I've been away from the boards for a while for various reasons. I won't bother you with my job changes or my wife's ER trips, I'll stick to the happy reasons, like the volunteering I've been doing. I'm doing basic woodworking and general shop tasks for the Northwest Railway Museum, helping restore train cars and maintain the ones currently in use. I've always been something of a closet train buff so this lets me do woodworking, play with actual trains, and help a local museum. I've been doing very basic things thus far, mostly knocking apart old wooden seats and stripping thick battleship-grey paint off the gorgeous mahogany underneath, but that's what needs doing and I'm happy to do it. Posting a few pics of the workshop and especially the machinery. There are some conservatively sized Craftsman and Grizzly tools around but mammoths dominate the view, with names like Yates, Oliver and Northfield. And what appears to me (a non-machinist) to be an implausibly large lathe; but I guess when the pieces are for use on something the scale of a locomotive, "implausibly large" quickly becomes "bare minimum".
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