Framework

Wow, actual construction. I bet you were wondering if I would ever get around to discussing it. Heck I was wondering if I would ever get around to doing it.

My primary guide to building framewok is Linn Westcott's How to Build Model Railroad Benchwork. It is a great guide to building rock solid benchwork.

When we bought the house I claimed one room in the basement. The room is 15' by 30' and was finished with dry wall except for some shelves built from unfinished pine on one wall. I ripped out these shelves and piled up the wood where it sat for 7 years. I then finished the rest of the walls with dry wall. The actual walls of the room are made of concrete blocks. To this someone attached 2" by 4" by 8' studs and put dry wall over this. One interesting thing to note is that the ceilings in this room are 8' 6" high. Yup, you guessed it. The walls do not go all the way up to the ceiling. This leaves me pretty nervous about the strength on these walls. So one of my rules is to not depend on the walls for support. This means all of my benchwork is free standing. It just happens to be right next to the walls.

Once I finished the walls I put in track lighting. I have gotten complaints that there is not enough light to work with. The amount of lights you can put in the tracks is limited by the wattage. I figure by switching from incandescent lights to the new florescent lights I can increase the number of light fixtures. Also the florescent lights are brighter than the incandescent lights. We will see if that fixes the problem. Right now I just tell people to turn the lights to point at what they are working on.

Remember that pile of wood I mentioned earlier? That all went into the framework. Ernie brought over his radial arm saw and we spent a lot of time ripping wood to the right dimensions. What a mess. Saw dust everywhere. We had to vacuum ourselves off before we left the room or we would drag it all over the house. You can imagine what my wife's reaction to that would have been. The wood I had saved was a mess. It had never been properly finished and the shelves were not of solid construction. As a result, I put some rather warped wood into the framework. But what the heck, the Earth is not flat either. I am still catching flack for this.

The lower deck is a lattice framework. The height of the lower deck was determined by the clearance required to store my NTrak modules. No ergonomic studies, no determining the optimum viewing angles. All that mattered was storage. Pretty sad huh? The net result is that the lower deck is about 37" high. On the plus side I did find some really neat shop stools at Sears. They have wheels and adjustable height. They should be great for operating the layout when the time comes. I figure I will need two for the Oneonta yard operators and a couple more for road jobs that are switching along the lower deck.

Most of the upper deck is at 55" high. It just seemed to be a comfortable height. The staging yard is at 60" high because I want to hide most of it from view. To support the upper deck, I built the back leg of the framework right next to the wall. The leg is either a 2x3 or a 2x4 and extends through the lower deck ending at the top of the upper deck. I then glue/bolted a joist to it and a small support brace to give it some strength. The upper deck is of open grid construction to keep its thickness to a minimum.

The construction of the framework went pretty quickly. I took a set of pictures in February and another set in March. This pretty much catches the story up to the end of March.