"Bank Johnny"

While I won't pretend that I miss the hard yakka and filthy conditions of volunteering in "Loco" at Thirlmere twenty-odd years ago, I do regret that my hands are no longer conditioned to manual labour! All those hours of shovelling out the pit, or shovelling forward, and cleaning motion, washing engines with BP truck wash or degreaser etc. certainly built up a level of hardness to the skin. Last night's toil with the screw drivers and hammer took a toll on this "Bank Johnny's" lily-white mitts...

This evening I cracked on with the rest of the leg sub-assemblies, including the blocks for the t-nuts at the bottom end. Everything was glued, clamped, then nailed, before removing the clamps and moving on to the next one. The blocks for the t-nuts were made up from the piece of timber sacrificed to the recalcitrant wood screws last night, in another show of austerity in the name of layout construction.

 

 

 

 

Once the leg sub-assemblies were sorted, I moved on to the front & rear diagonal braces. Two of the horizontal members of the old Yabbie Creek trestles yielded the correct length for four of these. Then on to the gussets that will attach these to the legs. By sheer chance, there were three squares of 1/4" plywood in the bits box. I think these were left over from the fascia of Brendan's layout, made from a packing crate salvaged from work in 2008. I only needed two of them, cut on the diagonal. They came out 30mm under size compared with my design, but that will just mean a slightly larger gap between the tops and the underside of the baseboard. This will be hidden, as I think I have just enough tracking and curtain (made by my late paternal grandma) salvaged from Yabbie Creek to at least cover the ends and one long side.

 

The drop saw didn't quite have the reach to cut the gussets in one hit, even flipping them over, so they had to be finished off with the tenon saw. Ouch - damn blister on my thumb just where I grip the handle...

Anyway, another productive evening. Tomorrow I hope to fit the t-nuts and adjusting screws to the bottom of the legs, then clamp them to the baseboard, drill & bolt up. I should then be able to check the measurements for the end braces and hopefully cut these ... but will have to dis-assemble another of the "brick dunny" trestles. Might wear gloves next time!

The design drawings (completed in Autodesk Mechanical Desktop 3D modelling software) appear below.

 

Cheers for now.