Cal's Coastal Café

The day started like most other work days. My cousin Cal and I were in my kitchen getting some coffee and shooting the breeze before heading off to the shop.

I was fiddling with the coffee machine on the counter, and Cal was in his usual place in the breakfast nook with his nose buried in the newspaper's classified ads section.

Something caught Cal's attention. He carefully laid the newspaper down on the tabletop and smoothed out some creases in the paper before asking me, "There's an ad here for the old brewery down in Ocean Park. Isn't that the one our great, great, great uncle built?"

"Yeap. There might be another great or two in there 'cause he built it in 1842", I replied.

I finished loading up the coffee machine and started it brewing. I turned to Cal and asked, "I don't think that place has ever been up for sale. And I think its been abandoned for a long time. What're they asking?"

"Don't know. The city's seized it for unpaid taxes and is auctioning it next Wednesday. It's open from 2 to 4 this afternoon for inspection. Do you wanna go have a look?"

"Yeap."

Awhile back I was able to find a 1967 release of AHM's Brewery kit, which was designed by E. L. Moore. I was planning on combining it with a Model Power version I already owned to build Art Curren's Perry Shibbel Fruit & Produce Co-Op. But, after I inspected the AHM's parts, I didn't have the heart to cut them up and repaint them for the kitbash. 

I thought about what I could build, and what I could use on the layout, and after a long time, the outlines of Cal's Coastal Café slowly started to gel. I figured I'd build it from the Model Power kit, and later I'd build the AHM kit box-stock, no painting, no modifications, no nothing. 

I'm not going to explain all the construction steps, just touch on the main changes from the kit's instructions. If you're interested in seeing the kit's parts, you'll find some pictures here, and the instructions can be found here.

As you can see in the lead photo, I didn't use the  little brick addition that is attached to the left of the main building. So, I had to sand off the alignment mouldings and part numbers from the main building's wall. In the photo on the right you can see what they looked like before being removed.










We got to the open house around 3:30. There was nobody else there. Just as well. The old thing didn't look in too bad shape. Cal seemed fascinated by it and was absentmindedly running his hands over the old brickwork as he wandered around the place.

"What's up Cal?"

"I'm buying this for Cathy!"

"For Cathy? Why?"

"She's looking for a place for her café and this is it. Solidly built, great views, tourists, and right beside a streetcar stop."

"Sounds good, but maybe you should ask her first."

"I need to find a phone."

The other bit of minor prep was to open up the front wall of the wooden addition on the right. This part was to be the outdoor dining area, and I wanted the wall to allow free passage to the deck. Sprue cutters, sanding sticks, and the Dremel drum sanding attachment were used for this job.

So, as far as part modifications are concerned, those two minor changes were all that were done prior to painting. Ok, well, all the parts were washed with a mild dish soap to remove any remnants of mould release from the factory. 

I chose the colours from leftover spray cans I had in the workshop. The only guidance in selection was that they had to suggest a seaside restaurant or resort.



Cal found a pay phone at the streetcar stop. By the time he got back the open house was over and they had kicked me out. I was sitting on the steps waiting for him.

"She says ok. And she's going to name it after me!"

"That's great. I'm going to have to put on my thinking cap and figure out how we can turn this old girl into a café."

"She's going to come by the shop after work and we can discuss it with her."

"Sounds good."

I got up from the steps and we took one last look around before heading out to catch our car.

I had a funny feeling come over me as we walked to the stop. I turned to Cal and said, "This place reminds me of something."

I probably should have done the modifications to the brewery's chimney before painting, but, for some reason, I thought it should be done after. I cut 5 cm off the top so that it only extended slightly above the main building's ridge line, and then cut a fireplace opening in the front facing wall. That was done by first opening the hole with a drill, and then finishing with files and small sanding sticks.

This picture gives a better view of the finished fireplace. The mantle was cut from a piece of strip balsa - I needed to include an homage to the kit's designer :-)

Yes, the lighthouse tower is a bit wonky, but it doesn't seem that distressing in person. 












Cal was looking at me funny as we walked across the parking lot to the car stop.

"You've got that look on your face."

"What look?"

"The 'I know a story about this building and one of our ancestor's' look."

"No I don't."

"Spit it out before you burst something."

