Base Boards part 2
Well its been a month since my last blog entry, so I thought it was about time I posted something up! Once the number plates for the Dean Good's turn up I'll post up some pictures of the finished loco. I've been promised delivery by the end of the month, so hopefully not too long a wait!
Although not much progress has been made on the modelling front, my modelling room has come on considerably. I've finished skimming and painting the plasterboard walls and laid a laminate floor. It used to feel pretty bleak working in there, but I think once I've got a few railway pictures on the walls it will be a nice place to be!
I've been working on the off stage part of the layout, building a train turntable type of fiddle yard. The outside frame of the fiddle yard board was built in a similar fashion to the other 3 main boards, using the MDF beam method. A piece of 9mm MDF was cut to fit accross the width of the frame work and the center was marked.
I wanted to use a "Lazy Susan" type bearing to support the train turntable which at 1400 mm long would need a fair bit of support. The bearings come in a variety of sizes, the one I've used is 300mm diameter.
Once the bearing had been fixed in position, the supporting piece of MDF was fitted to the baseboard framework.
The underside of the bearing support was strengthened by the addition of MDF beams.
A piece of 9mm thick MDF was cut to form the train turntable top, each end was radiused and then fitted on top of the Lazy Susan bearing. Feeling pretty pleased with myself I rotated the fiddle yard expecting in to swing right round, which it did until it hit the workshop wall! This most definetely wasn't part of the plan. Originally the layout was going to be 4' 6" deep, but I decided that in retrospect even my long arms wouldn't reach the back of the layout. I consequently built the baseboards to the reduced width of 4 feet. What I hadn't considered was the fact that the fiddle yard was still 4'6" inches long and so when spun round, stuck out 3 inches either side of the layout! This obviously required a bit of a rethink.
After a bit of head scratching I decided I could either move the whole layout 3 inches forward away from the wall, or to change the pivot point on the fiddle yard. I decided moving the entire layout solution was a bit of a cop out, so went for the changing the pivot point option. Luckily it was possible to bring the paper trackwork template forward by 3 inches on the baseboards, so I could still maintain alignment with the turntable. The Lazy Susan was repositioned on it's supporting board and then the turntable was put back in place. This time when I spun the turntable it was possible for it to do a full rotation without clouting the wall.
I've added additional support under the main layout boards using more MDF beams, which will hopefully minimise any distortion during the rest of the layouts consruction.
The last picture shows the state of play in the workshop so far. I'm planning on tackling the back scene and fascia boards next.
In past layouts before laying the track I've always glued cork floor tiles to the base boards using Copydex glue. Although I've found this method succesful, I'm wondering if there are any other methods that people have used to provide a resilient track bed?
Best wishes
Dave
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