Page 15 - March April 2006
P. 15

Non-Sense or Sense
In the past you have probably remembered my efforts mainly as the Non-sense variety. This time I am hoping to lean a little more towards the more sensible side of life. The demise of my old layout Driftwood Canyon happened this year. I expect some of you might have seen it, as I had it for over five years and took it to many venues in and around the south. I put it up for sale and it went to a new home.
Well in February 2005, I suffered a heart attack, and having got over it, decided that lugging a fairly heavy layout probably wasn’t quite so sensible any more. After all, when it was packed up it was still two lumpy boxes; granted they did have wheels, but they were still quite heavy to lift into the car, plus a holdall with minor boards, which was no lightweight. Then of course there were the tools, as well as rolling stock etc.
I thought I needed to manage things a little bit better, so sold it around August or September 2005. Even before it went I had been thinking of the future, and what I should do now. How could I produce something that was more manageable? After a lot of pondering I thought I’d make a complete layout in a box. It would have to be a lot lighter than before, so the latest plan was hatched. Shortly after starting to think about it, my pal Bill Antliff offered me two slices of two-inch blue foam, each two feet by four feet. He had ended up with a surplus after building his portable layout.
Having felt the rigidity and lightness, I was hooked, and I felt this is the stuff to use. Now what shall I put on it? Then came the hard bit; I trawled though various books of layout plans, not finding anything I really wanted. I didn’t want it too big, and thought that seven feet by two feet seemed about right as, when folded, it would be just 3' 6" and easily fit most cars.
After a while I harped back to a previous layout, the one before last, also in a box, which was based on Ian Rice’s Lilliput Logger. I had slightly modified that and turned it into my ‘Harpers Ferry’.
I dragged the plan out and thought about what I could do to alter it just, not wanting it the same again. A few minor variations would do the job in question quite nicely, fulfilling most of what I had in mind. The result was I had: ‘A’, a figure of eight, ‘B’ twin loops, and ‘C’ a branch line with either, which I thought was quite complex for a 2' x 7' effort!
Then I had to think about joining the two box halves together and still be able to open it up. The first thing that hits you is you need the hinges higher than the scenery. At the rear this doesn’t really present too much of a problem, but at the front you would obvi- ously end up with a tall pillar with a hinge on top, right in the middle, bang in front of the noses of the viewing public. I sup- posed that it could just be hidden as a hideous block of flats, but that’s not really acceptable. So a much more sensible solution was needed!
The first solution I thought of was to make the pillar removable. It should be possible, but you would need the tools to take it off and put it back, more to bring, more to forget, plus more work on arrival! All in all, not all that practicable!
The second idea turned out to be the answer; at the time I told myself that I was brilliant – you have to do that, no-one else is going to! So I patted myself on the back and hoped it would work.
Obviously the front had to fold down, otherwise you would just be looking into a box; the real brainwave was to fix the pillar to the folding front pieces, so it folded down with them out of the way. Now the only problem was to make it work!
Now I had a plan, all I had to do was follow it and not over- engineer it, and make it too heavy. I chose to make it with 3.5 mm plywood with 9 mm ends, to the middle two of which I fitted location dowels, so that once opened it would fit together nicely.
I bought an 8' x 4' sheet of 3.5 mm plywood and, after cutting out all the pieces that I needed, I found I have almost used the lot.
Allan Dobson
There may be a couple of sky boards left. I got the 9 mm ends from our local timber merchant who cut them for me, a lot squarer than I could, so it would fit together better. At first I thought that the whole thing might be too flimsy, but this has not yet proved to be the case.
The baseboards or trays, for want of a better word, were made of two 9 mm ends, 600 mm x 250 mm. I glued and screwed two pieces of roof batten on the inside bottom edge to support the two-inch foam, suitably cut to approx 3' 6".
I then made the sides the same height as the ends, which I then cut lengthways about 31⁄2" from the base, then glued and pinned the smaller piece to the ends at the bottom. Then I fitted the hinges, reinforcing them as necessary with 3.5 mm ply, and attached the upper portions to them, thus making a tray shape with drop-down sides. The whole tray was then placed on a flat surface, putting a spare piece of batten under the middle to stop it sagging, and was then glued all the way around the edges with PVA and left overnight to set. The following day I turned it upside down and glued all around the bottom. Once this was set I found that I had a very light and strong half box.
A couple of days later I had the other completed, making me the matched pair. I placed the trays end to end having located previously-fitted dowels, and laid my loose track in the trays. Having decided where the tracks would go, and where they would pass through 3.5 mm ply backboards, I cut the necessary holes in the backboards and fitted them, gluing the bottom edges into slots cut in the foam. I used small fillets at the ends; they finished up just the same height as the top of the trays.
The two then needed to be joined together; this was accomplished by first fitting the rear pillar by shaping a pair of 2" x 1" pillars and cutting the middle joining ends to fit. So far so good; the second pillar turned out much easier to fit, but first I had to cut away some of the middle joining boards, to make room for the shape of the scenery and the tracks.
The pillar was then easily fixed. The front sides were put up and the pillar clamped and glued to them. Later on it was slightly modified to make it a bit shorter and tidier.
The next step was to sort out the closure system – case clips seemed the obvious choice. The box was closed and the corners lined up, then case clips fitted. It was soon obvious that the alignment (my woodwork!) was not quite perfect. So I had to come up with an alignment feature. This was 3.5 mm guiding strips fitted to the inside and outside of one end, guiding the lid firmly into the right position.
This only left the long sides (front and back) to deal with. I de- cided to do the same with the sides as I did with the ends, that is, turn them into tongues and grooves. I cut 2" wide strips of 3.5 mm ply and glued them either side, on front and back of one tray, clamping them until dry. As I closed the box, because the pillar was attached to the fronts, the tongue fed straight into the groove automatically, and when the box was clipped together the whole thing was locked together nicely. Later I had to fit elastic bands with hooks to make sure both sides closed tightly together, as there was a little warping to control; however, this has all turned out fine, adding very little weight.
Having completed the box, track was fitted straight on the foam and most of the base scenery, made of polystyrene, was added. Also fitted was a Digitrax Zephyr, plus a base socket and remote control. The transformer was also fitted to it safely and out of sight. At this stage I decided to weigh the whole thing on the bathroom scales. It read 15 kg, which to my thinking was not too bad. Since then I have added further scenery and await the final weigh-in.
The track was laid quite easily by pinning it down with large- headed dressmaking pins and applying the usual watered-down PVA glue mixture formula and resting house bricks on it overnight; in fact a lot of my work was done thus on its own overnight. Holes were dug into the foam for the switch motors, and wires fed through to the bottom, the beauty of the foam being that,
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