"I seem to recall that in the '20s those islands off the coast put in prohibition. For awhile one of our uncles - I have to ask Ma which one - performed a delivery service for the owners of this place. His boat had two gas tanks: one for gas and one for hootch. One night a week he'd motor over to the islands and make a delivery. When he got back he'd give them the cash and he'd get a small cut. One night he never came back home. Ma seems to think he decided he wanted all the cash for himself and disappeared."*

"That's it?"

"That's it." 

The light tower is built from a core of 0.040" styrene, faced with styrene brick sheet. 

The light is an N-scale street lamp post that I scavenged from the old layout.

The frame around the light that supports the tower's little roof is built up from 0.040" x 0.060" styrene strips. The roof is just the cupola roof from the kit.

It gives a nice glow when it's lit up. In this photo it's powered by a 9v battery, but I think it's rated for 12v, so it should be a bit brighter when installed on the layout in Ocean Park.

The lighting in the outdoor dining area is by an LED strip.

I have a roll of LED strip lighting I bought a few years ago from a lighting store in Montreal, and all I had to do was cut off a piece and solder on some leads. A hole was drilled in the main building's right wall for the leads, and installation consisted for sticking the strip to the inside surface of the right building's roof.

There's a second Moorian homage on this build. 

I didn't spray enough window frames with turquoise paint, and found myself two windows short during assembly. I pulled two more from the kit and brush painted them a Moore green.

The ladder to the light is some stock I had in my spares box.

You can see a ghost of the alignments for the left building that were ground off. Such ghosting often appears on real buildings for various reasons, so it's not too out-of-place. 

Argh, that tilting tower :-( I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the digital camera is a harsh mistress.

The railing is some stock that I bought a few years back and had in my spares box. For safety reasons, one can't have an elevated deck and walkway without a railing.  

And speaking of tilts, the roof on the outdoor dining area's got a little slant to it too. In my defence I'll note that it fits solidly on its supports and joins the main building cleanly and without gaps. $%&@ digital cameras!


When I started this project I made it a point to build it as fast as I could. Usually I'm dead slow when it comes to my building projects, but on this one throwing caution to the wind was the name of the game. It took 5 days of on-and-off, part-time work. And I decided I couldn't declare the thing done if it didn't have signs and lights, which I usually leave to a 'later' that is often a long time coming. The downside of speed is that the project's got some odd tilts in it. I'd like to blame my camera for them, but in the end they're there because of the throwing caution to the wind thing. Maybe they add a little character :-) But, I'm glad I did this little test, and am happy with the result.

*Based on an apocryphal story in my own family, but it involved a car with two gas tanks.

Moore's Balsa Products

Cal had come over for breakfast before we headed off to a train show in Scarboro. I was making some coffee. He had settled into the breakfast nook with his paper and had his nose stuck in the classified ads section looking for bargains.

"Well look at this!" Cal folded the newspaper into a rectangle he could hold with one hand while pointing to a little classified with the other.

"Look at what?" I set coffee making aside on the counter and leaned into the nook to take a look at whatever had caught Cal's eye.

"It says here that the machine shop over on Mortimer you designed is for sale. Not a bad price either."

Cal handed me the folded paper with the ad dead centre. Yeap, it was for sale. That was an easy one to design. I just reused half of Grusom Casket that I did a couple years ago. The buyer was happy enough and so was I. I didn't have to do a lot of work on that one. 

I read the fine print. "It says there's an open house this afternoon. We could take the ocean park car down to the loop at Mortimer, and drop in after the show for a look."

"You're thinking of buying it?"

"The business is getting a little too big for the spare room and basement. And Ma's been hinting that balsa dust in the rhubarb pie might not be the healthiest thing."

"I wasn't going to say anything, but now that you mention it, your last one was a bit dry."

Everyone's a critic. "That didn't seem to stop you from eating half of it."

---

When I wrote about E. L. Moore's cheap and cheerful plastic kits I had forgotten I had an assembled Machine Shop kit stashed away in my spare-parts box. It was only while looking for parts for Variation No. 3 that I stumbled across it. 

The Machine Shop is half of the Grusom Casket company kit - this little shop is one of the derivative kits, not one of the Original 9. On mine, the base's bottom is stamped with 'POLA-HO' and 'Made in Western Germany'. It looks like this kit had a long history as it was distributed by AHM, Atlas, and Tyco as well as Pola*.
  

