Latest News (on the construction):
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21/01/2012
Backboards painted in a Matt Sky Blue colour.
10/01/2012
Painting of the front of the layout complete!
08/01/2012
I'm currently in the process of filling all the holes in the baseboard. After that is complete, I'll finally actually be able to get on with the painting and back-board fixing. After that, I can get on with track-laying.
31/12/2011
Legs complete!! I finally finished the legs. The legs are fully un-mountable using bolts and the whole layout is stable on it's own legs. I still need to do a small bit more of bracing on one of the pairs of legs, but it works as it is, which is a good sign. Hopefully, I'll be able to start on the electrics (or at least a few of the point motors) sometime this week. However, before I can do that, I 'd like to put together some sort of fiddle yard using some spare MDF board. The Hardboard back-boards also need to be painted Duck-egg Blue (although that's not too much of a priority at the moment) and I'll probably be painting all of the bare-wood which won't be scenically covered with black paint. For now though, I'm revealed that my legs work.. :)
Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year for tomorrow.
28/12/2011
As you might expect, the last 7 days have been very quiet on the layout side of things. However, today I managed to get back to the garage to get on with some more structural work on the baseboard so that I can secure the legs using pieces of dowel, rather than screws (I'm using the second method that I described in the previous entry). Basically, I've had to add extra bits of bracing so that the legs can be removable very easily for exhibition use. Tomorrow I should be able to finish off the extra-bracing by painting it all with Matt Black. 23/12/2011I'm now getting on to the problem of legs and stability. I've basically got two options: I can go for a screw-on option... I have some old (but quite heavy) table legs with metal plates attached to the top. When setting up at an exhibition, I could just simply screw the metal plates onto an extra thick piece of wood secured to the bottom of the base board. The second (and more likely) idea is: I could go for a different idea, whereby I specially-produce some legs which, at an exhibition, I would use dowel pegs to secure them to the baseboard edge bracing. I think that the second idea is going to be a much more user-friendly mechanism because with the first option, it'll most likely take up too much time to screw on all the legs and the table legs are only a metre in height, and I'd like the layout to be at a height of 1.2 metres.
22/12/2011
Second coat of black paint applied
21/12/2011
First coat of Black paint applied.
20/12/2011
Quite a lot of work done on the layout today; I used some home-made filler (made out of a mix of wood-glue and saw-dust) to fill any gaps on the base-board, I then sanded them down, I got on with cutting out the pieces of flexible hard-board for the back-scene, sanded the edges of those and I prepared every thing for painting the bare wood that wasn't going to be covered by the TMD itself, Matt black tomorrow. Steady, steady progress.. :)
19/12/2011
Not much work completed on the layout today. I only glued on some spare pieces of soft pine for a solid fixing for the back-scene boards.
18/12/2011
No work completed on the layout base-board, but instead I purchased a rather nice Hornby Class 56 in Petroleum Sector livery with working fans, sprung buffers and very good lights, as well as two Bachmann TTA Fuel Tanker wagons for me to weather in the near future. Please see the entry on the 'On my Workbench' page for pictures.
17/12/2011
Baseboard completed using two pieces of scrap MDF salvaged from previous layouts, as described on the 'About the Layout' page.
16/12/2011
Two pieces of scrap MDF found for a base-board of some sort.
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Almere Road TMD, 2012
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Almere Road TMD, 2012
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