Building the first section eastbound

As we have now laid out the roadbed on the paper on the floor, we sketched in a curved edge to the benchwork as you come into the room from the foyer.
With that diagram, I am able to cut the wood to the right angles to create the flow to match the roadbed. You can see the pieces on the floor as I build the parts to be able to assemble the parts into bench work. The kids (11 with families) were home for Christmas and my son Justin helped me to raise the parts into a finished assembly. We started with the rear spine that was along straight section of 1 by 4 pine. The cross members were then screwed and glued to it. We made the section by the short wall first as seen in picture three as it attached to the river crossing section way back on the right. That was bolted to the wall and then the long section was raised onto temporary legs so we could attach the two together. Once that was done, the flexible plywood front section was screwed and glued to the crossmembers. The plywood is one half the thickness of the pine so I laminate two sections together and use the clamps to hold it while the glue sets. This gives me the ability to make the curved sections.

This pine that I am using actually was purchased back in 1990 from Pat Mitchell who had a business building large scale scenery then. So it has aged in my house for a long time - who says O scalers don't plan ahead!!

In the last shot you see the finished section with the curved flow. The legs are steel square tubing that Pat Mitchell obtained for me and then taught me how to weld back in the early 90's. I fabricated about 30 legs and can now finally use them.

As I watch thebenchwork go up, I get anxious to get some track down but have to be patient.