I bought this fully constructed model many years ago at a local swap meet. It wasn't in bad condition, and only cost a toonie. I've learned the hard way to be selective about buying old kits that others have already put together. Some are horrible glue-bombs that can't be disassembled for restoration. Those I take a pass on. Others that have only been lightly stuck together with tube glues are better candidates. If they appear more-or-less complete, and aren't expensive, then I'll buy. It's those that I'm likely to have a better chance of successfully restoring, but there are no guarantees. It's only once I have had a chance to clean and examine the model closely, and try some disassembly, that I get a better sense if it can be easily restored. Luckily, my Machine Shop was in good condition; it was just a little ratty looking.

After thinking about this model for awhile I thought it might fit in rather well in the older part of the Ocean Park Loop along Mortimer Street. But, it needed a little modernization because Mortimer Street isn't a slum in the making, but simply a living street where the buildings are a bit older. And of course, since this a Moore design, so there had to be some Moore in the presentation :-)

---

We got off the car at the Mortimer loop around 4. The machine shop was a short walk away, on the other side of Ocean boulevard. Things were changing in the city, but this part still had lots of traditional buildings, new ones as well as old. Down here, people could still escape.

Cal brought his camera so we'd have a record about whether we'd have to do any reno work. It turns out the shop wasn't in bad shape, and maybe needed only a little sprucing up. A general cleanup, corner squaring, replacing missing roof stacks, window cleaning, and some work to make the facade a little more attractive to the customers and I'd be in business in no time.

Cal took some pictures. I did some haggling. 

---

The first thing was to cut off the old base because this building isn't standing out in some deserted lot with junk strewn all over the place; it's facing a busy street. It might have been a machine shop, or maybe a small appliance repair shop, in an earlier era, but today it has to deal with customers who don't want to be scared away by neglected surroundings and a dreary facade, so some general city-fication was called for.

To remove the base, I cut the corners off with a cutting disk in the Dremel, and then used the cutting disk to slice into the exposed foundation corners as close as I could get to the brick walls without touching them. This weakened the base and allowed for some careful flexing to get it unstuck from the wall bottom. You can see that little glue was used to attach the walls, so that was good. But, you can also see I tore the wall and foundation over in the lower right corner. The tear was small, and since that part was going to be hidden with a planter, I didn't spend time to fix it.

I think the biggest job on this project was adding the new foundation.

The base is a piece of 0.080" styrene cut to the edge of the main perimeter. The foundation pieces on which the pilasters - is that what they're called ? - rest are little pieces of 0.080" that were glued on later, and then ground with the Dremel and files to be flush with the pilaster surfaces.

The planters and entry were built up from styrene pieces and putty.

While working on the base, all the clear plastic pieces that had been glued in as window panes were pried off as they were scratched and dirty. I figured I'd break the window frames if I tried prying them, so they remained. The frames were given a loose wash of flat grey to tone down their plasticky brightness. 

The windows were replaced near the end of project with some 0.010" clear styrene.

The roof had a couple of issues that needed fixing. First, the piece itself had a dozen or so ejector pin marks that had to be ground out and smoothed. Then the missing ventilation stacks were replaced with items from Walther's roof top details kit. I used whatever seemed to look interesting and fit the roof.

After that little bit of reno work, it was on to painting. The shingles were hit with several washes of black, grey, and smoke. Once all basic painting was done, thin grey and smoke washes were sloshed on the entire roof structure to weather it a bit and even out the tones.

I didn't glue the roof in place so that lights could be added later.

Building up the facade was the fun part of this project.

First, as you can see, all that was done on the brick was to float on some, loose, thin grey washes. You could do more detailed brick treatments to the walls, but I just wanted to keep things simple.

The sign is just a balsa sheet with old-school Letraset lettering. I wanted it to look fairly new in keeping with the just-opened-for-business vibe. A street number, porch light, and entryway roof helped with the city-fication. A Moore Green door helped reinforce who designed this little building :-)

---

The new place has got a fancy coffee station, and Cal dropped by to help me christen it. I fiddled with the coffee machine while he settled back in a chair with his newspaper and read the classifieds.

"It says here some guy's got a box of oom-pah** records for sale."

I stopped making coffee and looked over Cal's shoulder at the ad. "Not a bad price. Can you circle that one? I'll give him a call later."

"You got a record player here?"

Darn, I knew I forgot something.

---

* E. L. Moore's Machine Shop has been sold in a number of different boxes over the years, without buyers knowing Mr. Moore was the designer. Here are a few box-top scans pulled from the internet and my stash.

This is the Grusom Casket company from which the Machine Shop was extracted for its own kit.

