David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
A frequent question on train forums involves a particular diecast toy car, usually available for a limited time but at a good price, and asking if it’s suitable to use in a particular scale. It seems not everyone knows how to determine scale themselves.
I understand why. I’ve never seen anyone explain how to do the math to figure it out, but it’s really not hard. All you need is a search engine, a ruler, and a calculator.
In the 1970s and early 1980s when Lionel was part of General Mills, one cost-cutting measure they took was to attach trucks to car bodies with a plastic doohickey. It’s not really a rivet, but more like a clip, and it doesn’t exactly hold the trucks steady.
Removing them isn’t difficult but the method may not be immediately obvious. And sometimes these Lionel cars really did use rivets. I can explain how to remove those as well.
I was making a chart in an Excel spreadsheet the other week and it insisted on adding trailing zeroes in the charts after the decimal point, even though all of my stats were whole numbers. Here’s the solution I finally found to get rid of trailing zeroes in Excel charts.
Someone asked me recently about the Lionel CW-80 and how it compares vs older transformers. That’s a fair question, and one that tends to stir up a lot of emotions on train forums. So I’ll try to present the pros and cons in a fair manner.
When fixing up a house or changing things around, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to patch some holes in the wall. Small nail holes are easy to fill with a bit of spackle applied with your fingertip, but bigger holes can be tougher, unless you know a couple of tricks that make hole in wall repair easy.
The other day I heard a reference to the “high side vs low side” of a computer system in a podcast, and the speaker didn’t stop to clarify. Worse yet is when you hear “on the low side” or “on the high side.” I came from the private sector into government contracting myself. I wasn’t born knowing this jargon either, so I’ll explain it.
Commodore International went out of business in April 1994, after nearly a decade of declining revenue. But the company left a significant legacy, which leads to some logical questions. What became of Commodore? Who bought Commodore?
Your Lionel 675 light doesn’t work, you say? Mine didn’t either, but the fix was really simple. You might not even need any parts.
The postwar 675 (and its brothers, the 2025 and 2035) have a quirk in their design that can make the light bulb quit working. But it’s easy enough to fix it, once you know what to look for.
I set up a DD-WRT router on Charter’s Spectrum broadband, and had a hard time getting it to work. It wouldn’t pull an IP address on the WAN side, or it would pull a 192.168 address rather than a Charter public address.
Here’s what I had to do to fix it.
Someone asked me the other day about the dimensions of the metal ties on vintage electric train track, presumably to cut some wooden ties to match. So I pulled some track out of my stash, got out my caliper, and took some measurements.
Vintage electric train track from American Flyer, Lionel and Marx had large gaps in between the ties. Filling those gaps makes the track look more finished and a bit more realistic.
Matching them exactly using the wood and the tools available to you may be difficult, but you don’t have to be exact. I have some tips for that as well.