to say positive comments, but that wouldn’t be fair. Sometimes the comments are negative but end up producing the best changes.  I guess the proper term would be constructive criticism.  Constructive criticsim goes a long way to making you a better hobbiest.

Neala says that if I post some pictures of her, everyone will comment and that my stuff is just boring!

Neala (aka Tinkie)