Friday, September 3, 2010
Paint for everyone!
The pierina was paintend successfully last wednesday. Sorry no photos for the moment! The next big step is decoloring and painting the metal skeleton of the loco. This is quite a challenge, because I was unable to disassemble the rotor of the motor which remains attached… The (brutal) solution is to put everything in the brake fluid to decolor… After a night in the liquid and a good wash the result is as follows:
Also, to prevent the metal oxidizing, I carefully dried it with a hair drier set to the minimum warmth (quasi cool).
The motor seems intact and the winding intact. The only problem is that when trying to unmount it I damaged all the soldering, so I will need some patience and a good repair session to make it work again.
I then proceded to cover all the “sensitive” parts so I could spray the primer on it:
Recto
Verso
And finally I can spray the paint:
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The 897 Pierina saga continues…
In the last two weeks we saw:
PAINTING
Here we apply the scotch tape to protect the windows from the paint:
and the the primer is applied:
A detail:
Next step is applying the black paint, which for the moment is a big failure…
TOTAL DISASSEMBLY
Of the chassis mounting al the rods and motor. It is necessary so I can remove the paint and repaint it with the italian “rosso vagone”.
This is a quite unpleasant experience, since everything is fragile and delicate. I started disconnecting the rods, pressure mounted (I’m not sure I will ever be able to remount this…)
Next step is unmounting the wheels, still pressure mounted. Two of them mounted the gears which transfer the motion inside the metal body, quite difficult to undo.
And finally nothing remains mounted, except some gears and the motor, as I was unable to disassemble it.
And these are all the pieces:
And the final step is melting all the paint with dot-3 brake liquid (everything except the metal body for the moment)
Friday, August 13, 2010
More Pierina - 2010 Edition
The saga of the GR987 “Pierina” continues!
After a year of halt, I started over with the project. I just had to add some little nasty details before I could paint the loco.
Making all the little pipes is no fun at all!
The worst part was making the horizontal pipes on both sides. You can see how it is mounted here:
And a wiew of the other (finished) side:
And the unfinished side before installing the pipe:
You can see the almost corrected chimney here:
This is the pipe while installing: it will be cut to length afterwards being glued.
The stairs on both sides of the cabin broke time ago, so I glued them back with some reinforcement.
This is a general view:
And this is the original BR97:
(pierina in focus)
Monday, March 15, 2010
MIDI Pedalboard!
Many months of silence. Too many exams! This new project comes from a real need of studying organ. Since I always dreamed of having a “real” organ all for me, and since Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ has made a “free” limited demo version of their program, time has come to build my own organ console.
The initial project was to build all, manuals, pedals, electronics and software.
The second revision consisted of just a pedalboard, electronics and software, and use a midi keyboard.
Since time is scarce, I managed to obtain a prebuilt pedalboard.
Since time is really scarce, I decided not to build myself all the electronics, but to use the excellent MIDIbox and make the pcbs myself.
Since… well you know, time is scarce I ordered (excellent) prebuild pcbs and components from http://www.mikes-elektronikseite.de.
Now I just had to build the electronics and modify the pedalboard to install switches for the pedals (todo…)
The first step is building the electronics, which I will document today. After all these months I did not even remembered how to turn on my soldering iron!
These are the PCBs, home made but very nice (almost as nice as the ones I make :-P )
First I start with the DIN (digital input) module:
Hey! get off of my box you cat!!
And then is the CORE module:
Half Built!
And finished:
Next time… first power on and debugging session! then software, then tests… eek!
My many thanks go to Andrea Macinanti and Brondino Vegezzi-Bossi Organ builders for helping me obtain the pedalbard!