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Hitachi EX-8000 Mining Shovel parts being built by Gaylord Resident Don Campbell., originally uploaded by Don Campbell Models.
Hitachi EX-8000- Todays picture shows over 250 parts now laying on my workbench that will end up being a 1/12th scale Hitachi Ex-8000 Mining Shovel. You can see it still looks like nothing at this early stage. But I have enough of a imagination that I know very well what it is going to look like a month from now. It is that process of starting with a flat piece of metal and creating every part with my own hands and welding and drilling every part and watching it transform from nothing to a awesome monster model that keeps me excited everytime I build a new model. I cannot force myself to build more than one of anything it is just to boring for me. I have over 100 machines I want to build someday . It will be fun someday to publish two books of all the models I have built over the years. One book will be the dozens of farm machinery I have built and of course the other will be heavy equipment and the dozens of those monster machines I have built .
Somtimes I think about putting a live cam in my shop and run it a couple hours a day . People would be surprised how slow the process really is to hand shape and build hundreds of pieces out of metal to get one model.
Today I am designing more parts and cutting them out.
By Monday night the boom and the stick parts should be welded together . Those will be the very first three demensional parts I will assemble.
Hey Deb ! What’s on the Menu ? – Deb just pulled a meatloaf out of the oven, she has fresh mushroom / beef soup on the burner and she’s sampling a warm pumkin/ molasses cookie, yum !!
WEIGHT LOSS PROGRESS- Deb and I were up early as usual getting our hour exercise done and starting the day off right . We now realize running is not good if you want to lose weight on the scales.
Sure the first 25 lbs. came off easy, but now the muscles a person gets running everyday make it look like you stay the same week after week. As we continue to fit in smaller clothes we see it is not just about what the scales say , instead it is more about getting smaller and we are certainly doing that. This morning was warmer at 40 degrees as we headed out running.
NATIONAL FARM TOY SHOW 2009- We get e-mails from people going to Dyersville and it makes us think each day what we used to do at the show. When we first went we could not get over the thousands and thousands of people who attended the show. The hallways were packed with people elbow to elbow from morning until night. But each year we saw the numbers slowly fall . We saw the locations people set up in all over town slowly close . Our last trip to Dyersville a few years ago we figured the show had shrunk in half from years past when we were there.
But we were glad we got to be a part of the show for 10 years during the highest attendence times. It was very exciting . The last couple years everyone talked about the low turnout and talked about not coming anymore as they were not making enough to pay their expenses. We here each year things are much slower at Dyersville and that was before the economy even crashed. But regardless if it has become a much smaller show , if we didn’t live so far away, we would still like to go back one more time just to visit with the folks that still do go.
Have a Great Sat. !!!!!
