What's your favorite project that you have completed under $5? This is $5 for the project, not including extra parts that you had to buy. (Swapping out plastic wheels for metal ones, for example, is about a $2.50 per car project.)
My favorite thus far, and cheapest, has been a N-scale track inspection car. I cut the base out of a broken CD jewel case, and attached trucks to it using parts left over from swapping out trucks/couplers on the cars I run. My cost: Free.
Puckdropper
On 10 Feb 2007 09:29:25 GMT, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Puckdropper instead replied:
Don't even try that you foul mouthed, anti-Christian, Aussie hating train monger! How dare you!
Have a beer. Tell the beertender it's on my tab.
-- Ray
David Starr
On Sat, 10 Feb 2007 09:08:29 -0500, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and David Starr instead replied:
I usually toss a small chunk of charcoal briquette into an electric coffee grinder. The scale determines how long you let it run. Same trick works for balsa chunks dyed with food coloring for other loads. Cheap and easy to glue, as you noted, with white glue.
-- Ray
Pd:
I scratchbuilt a small bungalow from cereal-box cardboard with homemade grocery-sack shingled walls and roof and a back sun porch with lichen plants for the cost of the paint and glue used...probably no more than $1. This is my favorite modeling technique, learned from an old Raymond F. Yates book called "How to Improve your Model Railroad", and with it I have at various times built:
a water tower (mushroom can with card wrapper, stripwood) a locomotive crane (first rolling-stock project ever) a freelanced centercab diesel (on an ancient and extra- ordinarily heavy Botchmann GP30 drive :) ) a replica of some old stores in my home town a small country church an engine house (this one was made from matboard). Unfortunately, most of these have been lost over the years, but I still have the second one I built (a small, one-room cottage with index-card lap siding), that house, the crane, and that water tank. It's so fun to build stuff.
Other bizarre, cheap projects:
a battery-powered railcar from a slot-car chassis and an old Tyco caboose body from the scrap box
a coal yard with a conveyor built from scraps, a caboose body for the office, piles of crushed-charcoal coal mentioned above
a junk yard on the same spur made of everything and anything I had handy
a city park with a bench, basketball half-court, trash can, swings, and seesaws, as well as vegetation, made from bits of this and that
an extreeeemely ugly custom tank-engine body for a Model Power
2-6-0, made from posterboard over the filed-down plastic shell, now mercifully losta rather clunky wood-and-card 2-4-0 body, made to mount on the filed down chassis of an IHC Old Timer 0-4-0, somewhat like an oversized Baldwin engine of the early 1900s
Man, I wish I had kept more of this stuff...
Cordially yours: Gerard P.
P.S. I have a small compilation of cheap projects sent in by r.m.r. posters here:
Cordially yours: Gerard P.
Save your foam scenery building scraps. Use in place of the pine.
Puckdropper skriver:
My generator for wind turbines (or lagrge electrical motor).
The last picture doesn't give the generator the right credit, on 20cm's distance it looks great.
Klaus
Klaus D. Mikkelsen spake thus:
That's my kind of project too.
Hey, you know what you should do? Make a mold of the motor/generator so you can cast lots of them (plaster would probably work fine, or some kind of plastic resin). You could make bunches of them.
David Nebenzahl skriver:
I can make bunches of then from wood and plastic, the way i did it here.....
No need for molding :-)
Klaus
$5.00 is more than you have earned in your lifetime you parasite.
Hey! I recognize one of those. I wondered what had happened to your site; I remembered sending you that a long timne ago.
dlm
A hobby is something that is done for one's own entertainment.
Model railroading is a hobby.
Therefore, there is no "wrong" way to do it unless it involves doing something that might kill or injure someone or otherwise cause severe damages.
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