Waiting for glue to dry!

Yes, it is that time when I have to wait for the glue to dry. The underlay to the track on the removable section on my Last Great Project 00 gauge layout has now been glued in place complete with the plywood pieces at the baseboard joins.

Ordinary PVA glue is just the job and spread over the whole surface to be glued should make a secure join.

I have poked the holes through the glued underlay where the wiring feeds through to the underside of the baseboard from the crossing complex.

 

All the underlay on the removable baseboard and the plywood sections at the joins have been glued in place. I need to think about weathering the track next. I will have plenty of time to think about that as I wait for the glue to dry!

Drilling times!

Today Mr. Drill came out today! 

Many holes were drilled to feed the various wires through and for the point motors. Amazingly, having fed the wires through and tested that the point motor holes were in the right place, the track actually fitted to the baseboard. Next step is to take it all up again and glue the underlay in place! Sometimes you have to do things many times to do the job properly - that is what I keep drilling into my mind anyway!

24 wires from crossing!

24 wires from crossing is perhaps a bad variation of that hit Gene Pitney song 24 hours from Tulsa! However that is what I have - 24 wires from the crossing. Following several hours of head scratching as to where wires would go and getting the right colour to the correct joint I finally finished the soldering without any swear jar contributions!

Next step is to place it on the baseboard and drill holes for the wires to go through and also holes for the point motors to be fitted. That will be a further testing time!

Once I have got to the stage when the crossing is permanently in place I will be using a mix of these connectors that arrived today.

The blue ones are the same as I used on Chalkdon and allow a number of wires to be joined to one feed. The white chocolate block connectors are a plug and socket type which will allow the power across board joints to be separated when needed. That is the plan at the moment but Woody's plans have a habit of changing as Mrs. Woody can testify!

Fine tuning!

Fine tuning might be taken that I have some form of musical instrument that I have spent some time tuning to optimum musical performance. Well there is a drum kit or two or WMD HQ much to the concern of Mrs. Woody. One is an acoustic kit that never sees the light of day these days due to noise considerations and whilst the other is a neighbour and wife friendly electric kit that only I can hear through headphones when I play it, neither has ever had me fine tune them. Instead the fine tuning I am currently involved in is related to my last great project 00 gauge layout.

As outlined back on Monday I am currently working on track joints at the baseboard joints and I had cut some plywood pieces that would be located at the baseboard joins to which copper clad sleepers would be attached to which the rail would be soldered. Well the plywood has been cut and painted. Giving it a coat of grey paint seals it against any moisture from the glue when I eventually ballast the track and will also ensure any parts not fully covered by ballast will not stand out as they would if I left the plywood in its natural state. 

Luckily Mrs. W had a recent Amazon delivery (not an unusual situation!) and I diverted the discarded packaging from the recycling bin in order to attach the plywood ready for painting.

It certainly made painting easier.

Now back to the fine tuning. To get the best from a model railway the track needs to be level and well laid. Whilst I have a general layout of track, non of it is fine tuned and it shows at some of the joints and the general alignment. Trains run but there are occasional issues which I want to avoid once the track is secured and ballasted. Using Set Track pieces to build a layout at least means that with the set sized pieces and the geometry used it should fit together reasonably well. Mix Set Track and flexitrack and you really have a bit of a nightmare in getting it all to fit properly. Now with my skills, or lack of them, getting track to fit is a challenge! However that fine tuning has to be so I have started.

First off is this crossing with four points and a diamond crossing. I have, for ease of doing things, taken it off the layout. Looks reasonable from a distance.

However, take a closer look at this joint. Whilst it is always useful to have some room for expansion that gap is just to big to give reliable and smooth running.

Taking a close look, I determined I needed to shorten the lower piece of track to close the gap so out came the rail cutters.

Having done that the situation was much improved.

The best way to check how straight the track is is to look down its length at a low level. Looks good to me.

Next job is to solder some power feed wires to the underside. Now that will be an interesting job. For this crossing there will be 24 wires! That should test my soldering skills and possibly fine tune my skills at adding to the swear jar!

WWW - Warm Wet Weather!

 Tuesday and a day at the Rocks by Rail Museum and with the www - warm wet weather - yet more grass cutting and a bit of weeding for added variety!

Weeding consisted of picking out the weeds from the display of narrow gauge equipment. There is a layer of terrane under the woodchips which is supposed to suppress weeds but is that old now it has broken up.