And there it is, AHM kit #5839.

At sometime later AHM re-issued the kit in a 'Masterpiece Series' box. The box-top painting has been replaced by a build-up of the model.

At some point in the '70s, Tyco got the molds and sold the kit in their brown-box line.

Things take a turn once Pola started to sell the kit. In this incarnation it's no longer a machine shop, but has become a pickle factory.

It doesn't have anything unique that visually indicates the new business, although, I do like how they've changed the foundation and base to make it more practical. There's also a loading dock and sliding door on the side.

At some point Pola put it in a box that actually said Pickle Factory.

Maybe the Pickle Factory label was simply for the English-speaking markets as this one, which obviously is targeted for the German market, refers to the building as Hengst & Co. Cannery. Maybe cannery and pickle factory are the same in German - I've relied on Google Translate for translation services :-)

The Hengst & Co. Cannery gets a nice blue box.

[Added 31 Jan 2020] It looks like Atlas also marketed the machine shop under the name Johnsons Inc. Chemical Products. The base and loading areas are similar to the Pola releases, and it looks like a water tower has been added to the roof.

[Added 18 February 2020] It's good to see that Walthers now markets the Machine Shop. The box has a rather clinical look compared to its ancestors, but at least it's still on the market.

[Added 12 May 2020] A version marketed by the West German company VAU-PE. What makes it unique are the extensive grounds and out buildings that have been added.

[Added 16 May 2020] Another blue box Pola variation, but this time some sort of benzene processing plant instead of pickles.

[Added 19 May 2020] Another Atlas boxing. Unlike Johnsons Chemicals this one is in red brick, points towards the right, and doesn't have a water tower. Overall it seems quite standard; it just has a different sign.

[Added 26 May 2020] A boxing in the Quick series of Pola kits. From the box-top painting this appears to be a box-stock branding without any additions to make it unique.

[Added 26 May 2020] Not to be left out of the action, our old friend IHC sold a boxing, and much like the Pola Quick version, this doesn't appear to have any unique additions.









I don't know if this is a complete list of all the Machine Shop's boxes and versions. If you're aware of others, please leave a comment.

** Back in the Jones Chemical Co. article in the March '74 issue of Model Railroader, part of the deal Eddie Jones makes with E. L. Moore to build the model was to hand over an oom-pah band record as partial payment - apparently handing over that item caused Mr. Jones some pain :-)

I don't know about oom-pah bands, but when I heard a Townes Van Zandt song called Blue Ridge Mtns. (Smoky Version) on his album Sky Blue that was released earlier this year, I immediately thought it seemed like something that fit in the E. L. Moore canon. You can find the song on the internet, but its embedding is disabled, so I can't include it here. The album has a haunting quality that stopped me in my tracks. Get it if you can. 

And yes, look up in the sky on the Sky Blue cover and you'll see a web of streetcar overhead power lines. Where was the cover shot back in '73? I need to find out.

From the Time Machine's Glovebox: Stories

The discussion Paul kicked off got me thinking that at this blog I've tried a few times to write a little bit of E. L. Moore inspired fiction to complement a construction post, or maybe just stand alone because I wanted to give it a go.

I think my first post on E. L. Moore as a storyteller was in the 25 Years at the Movies one. Buried deep in the digressions section I tried my hand at cooking up two stories as construction article set ups: Ma's County Winery and Al’s Airship Aerodrome. For your reading pleasure, here they are in their 2013 retro-glory.

Ma's County Winery

It all started with a phone call from Cousin Cal one Friday morning last May. I got to my office a little late that day as there was an unusually long line of people ordering complicated mocha-latte-grande-double/doubles with sprinkles and such at the café downstairs. All I wanted was black coffee to go. When I finally got to the counter the simplicity of my order confused them a bit and slowed down things even more. By the time I had gotten my drink and climbed the stairs to my office, I could hear the phone ringing inside. But luck was with me, and I was able to get the fiddly lock on the office door to spring and I made a dash to the phone before it stopped wailing.

I grabbed the receiver with my free hand and balanced my coffee with the other.

“You gotta get over here right now!” Cal was sounding flustered and forgetting the pleasantries of civilized conversation.

“Cal, you gotta work on your manners. Where’s the ‘hello’? Where’s the ‘how are you’?” While I was giving him the Dear Abby routine I put the steaming cup on my desk, cracked open the blinds to let some light in, and then proceeded to forget my own manners as I settled back in my chair, “Why are you calling?” 

