Building a Small, Light Baseboard

[PatB]

Well, I'm finally getting out of the armchair and doing something about my long promised 2FS test piece. However, due to my current circumstances, both time and money are in short supply so I'm not going to commit to a full layout thread. Instead, having managed to find a couple of hours over the course of the last week I did throw together a baseboard, the construction of which may be of interest.

 

As a result of another, non-railway related project, I have access to a large quantity of offcuts of 4mm hoop pine plywood, some exterior grade and some the full blown AS2272 marine flavour. Both are lovely and of excellent quality. It seemed sensible to utilise them to create a baseboard suitable for a small, 1200mm x 200mm plank.  Being currently working with plywood (again, non-railway related) I've been able to work fairly quickly.

 

Here are the two offcuts which will form the integral backscene and the board surface itself. The backscene board is a roughly 450 mm slice off the end of a 1200 x 2400 sheet. The other is a 200 mm slice off the long edge of such a sheet. It'll form the main surface and all the crossmembers. Another, slightly wider, strip will provide the ends.

 

 

Here are the crossmembers cut to size. I'm putting them at 200 mm intervals so  there are 5 intermediate members plus the ends.

 

 

In order to allow wiring to pass through the crossmembers I'm putting in some holes. There will be some marginal weight advantage too but nothing you could measure without a fairly accurate scale. I'll be using the largest spade bit I have that I can be confident is reasonably sharp. Spades are brutal and prone to creating huge splinters as they break through so I've screwed all the crossmembers together as a block and fixed them down to a chunk of scrap 18 mm ply as a sacrificial backing.

 

 

And after the attentions of the cheapo Chinese pillar drill and 32 mm spade bit.

 

 

And separated. No splinters thanks to the acne riddled backing board seen in the background.

 

[PatB]

Continuing, because I'm not confident of my ability to connect 4 mm plywood edge-to-edge I need some corner blocking. 5 Minutes with some 1/2" thick pine that even the woodworm were complaining about, and a bandsaw and I have all the corner blocking I can eat, even after throwing half of it away in the form of knots.

 

 

Short lengths of the approximately 10 mm x 10 mm corner blocking are added to each end of each crossmember, glued with good quality PVA and pinned in place to save messing around with clamps.

 

 

The crossmembers are glued to the front rail and clamped for a while.

 

 

Then the backscene board is glued in place and similarly clamped.

 

 

Creating something that's just maybe starting to look like a baseboard.

 

 

On with the ends.

 

 

And in with the main board surface.

 

 

 

 

[PatB]

Finally, there was still a bit more torsional movement in the board than I was happy with, in spite of the depth of the section. To counter this I've added a couple of diagonal braces as shown below. I knew those holes in the crossmembers would come in handy.

 

 

One of my other interests is collecting plan sets for homebuilt aircraft, particularly those of wooden construction. Whilst I'll probably never build one, flying machines being even more expensive than my other vices of train sets and motorcycles, I find the structural engineering used  to be very attractive and so the resemblance of this baseboard to the interior of an aircraft wing isn't entirely coincidental.

 

All up it took me between 2 and 3 hours to reach this stage, spread over two rather rushed sessions. The fact that I was working to wood sizes already cut helped considerably, as did the fact that I was already in woodworking mode with tools and materials ready to hand. Still not bad though.I reckon you could build a similar structure in something like foamboard in maybe half the time and it would work fine, although I'd expect it to be more fragile. This board feels very robust and yet is still very light. I'll see if I can get a weight for it tomorrow if I remember,

[nick_bastable]

watching with interest your woodworking skills look excellent

[PatB]

watching with interest your woodworking skills look excellent

Thanks, but I'm an engineer rather than a cabinetmaker. I automatically design stuff (on the run rather than on the drawing board) so that my own rather wobbly cuts and dodgy measurement don't matter too much. Where things need to be accurate I try to use the 'factory' edges of the sheet. Ask me to do a proper woodworking joint and it'll look like my dog did it .

 

Progress is likely to be extremely slow due to lack of time and money. First I have to work out hi to incorporate my desired train turntable fiddleyard having built the board in such a manner as to make it impossible. Time for a slot in that backscene I think.

[Steam_Julie]

Have you considered using the techniques that I have used on Borough Lane? These have been posted on the Ruston Quay's blog.

Julie

[PatB]

Have you considered using the techniques that I have used on Borough Lane? These have been posted on the Ruston Quay's blog.

 

Julie

 

I had  look at the Ruston Quays thread and saw your model of a model, which was very interesting. From what I can see you've incorporated quite a lot of 3-Dness into the scene itself and so your viaduct will add quite a bit of structural stiffness to the layout as a whole. My own (still not finalised) plan is likely to be rather flatter o I've had to put most of the structure below the board surface. I will, however, be placing some tall buildings to the rear which may have plywood shells, creating stiff boxes. I will also probably be adding an additional track bed above the board surface (mostly to compensate for an inaccuracy that crept into construction) which will also help.