It may not be perfect but it looks better. Up in the top right hand corner you can see a red and cream wagon that Thomas had just got out of the shed to paint. Remember that - we will come back to that in a minute.

A few minutes later the mower and myself were at the far end of the site - furthest point from the buildings - just as a thunderstorm came in. Luckily a tree offered me some shelter until the rain passed over.

Meanwhile that red and cream wagon had to be hastily returned back inside but it is progressing.

In the restoration shed Ketton No1 has progressed. The new bonnet is on and it is beginning to look smart in its Racing Green livery.

Meanwhile the brake van has come out of the shed to be replaced with this wagon chassis which will be a wooden sided wagon.

Although the chassis is generally in good condition, John is using his experience and knowledge to get rd of the last bits of rust such as between the leaves of the springs. A chisel and saw blade may be unconventional but in true John fashion it works!

This bit of chassis may require a bit more then a hammer and chisel but John will sort it!

I will see how far things have moved on next week!

Slow ahead!

As the captain of a ship or indeed the Star Ship Enterprise would say when entering unchartered waters - Slow ahead! That is exactly what I am having to do with my Last Great Project 00 gauge layout. When I started building the layout over two years ago I decided to make it movable. The idea was that the baseboards could be separated and the layout moved out of the Man Cave. Now this involves having breaks in the scenery - relatively simple to do - and breaks in the track - not so easy. I have built layouts before with breaks in the track. Chalkdon, my 009 narrow gauge layout is one of them, so I know the basics. However with Chalkdon there were just two breaks in the track. With the 00 gauge layout there are about 26! So the method I use to make the joints has to be robust and easy to replicate.

At the baseboard joints I will be replacing two of the plastic track sleepers either side of the join with some copper clad fiber sleepers. The rail can be soldered to the copper clad sleepers making a strong joint - certainly stronger than the plastic sleepers. I am laying the track on a 6mm foam underlay and the track will be glued to that. However the foam underlay will not be suitable to fasten the copper clad sleepers to so I will need to substitute the underlay with some 6mm plywood cut to size. The photo below shows the basic principal.

Having cut a sample piece of plywood to further test this uncharted idea it seemed fine.

Putting the plywood either side of the baseboard joint and I can see that I have space for two copper clad sleepers to be glued to the plywood either side of the join.

Looks good - to me anyway!

Just need to cut more plywood now but that will only be the start with wiring weathering and ballasting still to come! Still lets just proceed with slow ahead at the moment! At least I don't have Klingons on the starboard bow!

Getting closer to nature on Route 66?

I always enjoy Summer with the general growth of things, the bright colours that plants and flowers provide and the activity of wildlife as they bring their off spring up. The older I have become seemingly the more Summer means to me. I guess it is a getting old thing! So, today, when Mrs. Woody announced she wanted to go to a local country house to have a look around the house and gardens I was not going to argue - I never disagree with what Mrs. W says anyway! We arrived at the country house to find that it was holding a car show. Now some decades ago I would have thought that this sheer coincidence must make it my lucky day and have driven straight in. However Mrs. W and myself agreed (now that is an unusual occurrence) that it just looked too crowded and we drove off. We did end up back at the tranquility of Easton Walled Gardens where we visited a few weeks ago.

One of the nice things about the garden is that it is always changing as nature goes through the seasons and that you always find something new to look at. The other thing is that the gardens are large enough to leave some areas uncultivated so that nature can take over and the results can be stunning with grasses and wild flowers providing an oasis.

There were a lot of bees, butterflies and wasps and I stretched the capabilities of my camera phone to try to catch a bee and wasp as they hunted for nectar.

 It just hits you that this simple activity by these insects, repeated trillions of times around the World, is the basis of how we all keep alive. Amazing!

There are of course the more cultivated areas where form and order are displayed such as the universe garden where the galaxy and planets are represented in a mix of plant and sculpture form .

Further down the flower beds are dominated by large plants to an amazing effect.

At the moment sweet peas are one of the highlights of the gardens where they are grown for display and then the seeds are taken for the next years plants as well as for selling on through the on site shop.

It is strange how sometimes there can be the most unusual connection but having driven away from a car show to come to the gardens instead I find one of the varieties of sweet pea called Route 66 which from having driven some of it is probably the biggest car show ever!

Anyway a great afternoon and time spent sitting lazily in the sun for me and Mrs. W as well as this robotic lawn mower which had decided to call it a day and had parked up!

There is another reason I like to get close to nature at the walled gardens - they sell amazing cakes some of which came back to WMD HQ!