I started to sip on my coffee while Cal gave me the particulars. He seemed to have calmed a bit, “Ma’s got it in her head that she’s gonna expand her old winery down in the County. She saw on the inter-tubes that the Chinese are out buying up every drop of wine in the world for the next few years. She figures now’s her chance to cash in big on her organic artisanal hipster wine. Expand production and all.”

Cal was getting wound up again. I jumped in and let him catch his breath, “That old winery needs to be demolished. It’ll never produce more than those few bottles she stashes away each winter. A new winery is what’s called for.” I started to muse a bit on this thing as the coffee kicked in, “She’s gotta have a rail siding for getting the stuff up to buyers; there’s gotta be some sort of olde-timey tasting room for the tourists; come to think of it, maybe it needs to be sorta olde-timey all round for the total tourist experience; probably needs some big vats for all that grape mash; well, there’s lots of things its gotta have.”

Cal knew what it meant when I started musing. He knew I was hooked, “Can you come down this weekend? She’s in a state and itching to get going right away.”

Ma with an itch is always trouble.

This seemed like an interesting diversion, and clients weren’t exactly beating my door down. “Yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow. Make sure some coffee’s brewing.”

I set to work drawing up some plans.

And that’s how I got to building this winery, and all you’ll need is in this shopping list,

{ list of materials }

That stuff should only set you back a couple of Twoonies and a Loonie. I kept costs low by making my own windows and doors, but feel free to substitute with your favourite castings. Shouldn’t take more than two weeks to build. That is of course if you don’t get too carried away watching tv on your iThingy while you’re working. That is unfortunately one of my failings. 

{ instructions, instructions, instructions }

I thought I’d give Ma a call to ask her to come out to the site and take a look at how things were progressing. As I pulled my mobile phone out of my coat pocket Cousin Cal started up with that cackling laugh of his.

“Cus, when are you going to get a phone that doesn’t look it fell off a Soviet trawler and washed ashore in the North Atlantic in ’75?”

I had to admit I listed a bit when I walked around with it in my pocket. “It works just fine and it’s cheap to boot,” was my lame attempt at a witty retort while I punched Ma’s number into my one-kilo wonder.

“O look, there’s another one over there!” Cal pointed to a stray brick left on the ground. He was laughing so hard he started to cough.

I hoped he gagged. Ma’s phone rang.

“What!” 

Ma was a little short on manners too.

“Do you want to come down to the field and have a look around? 

“Sure,” was her reply.

The line clicked. What Ma lacked conversationally, Cousin Cal compensated for with hilarity. He was having a good old time, holding the brick up to his ear and in between fits of laughter chattering away to unseen listeners on the other end of the baked clay network. 

But he sobered up as soon as he saw Ma’s ample silhouette striding across the field.

{ more instructions  and hopefully a conclusion to the story }

And in the same vein as the The Cannonball and Safety Powder Works, what could be more tempting than a building that houses a flying machine filled with hydrogen with old-fashioned, poorly maintained sparking railroad engines nearby – the plot possibilities are endless :-) Which brings me to,

Al’s Airship Aerodrome

I was renewing my liability insurance this afternoon and started to wonder if I had ever told you about the time I built the airship hanger.

Well, one day a couple of years back this Brazilian gentleman called me up from Paris – Paris, France that is – and asked if I could build him a hanger down in the County for an airship. I was glad to hear that my reputation for frugality was known in some quarters of the City of Light. This fellow – I never could pronounce his name properly, so we agreed I’d just call him Al, which it turns out he rather liked, and he’d call me Monsieur M, which Cousin Cal thought was hilarious, but I was partial to the sound of it, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Al was a ‘Personal Blimp’ builder.  I hadn’t heard of such an occupation, but I figured there are personal computers, personal trainers, even personal pan pizzas, so why not personal blimps. 

Anyway, he was coming over to the County for a few months to get this financier-turned-gentleman-farmer fitted out with a personal blimp, and all the things needed to own and operate one. That included a hanger to park it in. That’s where I came in. You might ask, why was a railroad man like myself called up for this project? Like I said, there’s frugality, but it did involve a considerable amount of railroad gear.

For one thing, there’s the doors. A blimp, even a personal-sized one, is mighty big. The doors on the garage needed to park this beast are 50 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Now, Al is one smart cookie and on the hanger his guys built in Monaco, he figured out how to make the doors ride on rails so that even a 10-year-old kid could push them open. Given that Cousin Cal is the spittin’ image of the ‘before’ guy in those Charles Atlas ads, this was just his speed. 

