New Posts Coming!

As I have been getting ready to posts some new projects we have been working on, it seems I left you hanging on the final Alberta job! So silly this guy!

So, let me wrap up the Stettler job tonight, for new stuff tomorrow!

I think the final result was great! Every building around the base of the heart is a building from the downtown core of the town, and we chose the giant heart, busting out of them, because the town slogan is "Stettler - The heart of Alberta" We chose the train at the top, as it's a seriously popular attraction for the town, globally!
Since finishing the job, I have heard from Dave, who was our contact in Alberta, and they had developed a pretty sweet scissor jack, that allows 1 person to raise and lower the train down into the heart. So now, this can travel with just one person, to all the major events in Alberta, promoting the sweet little town of Stettler!
A very memorable job, and even more memorable people!!

 We were even allowed to tour the #41 steam engine we cartoonified on the float! Woo Hoo!
The owners were gracious enough to allow us full access to the train, while they were getting it ready for the up-coming season!

 I have never seen the inside of a steam engine barrel.

And I certainly have never, ever, ever, been underneath a steam engine before.......or any train for that matter! Thankfully I was in a service pit, and not thrown from a train platform :)



But before we left, we were able to make it to Drumheller. ever since I was a kid, I wanted to see the Badlands in Alberta, so this was one sweet trip for us!!

Certainly a fantastic trip for Jody and I, one I won't soon forget!
I was secretly hoping to unearth a dinosaur skeleton there, but I had no luck. Probably because my car keys were the only excavation tools I had with me!
All in all, we are certainly thankful to Dave Mccourt from Woodcraft by Dave,
the Town of Stettler,
Aubrey Brown from the Stettler Board of Trade,
and Stan Eichhorn, from the
Stettler P&H Elevator Preservation Society! All amazing people, who were so great to work with!
You guys make what we do even better!
8)
JWO

Alberta!

With the final pieces of the Stettler job crated and shipped, we just basically had to wait for our partner in Stettler to let us know when they arrived. Dave McCourt, from Woodcraft by Dave, was the fellow that hired us to build this crazy job, and he would be our main contact once we arrived in Alberta.

It was a 4 hour flight to Edmonton, from Toronto. I hate flying! Not that I'm scared of crashing or anything. I just hate being sardined into anything. Plus I find the security lines a little ridiculous at the best of times. The seats all suck, my butt gets angry at the lack of comfort, and every-time I manage to drift off, my head falls down and wakes me up. Plus I really believe that everyone else can't respect my personal space! Granted, I'm sure I'm just as unaware of their personal space, but it's different cause it's me!

Once we arrived, we were picked up by Jody's Uncle Aubrey. He lives in Stettler, and became an amazing tour guide/ chauffeur!

Stettler is about a 2-ish hour drive from Edmonton, so there was a lot of traveling by the time we got to our float/ mobile sign. And boy oh boy, the prairies are fl-a-a-at!

 The Historic Parrish and Heimbecker Grain Elevator in Stettler was were we were finishing the build. It was the only place available with a loading door high enough for the finished project to roll outside! But the Town is building a storage building specifically for this piece, it's just not finished yet. They were waiting on the finished piece to get a final door height for it.

 With the help of some amazing new friends, Dave and I were able to wrangle the train up onto the bridge.

After the train was bolted to the bridge, we moved on to lag bolting the letter truss to heart, and Jody got the bulk of the tracks fastened around the edge.

The buildings were next. We fabricated custom steel L-brackets at the shop, from 1X3 welded steel tubing. These bolted to the trailer deck, holding the buildings sturdy. We installed hidden Tee nuts in the building facades, and used them to bolt the buildings to the brackets.

 Dave, Jody and I worked to get the letters bolted to the truss system before we left. We came up short on the bolt count, so we all decided to call it a day. It was a long day for Jody and I! We were up at 4am, our time, travelled, worked on the float until late, then headed to our hotel room. Which was pretty sweet, to say the least! It even had a corner fireplace! When we finally hit the bed, it was 11:30 Alberta time, which is 2:30am our time. Yeah, we were tired! No passionate romance in front of the corner fireplace for these guys!

............or was there?

JK, we were asleep in 5 minutes max!

8)
JWO

The Worst Blogger Award Goes to..................

I win, I win!

We have been working on a bunch of neat projects since I last posted, all of which I can't talk about :(
We also have been busy with some personal projects as well. Jody has been working really hard at her running, and qualified for the Boston Marathon, by running the Toronto Good Life Marathon!  I have also decided to create a short indy film. So I have been busy working on the props for that, as well as acquiring some gear for filming.

 I did fabricate a pretty slick camera jib. It telescopes from 3 feet out to 8 feet! And is pretty portable for quick shooting set-ups!
The story has been written, and the next steps are working on the story boards and shot lists, so we can be as organized as possible! I have a self imposed NDA on this, until shooting is wrapped at least.........But I'll share two images from the 3rd scene:

And yes, that is a rack of bones being shot!

 Here's through the camera with some basic color grading done.


 But now back to the final few posts on the train build:

 With all of the building components sprayed, it was time to assemble them!

 While I glued up my puzzle pieces into something that eventually made sense,

Jody worked on prepping the 3/4" plywood backers for our building facades.

