Hello from Anchorage, Alaska

[Dick Morris]

I've been in the live steam hobby for about 50 years and built a Railroad Supply Corporation CP-173 4-4-0. For the last 10 years I've been involved in the restoration for operation of Alaska Railroad #557, a USATC S-160 Consolidation steam locomotive. I don't spend much hands-on time on the locomotive, but someone has to do the accounting, fund raising, publicity, acquire drawings, etc. For many years I've been working on a 1/8 scale model of the locomotive. Having access to an almost complete set of drawings and the full-sized locomotive tends to give me inspiration.

In addition to having a fairly complete home shop to do machine work, I've done sand casting for quite a few years. About four years ago I got a 3D printer and unpacked some investment casting equipment I bought many years ago from someone leaving the state and learned 3D CAD, 3D printing, and investment casting. First using PLA and then castable resin 3D printed patterns for investment casting. Having this capability has caused me to change the way I've looked at model building and I've incorporated a number of cast parts that would have been fabrications or hogged from solid in the past.

[MJM460]

Hi Dick, welcome to the forum.  It sounds like you will fit right in with all those activities.

Looking forward to hearing and seeing pictures of some of your activities.

MJM460

[tghs]

sounds great, what metals are you casting with?

[internal_fire]

Hi Dick,

I have read a lot of your updates over on the Chaski forum. Good Stuff!

Welcome to MEM!

Gene

[Kim]

Hi Dick!
Welcome to MEM!

Looks like you've got quite a project going already.  Would love to see more about it! Will you be posting progress here? (he says with fingers crossed?)

Kim

[RReid]

Hello Dick, and welcome. Good luck on both the full size and scale model projects! I'm another who would like to see pictures hear about progress of either or both.

[Dick Morris]

I current frequent the Chaski Live Steam forum and the Model Engineering email group.

In the past I also frequented a couple of metal casting email groups, a casting bulletin board, and a live steam email group. Those were all excellent places to learn and share, but have now gone defunct. I particularly wonder what happened to all the people who used to frequent the casting groups. Chaski and this group both have a casting section, but neither appears to be very active.

I'll do some posting here, but don't like to repeat myself in several forums.

As for metals, I've sand casted aluminum, brass, bronze (silicon bronze and a home brew aluminum bronze), and ZA-27 zinc alloy in Petrobond and have investment cast bronze, mostly silicon bronze.

I maintain the Facebook page for "557 Restoration Company" which chronicles describes the process of overhauling a 1944 vintage U.S. Transportation Corps S-160 Consolidation locomotive that operated as Alaska Railroad #557. We have been working on it for 11 years and expect to do some testing and training next year and operate on special excursions it on the Alaska Railroad in 2024.

I hope it's not in bad form to post a link to a thread on Chaski where I've posted about my model S-160, including quite a bit of casting.  http://www.chaski.org/homemachinist/viewtopic.php?p=459089&hilit=usatc#p459089