Modbury - Baseboards (2)
A little more progress has been made on the baseboards, although as is often the case there has been a step backward before resuming the stepping forward!!
The originally made traintable used a turned peg and socket on which to rotate, whilst that worked I could not prevent the whole traintable from rocking slightly on this centre pivot point without introducing a lot of friction at the outer edges which I felt would be counter productive as I could visualise the "sudden unsticking motion" when overcoming the friction throwing all of the stock of the rails. A search of the internet yielded a "Heavy Duty Turntable Bearing" sold by Station Road Baseboards. I recognised this as something called a Lazy Susan, and managed to find a 12" diameter one online at http://simplybearings.co.uk/shop/product_detail.php?products_id=42341&gclid=CO7Ah92WqLwCFafKtAodR1YAsQ. (No association with this company except as a satisfied customer)
A fair bit of hacking away at the underside of the traintable baseboard was necessary to accomodate the depth of the Lazy Susan below the traintable (about 8mm), and extra blocks of wood had to be attached to the cross members where the fixing holes in the Lazy Susan were. But once it was all back together it has made a much better and stable traintable that rotates smoothly.
The layout has also grown some legs and supporting structure. The legs themselves are 2"x1" timber held apart by 6" panels of 8mm plywood (screwed and glued), hopefully this will allow each pair of legs to be light and not require any diagonal bracing. The top of the legs protrudes above the panel by about 1", and the top panel is slightly wider than the baseboards so that the baseboard side member can rest on the panel and be held in place by the 1" protrusion. To help keep everything together, the leg pairs are held apart/together by 4" deep lengths of 8mm ply, these longitudinal members are slotted at their ends to match slots cut in the leg panels. Hopefully the pictures below will illustrate this.
I am in the process of priming all of this woodwork, the undersides of the baseboards will be painted gloss white (hopefully that will aid seeing what I'm doing under there), and the outside sides and ends will be in a suitable colour.
The next task will be to construct the traintable at the embankment end, and to form a suitable hole in the end back scene to get to it. Then the lighting pelmet will be constructed to effectively hang between the end back scenes. The back back scenes have bothe been cut from 6mm ply, but won't be fitted permanently until all of the track work is in place.
Ian
- 9
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