But, as things turned out, it wasn’t Cousin Cal’s lack of muscle power that tripped up this project, it was his lack of brain power. A blimp garage is more-or-less one gigantic loco shed, so the other railroad thing you need, is some track for hauling in blimp parts, and for bringin’ in helium tanks if hydrogen just won’t do. Al’s one of those renegades who swears by hydrogen for these things – none of that expensive helium for him. No sir. He makes it – hydrogen that is – himself right there in the shed. According to Al, hydrogen is like a woman –if they are treated with care and respect, then all will be well. Unfortunately for him he never met Cousin Cal and his ancient loco. Track, an old sparking loco, lots of hydrogen nearby: you can see where this is going. Well, more on this later. Here’s what you’ll need to build a blimp aerodrome to service the more responsible personal airship aficionados on your pike...

Those two stories never did accompany a model building project - but they still could, I'm hopeful for the future :-) - but this one for 2011's Mr. Buschel's Barrel and Marble Works did (which is based on an actual building even though the story is a complete fabrication):

Mr. Buschel's Barrel and Marble Works

One day last summer Debra and I drove down to Prince Edward County to have dinner at Bob’s Truffle Hut. Her friends had been telling her great things about the place, so we went to see for ourselves. What they didn’t tell us was there was this great model railroad-able feed mill right behind the Hut. Debra went in and got us a table and I wandered over to the building to take a look before the sun went down.

Turns out it wasn’t a mill anymore, but a recyclery, barrel maker and marble works that had taken up residence in the old building. Luckily the owner’s grandson was on the loading dock to tell me some history about the place.

Apparently granddad bought the abandoned mill in the early ‘70s to house his barrel making business, He was a big fan of Evel Knievel and thought that Mr. Knievel’s exploits would inspire an upsurge in motorcycle barrel jumping, and that meant there’d be a big demand for barrels. Well, with that and the new wineries springing up in the County, it looked like blue skies ahead for the barrel biz.

The barrels-for-cycle- jumping thing never panned out, but barrels for wine, or repurposed for furniture and other odd things provided some steady income over the years. Granddad rented out the west wing to a marble artisan in the late ‘90s, and a deal with the County saw the recyclery tacked on just a few years ago. The sun was getting low, so I snapped a few pictures and popped into the Hut before the truffles got cold.

The prototype mill is big. Too big for my 6 foot by 5 foot model railroad, so building a model of it was an exercise in selective compression. That is, picking out the parts I liked, and squeezing the dimensions down to something that was just the right size for the railroad, all the while trying to maintain the vibe of the structure that attracted me to it in the first place.

Also, I didn’t want to turn this into an exercise in overly specialized construction methods and micro-detailing, but something that could be built with fairly commonplace model railroading building materials, and only about 2 weeks of concentrated work.

Some styrene sheets, Campbell scale corrugated metal siding, window and door castings from Tichy Train Group, plus a few scraps of styrene tubing and balsa are just about all you’ll need materials wise. For tools, the standard X-acto knife, scale, angle, thick super glue, pen, pencil, and a tube of styrene glue will do it. Also, you’ll need some bottles of acrylic paints, a few brushes, and some water for clean-up, but no sprays or air-brushes.

Costs? Well, if you were actually able to just buy the exact amount of materials used in this project, you could build it for about $20 to $30. Turns out, if you don’t already have a small stash of materials leftover from other projects, you’ll need to buy the materials in the pre-packaged amounts they’re commonly sold in, so it’s going to cost more – around $30 to $40 - but you’re going to have leftovers for other projects. Which is probably a good thing, because once you have a small stash of materials there’s less of a hurdle when you start new projects. I’ll discuss how to save some cash as we go through the building process.

Now, a bit of a disclaimer: I was way off on the concentrated work bit – the elapsed time for the build was roughly 6 months of only working an hour here and ten-minutes there and doing other projects in between and so on. I’m sure you’re not as lazy or disorganized as I am!

…. and on with show.

And speaking of a show. I've been hooked on stories all my life, and looking back it's easily understandable that I was hooked on Jim Croce songs. I bought all the vinyl, and memorized all the lyrics to all the songs - which I can still call up at will, so you don't want to be in the car with me if one comes on the radio :-) Here's the one with my namesake, even though it doesn't turn out too well for him.