 Being that all of our buildings are, at the max, 3 layers of 1/4" pvc, we certainly needed a more robust backer panel than the pvc alone. All the pieces received 3 coats of heavy duty contact cement.

Before you wonder about the building choices, we needed to include 2 key buildings from the town of Stettler. One was the new City Hall, and the other was the historic P&H Grain Elevator. The far right building we chose, as it has been a landmark at the corner of town for many, many years!

Back from Alberta!

A lot has happened since my last post! I held off posting the final bits of the train float/ display, as we wanted it to be a surprise for the people in Alberta. But we have returned from the install, and are now back at the various thing we started before we went away.
The first order of business is to remind you all about the May 15th deadline for the Vector Pattern contest that Tools Today has going on!

Remember, this is $500 bucks in tools from them, pretty sweet! So give it a try, and enter!


Back on the train side of things....................

Once the building facades came of the Techno, Jody set to work cleaning all the 1/16" grooves. Instead of doing a true, ship-lapped siding, I just had the cnc profile along the evenly spaced vector lines, giving the appearance of ship-lapped siding.

While she tackled that portion, I set to work gluing any details to the building I could. Some stuff would be left off, to make painting easier, but anything that could get glued, did get glued!

Then when we were ready, we double sided taped every piece of the buildings back together, in their final positions. The reason for this, was that when we used the texture spray, which works as an amazing PVC primer, only the final outside portions would get sprayed. This leaves a pvc to pvc gluing surface, even after paint. Plus it makes it easy to tell exactly where every piece locates, given that it's paint free where a piece would sit on another piece.

With everything primed, we moved onto the final painting. The base of the columns on the Town Hall, in real life, are a cultured stone. So Jody made up a few different stone stamps, for painting the stone. We purposely went for a graphic look to most of the building, using simple contrast to make everything stand out from a distance, as most people will only get to view this from a small distance away.

Due to the multi layers of the facades, we did have to mask, and re-mask a lot, but we tried to keep the steps simple, only doing it where we had to!
8)
JWO

Alphabet Soup!

The front of the heart gets the word "Stettler", Well actually, both sides get the name of the town on them. These letters will be 3/4" white pvc. This is so we don't have to paint them. The pvc is UV stable, and has the color running right through it. So small scratches or dings shouldn't be a problem for years to come.

Due to time issues, as well as current space issues, we had the truss welded up at Brewsters Welding a couple of doors down from us. He did a stellar job! Each frame actually splits in half, with guide pins, so each side can only get put together one way.

Jody got to work on painting it with a gloss red rust paint. I think her shirt was white when she started :) It's my hope that the red truss will blend very nicely into the red heart. As nice as the fabrication is, I don't want it to take centre stage!

While the paintwork was being done, our Techno cut out 2 sets of the  word "Stettler" I punched 2 holes through each letter, and countersunk a 5/16" Tee-nut. That should be plenty of power to hold these to the truss. I also milled a pocket on the back of each letter, slightly bigger than the bracket on the truss. This eliminates the text kerning, and height issues, that would arise from free-balling all the letters on the frame. They ended up locking the letters in place, easy peasy.

 Guess who is mysteriously missing from the above photo.........................?

That's how I roll!

Not a lot of structure is visible behind the letters, but what is visible looks pretty sweet, all shiny and new!

Once all the letters lined up to the holes in the truss, I cut a bunch of 1/8" thick disks, and glued them up as screw caps to cover my nuts.......................Oh no he di'int! (circle snap)

Once we were finished dealing with the giant letters, Jody moved on to painting the bridge.

She started with a red-oxide primer, as our bridge will be a steel bridge.

And then got a number of paint treatments, this being the first.
I find I'm walking a fine line for this. My artistic, movie prop side really wants to make the train, and the bridge VERY weathered and rusty, but I'm sure the Stettler board of trade would prefer to not show their town as a post apocalyptic, rusty nightmare! So clean looking is the order of the day, but I think the bridge is a very good meld of the 2!
8)
JWO

I think I can, I think I can...........finish this job this year!

The front of the train barrel finally got all the little detail pieces attached. Including the dimensional sign for the front. The real train has this as well, although the scale of ours is quite a bit larger, just to make it stand out a bit! Although, funny story, the first version of this sign, I misspelled the word
prairie, and no-one noticed for 5 days. In fact, it was a friend whom had stopped by, that pointed it out! Stupid Jamie.

There was still a bit of underside work to finish up, so we put the whole assembly up on a couple of tables. It's pretty high already, to say nothing about the 4 more feet it will be sitting in the heart.

The very last step was to weld up the bracket that will bolt the bridge and the train together! That was a whole lotta crap working in that tight space!

Quite the monster from down around this height!

I had a few options for bringing the train whistle to life. But in the end, I decided to 3d print it. Who says 3d printing is "rapid prototyping"? Pfffff. HA HA! I do like his leaning back posture, and from the front, he kinda has "blowing cheeks"

I didn't even take the time to sand, and clean it up. I just went right to our 2 stage polyester primer, and applied it with a brush, because I didn't want to have to clean the spray gun for a tiny little bit of primer! Jody sanded it the next day, and it looked great!

All in all, he looks awesome!
8)
JWO