Back at WMD HQ work on my Last Great Project 00 gauge layout is progressing but would easily be taken over by nature if allowed! I have now finished the track work to extend the loop over the viaduct.

I am now in a position where I can start to fasten track down permanently as well as wiring it up and ballasting it. Or should I just let nature do it?

Doing things twice!

Having got back to trying to make some progress on my Last Great Project 00 gauge layout I was somewhat frustrated with myself that I have ended up doing some things twice. Now whilst Mrs. Woody will confirm that I do some things twice, like a visit to a place where the second visit is to apologise for the first visit, I try to avoid this where unnecessary. So it was a bit concerning to find I had to rebuild parts of the viaducts because they had warped. This was a major issue at either end of the viaducts but some carefully inserted foam board and card has both dealt with the warping issue and brought the railbed level of the viaduct to inline with that on the baseboard. 

Hopefully once I find the missing capping stones to the piers I can say that the viaducts are finished - both of them!

Sometimes I should try and remember!

A busy day at WMD HQ today with a trip to the scrap yard to cash in my collection of scrap metal that I have gathered. £8.50 just for a scrap car battery! That will buy some lemon drizzle cakes! Anyway with an empty car it was back to WMD HQ to pack it again for a trip to the waste recycling center. Never one to miss an opportunity Mrs. W had given me a small list of things to pick up whilst I was out. Small list??? £121 later I returned to HQ to unpack that small list!

Whilst exhausted from the effort of typing my pass code in to pay for the 'small list' of items (I am waiting for the machine to one day tell the assistant to retain the card and destroy the customer) I did have some time in the Man Cave. In yesterdays post I did say I needed to next do some work to the second viaduct. Well there was a reason for that which for reasons of exhaustion I forgot! However it relates to the fact that I am lengthening the loop of track that runs over that viaduct. Sense would say do the viaduct first then the track. I have done the track first! Not a major issue but I will need to lift the track again to work on the viaduct.

This is the end of the loop that I want to extend.

The photo below shows the point has been moved back which will extend the loop by about a foot or 30cm depending on your preferred measurement system!

As there was a need to form some curves using flexi track I used an old trick of stripping the sleepers off the rail. I then bent the rail to the curve I needed and rethreaded the rail onto the sleepers. If you just try to bend the track with the rail attached to the sleepers it will fight back and try to straighten itself so this is a good way to avoid that problem.

I have got further with the track laying but forgot to take photos so more tomorrow when I may have actually done the necessary work on the viaduct - if I remember!

Don't do this at home!

Well I think I can just about say, after seven months, that the conservatory rebuild exterior work is now complete! Mrs. Woody will be pleased to cross that off her list of jobs for me to do. It is indeed a rare occasion that she can tick a job off so it may be time to have a slice of lemon drizzle cake to celebrate!

The job that brought it all to a completion was the setting of the step slabs on a bed of cement and then the final gravel surround. The slabs weigh a lot. I used to be able, many years ago, to lift and carry these but these days I am more limited to lifting a slice of lemon drizzle cake and carrying it to the lounge to eat! I really did not fancy trying to give myself a bad back by lifting the slabs on and off the bricks so my ingenious if somewhat safety challenged solution was to raise one end of the slab and hold it up with a stout piece of timber whilst I put the mortar on the bricks. With careful and consistent application of the mortar the slab should, when lowered be level. It was whilst putting the mortar to the back of the slab that my mind kept worrying about the slab falling on my arms and whether this ingenious idea was indeed as ingenious as I thought.

Well the fact that I am writing this post is confirmation that no accidents happened but my advice is, don't do this at home!

With the slabs bedded on mortar and the surrounds graveled up it is finished!

To celebrate I cut the grass and then had an hour in my Man Cave where I did some more work on finishing one of the viaducts. The job required the end brick piers to be fitted which I left off when I first built the viaducts as I needed to adjust the height of the viaduct in relation to the track level. Now this is where another don't do this at home warning comes in. When I built the viaduct back in November last year I made up the stone capping stones to go on top of the piers. I put them somewhere safe awaiting the moment that I would need them. Where that place is is beyond me! So, if you do stop building something to come back to it later make sure you put the remaining parts somewhere safe but leave a note of where that is with whatever you are building! 

However I have replaced the first viaduct which is now level with the track following the addition of some card to the foundations and has the end piers are fitted. I will find the capping stones sometime!

Next up is the second viaduct.