Thursday, January 21, 2010

WLF1 Ring- Bleachers








Greetings from the Ring! It's hard to believe its been six months since my last post. I've certainly done some additions over the last several months so I am going to bombard the site with several new posts to accompany all the pictures.
I'll start with this little bleacher set I made. These pictures show the set in various states of progress. The finished sets you'll see in a post or two from now. I tried to document my construction with photos but I tend to work more and take pictures less. I thought this would be a good one to show though because I think most tracks can certainly use some bleachers here and there and they are very easy to make. I used Pine and Balsa wood for the main pieces and these shots show the table I work on for everything. Notice that it is gridded, this is extremely useful to make sure you are fabricating with good right angles, parallels, perpendiculars and increments. I cut the pieces in assembly line fashion, cutting all of one length at a time, etc. This makes a project like the 4 sets of bleachers I produced move along much more quickly. The ruler was taped down to the table and the bleacher risers were glued together right along the edge of it to make sure spacing was good. You need four risers to make a bleacher set of 3 spans. The spans were cut from balsa wood, and in the instance of this set of bleachers I made it curve slightly by cutting the middle span at an angle. I wanted this one to curve because it was going to sit on the outside of a curve in the back corner of my layout. After it was all dried I painted it and then fabricated a simple awning structure from more pine and a corrugated paper. You'll see the finished results in the next post!




1 comment:

ProxDriver said...

Sir,

Your track is astounding, not simply for the footprint or the details, but in the design of the details. I found your blog while trolling for inspiration for my own effort, and was happy to find a fellow designer pushing the expected bounds of slotcar circuits.

I love especially the buildings, bridges, flyovers and pitwall enclosures -- especially love the cedar decked-bar/lounge! It's the creative inventiveness that is stunning here, and how all of it knits and plays nice as a composition.

I'm loaded with questions, but I'll save those for Slotforum, where we're both members ;)

Cheers!
Michael McLaren
aka "ProXDriver"