Well, I’ll never be able to do this again. I decided to put platform sections on eBay because there are loads of bits someone with better eyes could scavenge from them and I couldn’t just throw them away. Separating them into sections that could be posted seemed sensible. Here’s one of them:
Hard to get it all in focus. Here’s what it looks like with the room lights off:
And at the other end of that section is the goods shed -
Which also lights up.
For those who have no idea what ‘N gauge’ means, the people are about 1 cm tall. What you see on screen is quite possibly actual size, or bigger.
That’s why I feel the need to move up a scale. I can’t work with these tiny things any more! Still, one last brag before I sell it all off…
LOL! Pretty amazing. I am embarrassed to say that about the only thing I ever did with a train set was having fun trying to run over poor little defenseless spiders. I think I salved my conscience by telling myself that I was saving poor little defenseless ants.
- MJM
I’m not kidding either! One of my first forays into political activism at the tender age of 7 or so was to organize an “Ant Protection Club” where we’d block off sections of sidewalk where there were lots of ants and antholes that people might step on. At first the adults thought it was kind of cute. By the time we’d blocked off half the sidewalks on our block and verbally castigated any murderers who stepped over our boundaries and stepped on the little fellas the “cuteness” kind of wore off for most of the adults.
You’d have tried to kill me as a child. I used burning plastic as napalm to deal with ants.
If you had N gauge, a spider could derail it. We used to run over bluebottles with OO gauge.
Yeah. The only good thing about a train set was a good crash. In my opinion, anyway. But hen, that’s how vandals like me think, I guess.
In OO gauge, crashes are fun. In N gauge, putting the little sods back on the tiny tracks soon wears away at the novelty.
Forgot – there had to be crashes. That’s why we had those rail cranes.
then
My brother had an OO gauge train set. Nice steam locomotives. He used to set it up all real nice, and then I’d come along and cause major train wrecks.
My own fun was with my plastic soldier collection. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and I had lots of them. I used to build wood brick fortresses for them, and then spend all afternoon blowing the fortresses to bits using a piece of spring-loaded artillery that fired lumps of Meccano axle.
Those that were still standing after about 500 bits of Meccano axle had hit them were called “heroes”. And the most regular hero of all as the machine-gunner, sat in front of his machine gun.
Dunno why he regularly survived.
He didn’t survive the coal fire
Ah, I recall those days of destruction fondly. I made more models than I had room for so I cut the heads off many boxes of matches (we were allowed to buy all sorts of things as kids), filled the models with them and fired an airgun at them. Somewhere there are photos of some of the explosions. it did reach the point of fitting the explosives into the models as they were being built. it wasn’t always match heads either.
Kids aren’t allowed to have proper fun these days.
fired an airgun at them
Hmmm…, that was another thing.
We used to build plastic planes – Spitfires, Hurricanes, Me 109s, FW 190s, etc – and then blow them to bits with air guns.
Heck, I even used to shoot down daffodils (hit them in the base) until some frigging adult complained that I was decimating the daffodil population.
Nothing more satisfying than about 5 daffodil flowers toppling as the bullet goes through the base.
Yes, when I was a kid I had a set of O gauge. Thinking back, it was rather splendid, apart from there being a third rail in the centre of the track, which I didn’t think was very authentic. However, like frank, I was more intent on engineering devastating crashes than anything else. Needless to say, the set ended up as a useless pile of tangled metal eventually.
And you’re right LI, kids aren’t allowed to have proper fun anymore. I remember the excited anticipation leading up to November 5th, not because of the firework displays on Guy Fawkes night, but because in the few weeks lead-up to it, we could buy penny (or for real firepower, threepenny) bangers, which we would use for some serious demolition jobs, or for dynamiting fish in the Thames (although the canal was better, as it didn’t flow so fast, and the result was much more satisfying). I don’t think they sell bangers anymore, and most certainly not to 11 year-olds. Shame. Kids today have no understanding of risk and the excitement it engenders.
Has anyone here read Saki’s short story ‘The Toys of Peace’ ? I’d recommend it if you haven’t, it should be compulsory reading for all adults trying to sanitise childhood.
Great models, I particularly like the goods shed.
This was one of my favourites
Britains Floral Garden
http://www.tortoys.co.uk/acatalog/Britains_Floral_Garden.html
You could arrange all the flowers in the plastic beds by using the fake spade, my pride and joy was the weeping willow.
Other than that I spent a great deal of my time trying to build working machines out of Lego, when I wasn’t halfway up the poplar tree pretending it was a pirate ship.
I particularly enjoyed climbing it in strong winds and standing high in the crows nest, so the base of the branches had big splits in the bark from bearing my weight as well as their own.
I built a stone hearth underneath it and yes, using matches all by myself, used to cook what I imagined was breakfast in a metal toy saucepan from the kitchen set I was given. It’s a great wonder I didn’t get poisoned.
Britain’s miniature garden was brilliant. I still have a good amount of it, added expensively to in my old age. Some of it is still in its little carboard boxes.
Mine is still up at Mum’s house, my children loved to play with it and hopefully in a year or so my granddaughter will be delight with it too, she’s bit too small at the moment and would probably eat the roses.
