Gameroom
Pinball
Mame
Train
Bubble Hockey
 | G-Scale train Project Page |
| Staining the wood |  |
The next step was to start staining some of the lumber before assembly. (why? well because it would be a real pain to stain in between 2200 ties.) So at this point we picked out a nice cedar gel stain and got to work. Sue and Kathy stained the long pieces and I did the train ties. We did not do all of the rails since we will have to bend a few of them for curves and you don't want to stain it and then soak it in water. I should also mention that when I stained the ties, I stained the entire 36" dowel. We plan to sand and touch up the ends after the assembly is done.
| The first assembly! | |
Once the initial staining was done, we had to do a test assembly of a straight section. with that in mind, we built a jig and then Nick and I proceeded to construct the first straight section. We found that getting the spacing just right was a bit of a problem with the jig, but we finally got the jig adjusted correctly and the end result looks pretty darn neat!Here are some photos:
| Bending wood | |
Before this project, I had never attempted to bend wood. I think this was probably the biggest fear I had about doing tihs project. With this in mind I decided that if I couldn't bend wood, I would take another approach for creating the curves by cutting angled pieces and assembling them to make a pseduo curve. However I did some research and it seems many people like to build steam boxes. I was going to build one, until I found a sight that said there is a simpler way to do this by just using water and fabric softener. So I filled up the bath tub with water, dumped some fabric softner into the water and then put a piece of wood in there. Amazingly it worked! here is a photo of the first piece of wood I tested:
It took some trial and error to get the length of time to soak and the length of time to dry, and the radius to bend to, but after a few broken boards and many hours I seem to be getting the hang of it. I bought a piece of PVC pipe from home depot and capped one end of it to serve as my soaker chamber. Currently I am letting the wood soak for 2 days and then dry for 2 days before I take it off of the forms. Below shows the forms and how the boards are clamped as well as the first finished piece of the curve. (I need to find a photo of the jig we used to get teh spacing right for the ties for the curve, maybe next time I'll put that up)
Thats all for now. There is a ton more work to do and I'll be sure to put more up here as we continue this project. (i bet based on this so far you think it's done! lol. These two pieces represent about 9 feet of the total 200 feet of track, not to mention constructing supports to hold the track up and all the work in the game room to allow the train to pass through walls :) There is more to come, trust me :) see you next time.
Scott