Weve got a problem in the tower

Well if youve read my post on my building you know Ive been toying with the idea of adding a tower. Ive gone ahead and fabricated a triangular tower that will be attached to the side of the building. What Ive noticed is that due to the weight of the tower It leans away from the building. To fix this Ive cut slots into the bottom of the triangle addition with the majority of the weight resting on the roof of the building. So far so good, it looks much better now.

Ive also been playing around with different configurations of the triangle and the rectangle shapes. My goal is to create a different looking building than what you normally find. Below are some photos of the problem Ive been dealing with and sketches of the configurations Ive been playing with.




Below are pics of the tower before the slot modifications.

Today I built a skyscraper

Well kind of, I was in the mood to build something & it was a skyscraper for my ever growing n scale Japanese empire. I got inspiration seeing a post on JNS basically the building was covered with mirror mosaics tiles. So I sourced some gold rose color mirror tiles as well as smoke colored mirror tiles. Im not sure what type of pattern I'll do but hopefully it'll be interesting. Now I need to work on details like the entrance to the building, roof details and if I want an addition on the building or not. I added a couple of the internal bracing I used in my building.

Lights, Camera, Action, HD?

I thought it was about time that I gave up trying to take model railroad videos with my trusty Nikon P1 and buy a dedicated video camera. So after hours of searching the Net for camcorder reviews I settled on the Creative Vado HD. The Vado does all kinds of goodies like record video at an HD video resolution of up to 1280x720p. Its pocket sized, hopefully I wont lose it. The Vado has the latest H.264 video compression technology provides unprecedented video quality at ultra-efficient file sizes for the best possible viewing experience. Record up to 4 times more videos, compared to MPEG-4 encoded ones.It has up to 4 hours of HD quality video or up to 8 hours of video at VGA resolution.

The video below is AWESOME for something created on a pocket video camera.










Below is my little video shot on a Creative Vado, yup its in HiDef as well, hope you like it.

My Last Shinkasen

Well hopefully this wont be my last Shinkasen but last night I purchased a Kato 10-222 Yamagata Shinkansen E3 Tsubasa 7 car set from Plaza-Japan an ebay retailer. I wanted the E3 with the red stripe but wouldn't find it online to save my life. So I got the E3 with the Green stripe and the nose mounted coupler. Im not sure what the difference is between the E3 with the Green or Red stripe if there is any difference at all. Im pretty pumped about getting this one in the mail which should take about 4 days or so from Japan.


Update: I lied the E3 will not be the last Shinkasen I get. I plan to get a Dr. Yellow from Microace eventually/


Below is a nice video of the E3 Series pulling in to a station.

100 N scale cars for $16 USD

Yup thats right, 100 N scale cars for $16. I took a stab at that offer and wasn't disappointed. I mean what could you really expect for $16 bucks youre not getting any Kato quality cars or Atlas or Tomytec. What I did get were 100 N scale cars painted in Red, White Silver Metallic Green and Black. There were a variety of styles of cars, from BMW to Mercedes and a Mini Van styled vehicle.

These cars wont win any beauty contests but they will fill the gap when you need lots of cars on the cheap. They would fit any N scale car dealership, parking lot, station entrance and on your N scale roads. Below is a pic I took of my recently arrived 100 N scale cars.