Made a lot of sawdust tonight on just five jigsaw cuts. Admittedly most of those cuts were in excess of four feet long each. And this is what I made:

No, it’s not a wooden saguaro cactus silhouette (like the ones used in the night time scenes of Silver Streak) but rather the trackboard for Dominion Tar & Chemical. The spur on the right is where poles were loaded into three and five car sets for shipment all over the continent to be used for power poles.

It’s not much, but it’s still progress.

What a day of progress!

Cam came over in the morning and we got to work on getting benchwork built for the lower deck. But before we did that, I wanted to get that chopsaw stand that Murray brought over on the 21st into action. Turns out that shelf I was going to use (the top off the table my brother made eons ago) was the perfect size for the base of the chopsaw, and shortly after, the chopsaw was secured using bits of ready-rod, spare nuts and washers from the now-complete helix construction, and we can finally use it as intended. I even have the ability to do much of the work solo now that I don’t have to have someone hold up a long piece of wood.

Once done, we got to work on the lower deck benchwork, as well as the middle deck too, in some respects given that the deck depths were going to be the same. Stop blocks were installed on the saw and we chopped up a lot of the 2″ wide strips into dozens of fingers.

Holes were drilled through all of them for bus and accessory wires and voila. Half the job done…well, not quite. Lots of other things needed doing, like drilling holes through the shelf brackets for securing the wood to the metal brackets, cutting the pieces to good lengths, splicing them together, and then getting the works secured to the shelf brackets and to the wall at the south end.

That chewed up a very good portion of the day and then we started mocking up how the rest of the decks would play out, and it turns out, quite well…Well, almost. I was hoping we could simply screw from underneath the brackets into the 3/4″ plywood for the upper deck, but initial appearances showed that many of the brackets were pretty far from level, and no idea why. We’ll investigate later as to potential solutions.

Cheers!

Murray and Cam came over early in the morning to put some time in on the layout and we managed to accomplish the installation of a fair number of the shelf standards (thanks to Murray for bringing his 6′ long level), and now we have standards on two complete walls with a plan on how to start into the nose of the basement.

We also discussed aspects of copying this system over to Murray’s new layout, and discovered I needed a few things.  One was an additional 4′ long standard to help close the a rather sizable gap (give or take 30-35″), Another was a full sheet of 3/4″ plywood which would become the prime bit of benchwork for portions of Port Alberni, and lastly, I wanted to put 110V AC power into the peninsula wall, and needed some bits for that to happen.  Murray has a pickup truck, Cam and I do not, so we figured it would be worthwhile to take advantage of the transportation opportunity.

After returning to the house, we met up with a friend of mine, Matt Buchanan, came over while he was in Calgary to take a look at progress on the layout.  He’s planning on a little switching layout with a portion of Vancouver’s downtown.  While the four of us were there, we got that 4×8′ sheet cut into two pieces, one representing the eastern end of Port Alberni and the other the area around the ICG spur and the Port Alberni enginehouse.  After that was done and Matt had left, we decided a hobbyshop crawl was in order.  Michaelea and I left for Lee Valley to pick up the stuff there that we didn’t pick up in the morning, Murray and Cam left for an errand Murray had to take care of and we met at Trains and Such and then went around the south end of the city to a few shops and ended up at Kelsey’s for dinner.

The rest of the evening was spent playing down at Murray’s layout.  More would come on Monday!

Cheers!

Went out on Saturday to make some additional acquisitions. Another few hundred dollars later, I have some more plywood (3/4″ Birch, G2S, at Windsor Plywood for all of $30 per sheet), additional shelf standards and Brackets (found them much less expensive at Lee Valley, and they’re interchangeable with the existing stuff I bought at Home Depot) and a box of cork.

Cam and I got back to the house and after hauling it all downstairs (actually, it was brought in through the side window in the basement) and proceeded to pull up existing roadbed and track. Yes… You read that correctly. We did some checks, measurements and found we needed a little more length for the Trent River Bridge and I didn’t necessarily like having to go with partially visible 26″ radius curves… So we did what we did up one deck and curved the train behind the backdrop to hide it for a little bit and compress more mileage into hidden track. Needed to pull up one string of flex and also the roadbed underneath to make the corner.

And that’s about where we ended up finishing for the day. More work to come next weekend!