Yep the roses are bloody small, aren’t they. So are the rhododendron flowers…I always thought their trees were brilliant. Even got away with them on oO scale railways, where they looked rather large but still convincing.
Leggy,
On an entirely different topic, I have been pestering Junican periodically with my new method of curing, but as it’s working rather efficiently , I thought I would come and annoy you with the results.
This year with the weather being what it is and the temperatures being so low, there is no chance of curing the tobacco on the stalk as I had intended.
Nor will wrapping the leaves in towelling and leaving it on a sunny windowsill.
I’m currently using my heated propagator in conjunction with the towelling method.
“Another way to speed up the drying and colour change process of your tobacco leaves is to stack them and cover them with a blanket or a rug to keep the heat in. The tobacco leaves will then sweat like compost, which speeds up the colour change. The pile needs turning daily, with the inner leaves moved to the outside. Damp leaves will need to be allowed to dry off before being put back into the pile. After about 5 days, the tobacco leaves can be hung out to dry as normal”
To use a surrogate indirect flue curing system, the crucial temperature is a maximum of 41°C
http://www.caes.uga.edu/commodities/fieldcrops/tobacco/barn/heatexch/CuringTobacco.html
However, my adaptation is to harvest the leaves, maximum of 2 per week so as not to weaken the plant.Rinse them if necessary and peg them out to wilt on the washing line.
After a few hours wilting the leaves are stacked, towelled and put in the propagator.
I turn it on for about half an hour then turn the stack so both sides have been warmed, then turn the propagator off so that I don’t exceed 41 degrees.Turning it on again at around lunch time and in the evening.
On the rare sunny day the towelled roll of leaves does go on the windowsill and I don’t need the propagator.
I don’t think any of us will have enough leaves all at once to get a proper fermentation going, so this is the best solution I can think of.
In a day or two some of the leaves have turned entirely yellow, so using button thread I sew them loosely together in pairs and hang them over a dowel rod in the window.
The surprising advantage of this near permanent overcast is that I can leave these leaves to hang all day without worrying about the sun drying them too quickly.
Every evening they go back in the stack to be warmed and after a further day or two they are completely brown except for the veins and midrib, so I sandwich them between sheets of kitchen roll for 24 hrs under a heavy book then they can be hung up and left for the midrib to dry out entirely.
The pressing means that I can slide them together on the pole so that they don’t take up much space.
This has now turned into a continuous process, as leaves are being hung, I am picking and wilting new ones, so the stack never really alters in weight and is constantly moist.
And so far, it’s working very well.
My propagator has internal dimensions of 22″ by 15″ and has no thermostat, but I notice new ones do.
There are a lot of new growers this year and the weather has been against us all,I would hate anyone to be put off.
Could you possibly read through all this and if it sounds reasonable, turn into something coherent?
Incidentally,
Tobacco: Colonial Cultivation Methods
“In the first few years of tobacco cultivation, the plants were simply covered with hay and left in the field to cure or “sweat.”
http: //www.nps.gov/jame/historyculture/tobacco-colonial-cultivation-methods.htm
Look at how many times they sweat the leaves during the process!
Now I have an overwhelming urge to spin the cured leaves into rope in the traditional manner.
Apparently the smugglers used to plait it into the rigging of their ships,so it was hidden in plain sight.
I wonder when the GranscoFabiaNazis will begin to deny us electric power, since they will be suspecting that we are using it to “cure tobacco leaves” or perhaps…”distil alcohol”….Oh, er wait….
Once they have their smart meters in, we’ll have a monthly quota. Exceed that and the lights go out.
It already looks coherent to me. Curing them in rotation sounds ideal, there’d always be a fresh supply ready to go.
For the price of a large propagator, about £30, it does seem to me to be the cure for the British weather, rather than watching your hanging leaves slowly develop tiny spots of mold.
It’s happened to me before.
I have now stripped and processed all the plants leaving only the last four large leaves at the top and stopped pinching out the suckers, so the plants will hopefully get by on those until I have lots of new leaves and flowers on the suckers and the remaining big leaves can be safely removed.
It may be my tobacco patch but they are growing in my flower garden and I do so hate to see bare earth before Winter.
Mind you, there’s always the possibility of a second crop if the weather holds, those sucker leaves can get quite big.
Weather report claims there is some warm weather still to come. Which usually means it’ll snow tomorrow.
I have incubators but they don;t have windows or lights. Pity. They’re great for brewing though.
I was thinking about your incubators, wrapped in a towel, the leaves should sweat nicely at a steady temperature.
Night seems the crucial time for mold spores, when the moist hanging leaves get cold. That’s why I put them back in the towel roll overnight, when they are brown after pressing in kitchen roll they can dry out in a day hanging in the window. The midrib doesn’t seem to be as affected by mold as the leaf tissue, perhaps it’s still full of natural fungicides.
This is all part of my long term masterplan to render tobacco worthless, if anyone can do it with ease, there are no more huge profits to be made.
Cold and damp is indeed a good time for moulds. If I want to grow them in the lab I incubate at 20C. They don’t like it hot unless they are pathogenic (like ringworm) but those won’t grow on plants.
Moulds need air, and will not grow without it (there are a very few exceptions but again, they won’t appear on your leaves). I should maybe write one of those lectures on silage here.