Pigeon Poopers

We store our motor home in a three sided metal pole building. One side is open and allows birds, especially pigeons, to roost in the rafters. Pigeons poop when they alight for flight (weight savings I suppose) which results in the motor home being covered in pigeon poop whenever we went to get it out of storage.

A search of the Internet showed that you can staple Slinky toys to the tops of the rafters and this will prevent the pigeons from having a place to sit. For the reasonable price of Slinky toys we thought we'd give it a try.

Multiple Slinky's were stapled to the tops of the rafters with each loop about two fingers of width away from the next.

The experiment is a success - no pigeon poop on the motor home after two months!

Printing Chess Pieces

I found some interesting designs for chess pieces on the ThingiVerse website. There are many many choices of chess designs that can be downloaded and printed on your 3D printer, but this particular design caught my eye.

I'm printing these in both blue and copper color hoping they look good together on the chess board.

Driving a Hybrid

Some friends of ours recently purchased a new Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid automobile. I've enjoyed hearing of their driving experience and ended up reading about hybrid sedans in general. That led to  our finding that Hertz rents hybrid sedans and has an especially good rate for the weekends.

We drove out to the airport late on a Friday night and rented a Ford Fusion Hybrid sedan for two days. It turned out to be a nice automobile. The EPA ratings are 43 mpg in town and 41 mpg on the highway.  Zero to Sixty is about 8 seconds using the combined gas and electric modes.

We drove the car about 400 miles and got as high as 57.5 mpg for one segment of around town driving and as low as 38.6 mpg driving 70 mph into a 30 mph headwind. Our average for the entire trip was 44.5 mpg.

The car has a battery in the trunk that will allow the car to run on electric power under certain conditions. By careful use of the accelerator pedal you can cause the car to select electric (EV) mode to use no gasoline wile driving. The trick is to use EV mode as much as possible while driving.

When the car is decelerating the energy normally turned into useless heat by the brakes is instead turned into electricity to recharge the on-board battery.

The display screen on the left shows  the average fuel use for this particular segment of our drive.  The three blue horizontal bars are coaches for your driving techniques with more color meaning better efficiency in driving in the various models of Acceleration, Braking and Cruising. According to these screens I was doing pretty well with my driving technique. 

The right hand screen in this image shows vertical bars that indicate the fuel economy history for each 5 minute segment of the drive. The left hand image shows that for this particular 25 mile segment 13.4 miles of it were driven using the electric motor only.

With gas prices low and SUV's and Pickup trucks as popular as they are the demand for these cars is pretty low and as a result they sell for especially good prices, both new and used. Based on our experience I can recommend one if you want to save some fuel and drive a late model car at a good price.

Fun times at the Arcade

There is an Arcade to be found at the East Side Sports World location. Games of skill are to be found along with games of chance.  This is a typical fun palace comprised of games in which you put tokens and play to build up points.

The building of points is important because at the end of the game the machine spits out tickets. Each ticket is good for one point. Once you have enough tickets you can redeem them for various items in the gift store. The intent is to find games that put out the largest number of tickets possible.

Our grandson Wesley hit the jackpot on this machine and ended up with a pile of tickets all over the floor

Greta got a Unicorn headband with her stash of tickets

What a Cutie!

Train show in Estes Park

We were heading out of the mountains and did a quick check on the internet to see if there were any model railroad shows on the way home. We found one in Estes Park called "Rails in the Rockies" and decided to swing up that way and check it out.

I expected there to be a considerable amount of narrow gauge equipment for sale and was not disappointed.

Estes Park is the gateway to the Rocky Mountain National Park and the home of the Stanley Hotel. The Stanley Hotel is from the era of the Stanley steam car fortune and is quite the stately edifice.

Link to Stanley Hotel

The Model Railroad show was in this building at the Stanley Fairgrounds

It was a pretty good sized show

The slim rail HOn3 modules were there

A rather elaborate Lego layout was running and full of Raptors

I particularly enjoy seeing layouts created for the enjoyment of children. This one was one of the best I've seen.

This super detailed N Scale layout has lots of well done detail and ran great

Another children's layout that was a big hit

This was a Z scale (1/220th scale) that fit in a camera case

The On30 Guys had a layout running

The local FreeMo group had a concept they were showing which contained each module within a lighted shadow box. Intent was to make it easier for a 'Newbie" to start modelling.

I spent some time talking with the fellow who did such a nice job of painting this model