Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Unlegless

After quite a few months of having the modules set up on the floor to work on, my back has been telling me lately that its not really happy with this continuing state of affairs. However the solution was in the garage.


I purchased these legs for a collapsible table several years ago. All I had to do was get a couple of 6' long bits of 4 by 1, and spend 10 minutes with some screws. While somewhat precarious it seems to work fine.

With my new workbench set up, it was time to start connecting up the track between the first 2 modules. I have started with the seaward side of the station as its the easiest bit to do. I worked out the position of this part of the track work with reference to the scissors crossover, and then stuck it down with double sided sellotape. I then laid the rails up to the end of the modules and made sure that they matched the rails on the other side of the join. This was then fixed by soldering to a brass bar as before. It still has to be glued into position, and I might use another method to exactly align the rails.


It looks OK, I don't think that there is much of a hump across the join, and its getting that wee bit closer to getting this stage of the project completed. I'm just starting to wonder if I should have built something a bit smaller. (still, there would be no challenge in that, would there!)

Oh, and while my back is a bit better, I seem to have problems with my legs now. Might have to invest in a decent stool...

2 comments:

Earwicker said...

You've made some pretty good progress. Looks great!

Anonymous said...

Progress indeed...

I used these same legs for the end-loop modules of my Manawatu Gorge series. Likewise, I found them somewhat unstable so put some diagonal bracing (attached with G clamps initially) the length of the module. This effected a great improvement to the stability.
I also put telescopic pipes in the legs secured with hose clamps to increase the module height to the original NZ120 standard height.