A few days off over Christmas gave a chance to do some fairly serious sorting out of the railway room and make one of the changes needed before Fen End Pit could get exhibited again. The original baseboards were about 3'4" long and the legs were supported by Ikea IVAR wire cross-braces. These gave a leg spacing over just over 3'. So, the original layout had 5 baseboards, 7 pairs of legs and none of them in the right place! As the layout was built in two stages I'd ended up with the situation where one of the main boards had a leg positioned half way along its length and it was always a pain when putting the layout up. So the plan has always been to make it so this time around the legs supported the ends of the baseboards, we end up with less legs to lug around and a better supported structure. The plan finally came together when I worked out how to make cross braces like the IKEA ones, just a bit longer.. Answer, Cut-and-shut two Ikea cross-braces, joining the two bits together with a bit of K&S tube as a sleeve and a load of loctite. The result appears to be pretty sturdy and now positions the legs at the required ~4'. I've laser cut a piece of ply to go on the top of each leg which is shaped like a flattened 'U'. The space between the uprights of the 'U' is wide enough for the ends of two baseboards with clearance for the bullet style baseboard alignment dowels to clear each other. The result ought to mean that I can assemble the legs at a show, plonk the first base board in and then be able to put the second in place and connect up the boards with bolts safe in the knowledge that it isn't going to fall anywhere.

I've also attached a length of 1/32 ply as a fascia and a length of velcro which is used to attach a curtain at shows. The layout is wired with MERG CBUS so along both the front and the back are sockets which can be used to attach MERG DCC controllers and/or switch boxes to control points etc.

Scenically things are moving on with the bulk of the works now complete. I'm starting to think about details like more industrial scrap, oil drums, a spare drag-line bucket and similar.

Christmas also brought me a present, my second 3D printer. This one is a Resin based DLP printer which has a much finer resolution than the previous filament extrusion based FDM printer. Theoretically the machine has a resolution of .05mm in the X and Y and .035 in the Z. I've still got a bit of work to do to find the best settings for the resin but having seen some of the results on the Wanhao facebook group I'm really rather excited by what might be possible.

This little calibration test is 53mm wide and is a little 'over cured' which means that some of the details are a little 'blurred' - still a good start.

Expect some railway related bits to get produced in the coming days..

David