Hooroo '09

Well we had a wet second half to Christmas day and a totally wet Boxing day (but I did get a chance to get to the bench!) and my alarm is set for 0400 for a return to work tomorrow which will take me through to NYE, ho hum and poor me and all that other stuff!

So I'm pretty sure this will be my last post for '09. I hope that everyone had a good Christmas and that you will all have a hoot of a NYE celebration, or a quiet one, whatever your preference may be. Mine will be spent on the harbour bridge, yes the one in Sydney, making sure it doesn't burst into flames during and after the fire works. Believe it or not there is a lot of timber in the old girl. They don't even stop the trains anymore !

Sound exciting? I can assure you that the 'side on' view from the south pylon is not all that wonderful, but the explosions set off from the tops of surrounding buildings near the Quay aren't too bad!

Not that much activity on the bench of late, I think I slipped into bit of a rut on the motivation road. 3265 was finally programmed and tested on Werris Ck last Fri and my first foray into DCC sound decoder installation was a success in as far as it made all the right noises, moved forwards and backwards and emitted no green smoke, always a plus. It did show me that there is a lot more work to do before delivery. Extra pick ups will have to be fabricated and fitted to the tender (which I have done, pics to follow) and the loco as well. 'Through the body' connection cannot be relied on to get the signals from the track to the decoder. Stay tuned. The decoder and speaker has been removed from the tender and it will be off to the paint shop next year.

The LED headlight install, from a previous post, failed as I could not get the 3mm led to fit in the headlight housing. Will be switching to a 1mm flat LED as described in Ray's AMRM article.

The cave is dead in the water at the moment, till early Jan, when the local concrete plant fires up again, aiming for a slab pour in early Jan if I can coerce the council to do a pre pour inspection during January.

Well thats about it. Looking forward to catching up and reading up during '10. Cheers.

Cave update

Couple of progress pics from the cave project.

After knocking over the formwork in a day, the back filling started. The slope of the block was greater than I had guess-t-mated so this entailed extra form work and steel as well as a healthy amount of back fill material so as not to take out a second mortgage for concrete.

Cost to date:
Shed (walls, roof, ent door, guttering etc, gyprock batons and roof insulation - $5400
Timber for formwork and other hardware - $650
Roll of plastic - $75
Steel reo and other bits - $595
Fill material (approx 8 ton) - 1 carton of Carlton Cold + delivery $75 ??

According to an online concrete calculator Im up for about 8 cubic meters of concrete.

You can tell by the length of the shadows in the last pic this was a loooooong day. I'm going inside for a shower and something cold !!!