tributesinwood

Ned’s Assembled Parts

The unfortunate part of carving various parts of a carving is that you get to a certain point where you start assembling the pieces and you end up…well, playing with the figure…rather than continuing on with carving.

So, given that, Ned’s been scooting around the dining room table top lately since the wheels and axles have been completed.  Actually, it’s a good thing that I didn’t make the pump mechanism actually pump with hinged arms or I’d never get this carving completed.

Since my last update, the wheels and axles are pretty much complete, although I do want to carve up some nuts and bolts to glue to the wheels.  I’ve also included some wedge shaped blocks that fit above and beneath the axles.  I thought that it was important to include some blocks beneath the axles as you will be able to see under the rail car to some extent once it’s up on the rails and ties that I’ll be carving at some point.  Also, you’ll notice the lifting beams that ran beneath these pump cars so that a couple of strong workers could lift the unit on and off the rails.

Hope you’re enjoying the updates.

Pump-Car Wheels

I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about making the flanged rail car wheels for the pump car.  At first, I was thinking about using a lathe to make an accurate version of a flanged wheel, even though I knew that it wasn’t going to be much fun making four wheels with duplicate dimensions.  After a quick e-mail conversation with Lynn Doughty ( OutWestWoodcarving…you can find the link on the right-hand side of this page ), my thinking on this went in a different direction.

I ended up using a hole saw to make various depth cuts of concentric circles.  I think I ended up with a fairly decent looking flanged wheel.

This was a little bit of trial-and-error and I first started by making a variety of cuts into some 7-ply plywood that I had laying around.  Basically, I inserted some of the smaller cutting rings and bored into the wood to a shallow depth to make a hub around an axle, then I removed those inner rings and replaced them with some outer rings to cut a raised lip around the flange, and then finally took out those cutting rings and replaced it with the outermost cutting ring and cut completely through the plywood, releasing the wheel.

Once I cleaned out the raised rings, it started to look like a flanged wheel but it looked just too thin for me.

So I took the wheels and glued the flat backs of the wheels to the plywood sheet again and began the boring process again so that I’d end up with a thicker end product.

After some cleaning out of the cut ridges, I ended up with the wheel in the first picture.  Hope that this wasn’t too confusing.  If you give it a try, you’ll quickly understand how it comes together.