I’ve had a busy day today!

First and foremost, the upper frame is complete. My hands and arms are pretty numb right now, but the baseboard is connected to the wooden frame that I showed in the previous baseboard update on March 8th. I now have to think about raising the entire platform on legs, but that’s a job for another day.

I’ve also completed all the repairs I can do to the Duke of Gloucester model. The new body shell had already been applied earlier this week, but I’ve also had a chance today to strengthen the valve gear mechanism with some washers and replace the front bogie. It still wiggles when running on straights, but it definitely feels a lot smoother overall now. It’s come a long way since its first photo!

Before	After

Finally, I’ve started trying to get the Robert the Devil model back up and running, with mixed results. It now runs but occasionally sounds like something is grinding. I’ve had the bottom of the locomotive off and oiled all the bearings, but it’s not had any major effect so far. I’ll keep trying though.

I’ve spent the better part of this weekend working with wood. I’m currently working on the upper part of the frame, which provides the majority of the support to the two baseboard pieces. This frame is the main one that gets connected to the legs and raised up to vaguely table height.

Since this frame attaches to the baseboard, I’ve had to clear away the layout for now. It’s disappeared into a set of boxes for now (which has helped with filling out the missing images in the parts list!)

I woke up quite early on Saturday morning in order to visit the local wood recycling centre and picked up several metres of 3×1.5 timber pieces — I’d wanted 3×2 pieces, but they didn’t have enough of that size in. They have a basic cutting machine there, but cannot guarantee accuracy in terms of length so I took a few estimated lengths and brought them home to finish off with my own saw.

The frame I’m building uses four primary support beams to hold the baseboard pieces together. Between these four beams are three “lanes” of smaller beams to help keep the space between the primary beams equal. While the recycling centre could easily give me timber for the main supports, the little spacer beams needed to be cut from a set of longer pieces.

I have a wood saw but, without any way to secure anything, all it did was make the beams slide about as opposed to cutting them. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to cut everything with a much smaller hacksaw.

While the wood was pretty decent quality, the edges were a bit on the rough side. I went to my local hardware shop and picked up a wood planing tool to help smooth them off. For reference, this is a solid metal tool with a slit in it where an adjustable blade sits. When you run it up and down the beam, it takes off any uneven surfaces. I mainly used it to chamfer off the edges of the wood, where splinters were starting to appear.

Once all the wood was cut to size, I started thinking about how to keep the pieces together. The easiest option was to use dowels and screws. I drilled holes into the ends of the spacer beams and slotted in some dowels. I then drilled holes in the support beams to put the dowels and slotted the spacer beams in them. This should hold the beams together with enough force to add the baseboard and screw the whole lot together. I’m also looking to get some corner braces to help reinforce the joins.

Unfortunately, I don’t have enough screws to complete the frame currently so that means another trip to the hardware store over the week so that I can try and complete this section next weekend. More carpentry updates to come!

Mainly work on trying to get the Tornado working without its DCC chip. This is the chassis without the body applied.

There’s aslo been a considerable amount of work getting wood for the table: more on that tomorrow.