Dave,
There must be 10,000 sans-serif type faces, and after a while they all begin to look alike. My best guess is the type face on the straight key is called News Gothic. My second-best guess is Futura. You can look up both (along with the other 9,998) on a site called fonts.com. It's also possible that Lionel created its own lettering for the straight key--something done by an underpaid draftsman using his Leroy lettering templates. Regardless, the font you chose looks pretty close to the orginal--definitely close enough for gummint work, as you said.
Best,
dh

Great detail. How did you model the bamboo lashings?
Best,
dh

Nice work. You should post more of your work, like your Transformer Pencil.
Best,
dh

Great job, tuna.

Thank you, sir. I'm glad the chair has only three pieces.
Best,
dh

I've seen this chair on the Internet several times over the years. I even tried to model it once, but quicky gave up. The chair came up again the other day, so I gave the model another go. Couldn't have done it without Fredo6's Fredoscale--specifically, the radial bending option. Plus lots of trial and error. Mostly error.
The original chair is the creation of Joe Colombo, a very influential Italian designer from the 1950s and 60s. He was a proponent of minimalist design and decor. The chair is the first piece Colombo designed for a firm called Kartell, and it's made of molded plywood. The original dates from 1965; reproductions are still available, in plywood or plastic (the material Colombo favored).
I did the render in Shaderlight.
Enjoy.
dh

Nice work, even with your misgivings.
I find that I usually need to adjust the size of a wood-grain texture to make it look realistic. More and more these days, I also need to use Photoshop to adjust the brightness or color profile of a texture before I apply it to a SketchUp model. The textures I use tend to appear dark unless I tweak them.
It's also true that the little details often consume the greatest amount of modeling time. Such is SketchUp life.

Thank you, as always, tuna.

Thanks, all. I did manage to get through the day without doing any real work. But I'm sure I'll pay for this tomorrow.
Best,
dh

Trying to avoid real work this morning, so I modeled a contemporary bent-wood armchair by the Tuscan firm of Fred&Juul. (Federico Minarelli and Julie Janssen.) They call the piece the Odette armchair. The original is made of oak, and comes in black or clear finish. This also gave me a chance to fiddle with the light and material settings in Shaderlight.
Enjoy.
dh

Nice, as always.
I think the wine-tasting table may be a French design; a few years back, I saw a 19th century table that's the spitting image of Will Myers's on the One King's Lane web site.
Best,
dh

Excellent work, as always. The table must weigh a ton, though.
Best,
dh

Nice work, alvis. Thanks for the suggestion about Flowify. One of these days.
Best,
dh

Here's the completed model of the upholstered settee. Used SubD to do the tufting, which turned out to be easier than I thought. This is actually the third or fourth try at modeling the settee; I kept noticing problems with the lofting that produced the main areas of upholstery, so I'd give it another go. The actual loveseat has welting along the edges of the upholstery, but I think I'll skip that detail.
Best,
dh

SubD and Vertex Tools were on sale today from SketchUcation. I bought both and will probably use them for the tufting. If I can learn how to use these plugins, that is. Stay tuned.

Curviloft will work but it's time-consuming. The image is a test I did just now. It entails creating one tufted square and copying it repeatedly. That's OK for the flat part of the back, but it will probably get tricky when I try to create tufts on the curved part of the piece.

Thanks, Box, for taking the time to do the GIF. It looks as if SubD is what I need. I was hoping I could avoid buying a plugin to finish this model. Oh, well.

Some interesting models, but not a lot of hard information in the thread. It looks as if he's using Vertex Tools or SubD, but I can't tell.
Thanks for the tip, though. Much appreciated.
Best
dh

I've been working on a model of this loveseat off and on for a couple of weeks. I'd like to show the tufting on the back, but I'm not sure how to accomplish that. I've tried using the Sandbox tools, but with little success. I suppose SubD would work, but I have no experience with that plugin. Any suggestions?
Best,
dh

Yes, Frenchy, the original stool is even older than I am.
BTW, I did reshape the legs yesterday, so they're closer to the original. And I couldn't have done the model without two cool plugins: True Bend (for the backrest) and Fredo6's Radial Bending (for the seat).
dh