I’m distinctly pleased with progress over the last ten days. Having added the remaining X bracing to the legs, it occurred to me that I could easily modify them to make them even more like the supports which will eventually form the viaduct. I decided to add a middle vertical leg to each of the folding leg sections. This does add a bit of support and does make the whole structure slightly stiffer, but the main reason is purely aesthetic and I think it’s worth the extra weight.
I’ve also cut
I’ve joined the longitudinal and transverse formers together, using 20mm L section plastic strip from B&Q to strengthen each join. I then marked the positions of the weight saving holes in the base and cut them out. I decided not to cut holes near the positions of the leg abutments to give extra strength in this area – this turned out to be a mistake. The next step was to join the assembled formers to the base. For this I used PVA glue and panel pins and it was quite tricky to do single-
I made some enquiries through the forum here about how much wood it was safe to cut from a beam without greatly affecting its stiffness and was advised to look at the way in which aero-modellers save weight on wing formers. But even in aero-modelling sources, there wasn’t anything much about the maths of the calculation – or at least, nothing that I could follow! It seems that the aero-modellers use a fair bit of “rule of thumb”, but they cut away really quite scary amounts of timber. I event
Background
About three years ago I decided to take up railway modelling again after a break of about 35 years – the usual reasons: children and career followed by early retirement! The standards of all aspects of the hobby have improved so much during my time away that I was very apprehensive about my ability still to produce models of exhibition quality. Before trying to build my own layout, I decided to build a diorama to test my model making skills, before committing myself to a larger, mo
