Tinkering with Tiny bits of Plastic

Lately, my model railroading efforts seem to have taken on a distinct agricultural theme, with projects including a fertilizer plant and the first step at a grain elevator. I got to thinking...

One of the signature items I often see around grain elevators are augers. Seems every elevator worth their salt has at least one or two for various duty. A grain auger would be a great scratchbuilding project, wouldn't it? One way to find out-bust out the tools, the plastic cement, and a box of scrap plastic shapes waiting for a home. After a couple of evening's work, I had progressed this far:


Then last night, I managed to add a drive line to the top of the auger, along with a pair of tire and wheel assemblies (which aren't overly realistic, but clever, I tell myself). The drive line is Plastruct rod, and the brackets are tiny bits of for sale signs. The wheels are sections of 1/4" diameter dowel with the last of my big black shrink wrap shrunk on them. The grain hopper at the bottom is a bigger chunk of sign, bent around the auger with a flat end glued on. A few minutes with some craft paint yielded this:


Here's one more view of the itsy bitsy model, just over 7" long. The auger tube scales out to 8" diameter, which is realistic. But I forgot to include some type of motor to druve the auger! Something else to figure out.


This kind of small project is rewarding. It hardly costs anything, actually, I didn't have to go out and buy anything not already on hand to do it. Progress is quick enough to not get frustrated. And it's obviously not overly difficult or I couldn't do it.

Personally, it brought back memories of days gone by, almost 30 years gone by now, when I spent two plus years working in Bismarck, ND. Mrs. L4T and I were newlyweds, and one of my tasks was to assemble augers just like this one. I've learned a couple of things in the interim-HO scale augers are a lot less work to build, and being married is just as rewarding as it was way back then.