Building craftsman/wood kits - Model Railroader Magazine
As I've mentioned here in the Forum, I've been working in O scale (again) since '93. After a disastrous T-bone car accident (I was the victim) in '95, my landlord died owing a GI loan, and the lovely loan people evicted everyone in the building, so I had to apply for "Housing." I now live in a tiny 1-bedroom Gov't subsidized apartment, with my workshop in what used to be the pantry closet off the kitchen end of the main room. Stalled on the gondola-mounted snowplow that was my first new O scale project, I decided to build a 36' flatcar of styrene, scoring and snapping my own sills, etc., back at my old apartment. Getting all the underframe longitudinal members the same length was a definite hassle, but it worked out okay after a lot of fiddlin'.
I new home(!) is2-1/2 blocks from the LHS and I discovered he had a beautiful big display of Evergreen Scale Models styrene strips and sheets, including O scale dimensional "lumber" and some O scale Car Siding--everything I would need for building a raft of Old-time cars to go on the 40 pairs of archbar trucks and a like number of Kadee couplers I'd stockpiled. I spotted a Dobson Miter-Rite in a Micro-Mark ad in MR, checked to see if the LHS had one, and when they didn't, ordered one from MM. Many years ago I'd had a friend who owned an old-fashioned miter saw with the saw suspended from the top, a far greater device than our old miter boxes for making perfectly square cuts and I longed for a similar device for modeling.
The Miter-Rite uses a similar overhead mechanism, made of "space-age plastic," to hold a common hobby saw (I've replaced the blade several times with X-acto saws), and with good adjustment and light cutting pressures, it makes "4-square" cuts. The single problem with it was that the table was too short for most of my uses, but of course, being a model railroader, I felt perfectly okay with modifying it. I bought a hardwood 1x3x48" at Menard's, had them cut it to 16" (the other piece was fixed up to use for grooving my own siding, flooring, etc.), rabbited the back edge beyond the end of the miter mechanism, bought a 24x48" piece of 1/8" hardboard from which to make the replaceable table surfaces, which I've done several times, and can now cut side, center, and intermediate sills up to 50 scale feet long. The rabbit beneath the back of the top of the table is perfect for clamping a stop in place for duplication--and the cuts are so accurate that I can bond cutoff ends of styrene strips together with Testors Liquid Cement for Plastics without a noticeable butt joint!
Guys, you can build platforms of any length for the Miter-Rite's mechanism and make accurate duplicate cuts at any adjustable angle, perfect for very tall timber trestles or whatever. My only problem is storing it in my 36x60" workshop--and I can live with that!
