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I can't believe it. I was getting back to working on the track, stretched out on a scaffold to reach the center, and when I backed up to get off, I stopped short and put my knee down a foot short of the spot I was sure I was on. I put my knee right through the elevated roadway and crushed it right through. Now, I'm rebuilding one half of one lane on a 10+ year old MDF track for about five feet. Phooey. If my shirt had been a size smaller I could have seen where my knee was coming down, but I had to guess.

It isn't that hard to fix, but I feel so guilty for screwing up this wonderful old track. phooey again.

I tell you, when I get this thing running, its going to really be something. Cypress swamp, timber elevated roadway, shrimp boats, a beer joint in the woods with suspicious trailers out back and questionable women in the doorways... its going to really be something to see. But I have to stop breaking it up being clumsy to get it done...

We have all been there. It makes the track even better...one more story to go with it.

Update-
After some headscratching and scaffold rebuilding- in only three days, I have 2 and 1/2 lanes done, and about 12 feet of the second half of the third one. Its a huge workout on my hands an knees, and some of it gets taped only 10 inches or so per scaffold change, but its working, and best of all, the wiring beneath has stayed intact so far. I have been running cars on the lanes as I finish them.

Maybe soon I can get back to designing the scenery like I was doing when the previous taping went to crap. I still plan on shrimp boats, bateaus, and pirogues. There will be a nasty beer joint with suspicious trailers out back, pelicans and lots of alligators. Maybe a corn liquor still, and lots of cypress knees, or staubs, as we called them. I had just begun to collect items for it when the adhesive on the copper tape showed its age.

For those who tend to stockpile materials like I do, let me warn you... Copper tape for stained glass eventually has an adhesive degradation that will fail, not right away, but a year or so later, after you have burnished it so hard and so many times, it should have melded with the paint on the track. That's how I got in this position.

Disappeared too quick for those who have expressed interest- so, BUMP!

how about a picture?

I laid on a 2' X 5' hunk of 4" insulation when I painted all my bluffs, took weeks to do all the washes and plant the green stuff

hey look at you :text-bravo:

going to be a great looking tape job

The trick is to distribute as much of my weight as possible on the track to keep from causing the sections from shifting, cracking the paint. In order to get the wiring clearance under the track without perforating the table below, I laid large sections of plastic spacer, with traces for the wiring left between them. Trouble is, the retaping causes me to have to get up on top, which I didn't have to do before, and it took a while to figure out a way to get scaffolding together that a 64 year old can climb up on top of. The big worry as I go forward is that I can't test the wiring for damage until the taping is complete on each lane.