by midmoslts » Wed Apr 08, 2015 7:45 pm
I made a trip to the store to get hardware to bolt everything together today. Other than that I didn't really do anything but some straightening up. Thought this may be a good time to do a recap.
On day 1, worked on my own after work. Laid out some legs. The reason for this is that I was wanting to try to use some plywood that I had from some stuff I had taken apart in the past. As I was not sure how many I would get from the material I had I wanted to get them laid out to see how much I would still need to buy before the official start of the build.
Day 2, worked on my own after work. Laid out and cut some legs. Had to quit when the pulley on my table saw broke. Now I could tell that I was going to have enough material to get all the legs done without buying any more.
Day 3, Good Friday so I had the day off. Today I had help. I started by fixing the table saw then we started by cutting the triangles for the legs. 35 legs so 70 triangles in all. Now for the good stuff. The track has 6 straightaways so we set up the table saw and ripped 3 of the sheets in half. That quick we had the material for the straights prepped. We didn't cut any of them down to length yet. In the end we could have cut them down to the exact length that I had drawn them to, but we opted to be cautious and wait until we were further along and double check as we went. Next we set up to do the turns. We started with the 96" 180 degree that sits in the middle of the track as the overpass. By the end of the day we had all the turns cut and everything laid out on the floor. We still had not cut down the straights. Cleaned up lots of sawdust and called it a day.
Day 4, working with Tom again. Tom worked on cutting the slots in the legs and getting them assembled. I must say that tom worked hard on this part. Legs look simple, but if you want the slots in them so they are adjustable it is a lot of work. While Tom worked on the legs I cut 2x4's down to the width of the track and then ripped them on one edge. The reason to cut the one edge was to give a square edge to put against the bottom of the track. Then I started on the elliptical router jig for the first slot. Next up was screwing and gluing all 2x4's to the track. Got started on gluing the parts together until we ran out of glue, daylight, and steam.
Day 5, Working together again. Back to gluing and screwing things together. Started clamping the sections together. We started with the parts that we knew were fixed points and would not change. The 8' straight along the back was joined to the 180 overpass turn. Next we checked the length of the straight that connected to the other side of the turn. All was good so we cut it and clamped it in place. Then we clamped the 2 turns on the left end of the track in place. Every thing still looked good and was following the track plan as it should. Now we were onto the turns that have off angles (more or less than 180 degrees). The 14' straight was clamped up with the corner on the left end of the track and the others were laid in place to be sure we didn't miss any important details and that they would all be able to connect at the tangent point. Still looking good so the corner was cut to size and lamped up to the straight. Again laying all the rest of the pieces out to be sure everything was fitting up properly. Then the front stretch on the right was extended to the 9'6" length and put back for a final check. Still looking good we located the tangent and cut the turn. Another part out of the way and everything still going as planned. We keep repeating the check fit, find tangent point, mark, cut, check fit, and clamp in place method. As the sun started to set we were running out of energy, but we had all the track cut and fitted together on the floor.
Day 6, working with a little help from the wife for about an hour. We got the legs on the front stretch and dog leg. Stood them up and clamped them together.
I have been tinkering, but not doing any real work beyond that. I do hope to get some done tonight, but will have to see how I feel by the time I get home and what's going at home when I get there.
Last edited by
midmoslts on Thu Apr 09, 2015 11:48 am, edited 1 time in total.