Utility Poles

[whitworthnut]

[HomeRacingWorld]

Very well done.

[Ember]

Spot on. I like the insulator solution. They look great. I'd been thinking about using grub screws for insulators, but those are just perfect.

[whitworthnut]

FYI, each string has a different colour nut so buying 8 sets of strings at $10 a pop was out of the question. I went to a music store where they repair guitars and asked for all the strings they had discarded from the instruments they were repairing. I now also have miles of fence wire as well.

[Ember]

Ahhh.... It's up there for thinking, not just for growing hair (as my geography teacher used to say).

[scatman]

Outstanding. You my friend, have mad skills. :-)

[waaytoomuchintothis]

Just to add a touch of history to your fine modelling skills, I would tell you from my memories that there were three common colors for the insulators, and they have nothing to do with anything except what was available at the time. The bakelite brown you have done, and white and a dark green. The oldest were green glass. Some were single groove, some double and some triple, so you could even stack them for extra lines. The ones in the Deep South where I was were mostly brown or green, the very oldest being white. The local hoods (very bad greaser teenagers) would shoot at the ceramic insulators and break them from time to time. When the olive green Bell Telephone trucks would come around to replace them, we country kids would gather around the truck and get the broken insulator bits and put them into a fire later, which made the fire heat last way into the night. Lots of back yard camping came from that.

See what good info you get from old farts?

[whitworthnut]

[waaytoomuchintothis]

There you go. Those twisted iron bar braces are nifty looking. I never saw anything like that before.

[dreinecke]

Awesome work! I love the twisted braces too.

I did use glass beads on mine, but stacked them to look like insulators. Turned out ok.

[ourwayband]

Great job guys and great idea on the insulators!!

Rusty

[whitworthnut]

Those are some tall poles Dave. I climbed a few like that back in the 80's in Kenora, Ontario. And to top it all off, the telco had a habit of putting them on the top of cliffs. So depending on which side the pole you were on, you doubled the distance to the ground.

[waaytoomuchintothis]

Yipes! On the bayou, the tallest thing around that was man-made was a train trestle that crossed the deep swamp a few miles from my house. Yep, you guessed it. It was about four feet off the water!

[whitworthnut]

[Ember]

Just need a few birds sitting on them...