What's Benny been up to?  I rarely hold still and if I'm busy, there's a very good chance I'm working on Something that's keeping everything else at bay.  This year it has been moving back to the US from South Korea, taking a month vacation to Thailand, and then getting tied up in San Antonio for 8 weeks of training.  Between all of this, though, I have been working on whatever has caught my fancy - which at the moment is collecting prototype material for a wide variety of construction vehicles because lo behold many of the old brochures include dimensiona

I may be half way around the world right now, but this has not stopped my propensity to acquire new materials or hunt down new projects.  Indeed, it appears projects seem to accumulate on my workbench at the same rate as they did before - it's High time we get some of them out of the ether and completed!

About a year ago I got an inkling for a thresher. 

Sometime over the course of last spring, I opened up a publication somewhere and discovered a review for a track cleaning car from a company I had never heard of before and have seen little of since.  The car itself was reported to be self propelled, with a vacuum all under DCC control.  Try as I may, I cannot find the publication to go back to the review, but I did write down the details for this curious contraption, searched for it online when I got home, and saved the link for the impending future where my Enlistment Bonus might make something like this happen.

A couple years back [yikes, almost a decade!], I encountered a problem with a model where a single set of rear drive wheels was absent from the box.  I wasn't so interested in the rest of the parts that were in the box at that time, but after doing more research over the years, I discovered that this vehicle which appeared to be 1:72 scale was actually the beginnings of a 1:87 M-123 kit bash using the M-25 10-ton chassis and an M-39 series cab.  When further I found out that the M-39 chassis was introduced in 1951 and the M-123 truck was introduced in 1955,

I do believe this one has been done, but my reference escapes me.  Nonetheless, the project is so simple it's easier to do it than find the missing reference!

We start with a standard 30' CMW van and use the side panels to scribe the sides and the top with a razor saw.  The top is luckily the same ten feet as the side panels, offset, so we have natural joining lines to blend in the cut lines.

This one is just too cool...

http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/19/aaduino/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook

Some have asked why SASME tore down such a nice layout back in this thread here:

http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/23523

I thought I might provide some updates that show where the club is headed.

In this project I shall tool up my rendition of Sonoita Station for use on my Future Albuquerque, Tucson and Southwestern Layout.