A WILD RIDE THAT I'M BARELY OVER

Those of you following this blog are aware of my wife's health challenges and how it has affected my drawing projects. Sadly, she passed away this year on June 24th, two days after our 42nd anniversary.

Handling all the myriad details after a death in the family is mind-boggling, particularly when you have always assumed  you would be the first to go and not have to worry about all those details. Fortunately for me, my son and his wife have been life-savers for me through all this.

Things are pretty much settled down now, and my son has been quite active in seeing what is needed to get these books and drawings published.  Hopefully, all the hurdles will be overcome soon.

Keep your fingers crossed.

In memory of better days and better times.

CREATING A VIRTUAL REALITY (VR) LOCOMOTIVE... 3D PITFALLS

Creating complex objects in 3-D is challenging enough,  but since everything has to live in its own 3-D space, rotating your view early and often can prevent my little mess-up shown below.

It can still be aggravating, since moving the latest pipe can often mean re-creating the entire thing. Particularly since the top and bottom of the pipe are on completely different 3-D planes with separate origins.

pipes look fine in this view

Rotate things and oops.....

Just moving it back a tad makes it run into another pipe and both the top and bottom no longer mates up with its fittings.

Ignore it and hope nobody notices? Nope, that compromises the whole drawing, Can't do that.

A BIT OF WORK GETTING DONE

I've got things under control enough now to do a bit of work on the K-36 3-D drawings. Below is a bit of the plumbing on the backhead.

Some details of the K-36 backhead

Included here is the water column and it's three drains, the brake valve, the firedoor, and the two glass indicators. Much is left out for clarity, but most of it is on other drawings layers turned off at the time.

This plumbing is just plain a mess to replicate on paper, particularly in 3-D, but one  pipe at a time and sooner or later, it gets finished.


Working from photos like the below doesn't make the job any easier.

Not as complicated as it first looks

As I've said before, none of these locomotives are plumbed the same way, having been repaired willy-nilly over time at different shops and highly dependent on the financial health of the railroad at the time, so what I am ending up with is drawings that shows plumbing routes that can be quite different from anything you may see on a particular locomotive, but it will exist on another.