On the fiddle - (yard)
Entry posted by KH1
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I know things have been a little quiet on the blog front but that was mainly as I have just been messing around with assorted things of no individual significance - well just messing around really - until now. Finally faced the elephant in the railway room and have attacked the fiddle yard problem hopefully for the last time. My previous attempts at rectifying the automatic uncoupling and derailing devices which passed for marks 1 to 4 were just rehashes of the original board, this time I have started from scratch. One reason I have been putting this off is because the weather has just been too bad to do any cutting of wood outside. Last few days haven't been bad but did I freeze my whatsits off! A morning with the chop and circular saw had this nice pile of wood;
My approach was to make up a kit of parts and to reduce measuring and hopefully increase accuracy and speed, I made up various templates and just drilled or marked through them.
At the end of day one I had this nice pile of girders made up. This is easy I thought! Was looking forward to building up the boards the next day when I realised I needed to drill all the lightening holes. Did that take forever! Things were not helped by my hole saw going really blunt and as I was carless (another expensive story!), popping out for a new one was not an option. I did my best to reinvigorate it with a file but it was pretty far gone. So by the end of day 2 I had a huge pile of round bits of wood even more sawdust and these;
Right, day 3, time to get down to knocking up the boards - not a chance! Had completely underestimated how long it was going to take to fit the pattern makers dowel things, a job made far worse by the fact that I was trying to marry up with the existing boards at both ends. By late afternoon I was finally ready to get going and despite a looming PVA shortage and not quite enough screws to do the job, about an hour later I had three boards. I guess it is a testimony to my design (!) and wood working skills (!!) but they just flew together. Now you may wonder why there are three boards? here is the clever bit. The maximum I can fit in the car is 42 inches so the main fiddle yard board is just that. There is then an extension to this board of 24 inches to make it a decent size. The final board is an 18 inch extension to the fiddle yard at the other end of the layout. For transport the 24 and the 18 inch boards will lock together with the addition of plywood ends they will form a box with the 42 inch board. Well I think it's clever!
Incidentally the little grey cat took the first opportunity it could to get to the food bowls as it had been hiding from my power tools all day!
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