Separate the two centre boards that had been worked on last week and check that the pin realignment had worked.
Continue painting track.
Assess and design the new bridge and mine entrance.
Geoff started off with a block and fine emery paper, cleaning the track he'd painted last week. He then got the Dremel out, with a small grinding disk, and ground down areas of old solder that showed up when the painted track was cleaned. This usually occurred where wires had been soldered too high up the rail edge. He then touched up the track edges - a really nice job that made it all look very neat.
Stephen tackled the bridge/mine entrance redesign. Following posting the various real mine entrance photos last week, the consensus was a combination of 3 and 1 should be investigated. A rough sketch was prepared.
Having decided to use the old bridge as a base, it was clamped in place. Only the front section would be used, so picturing the new road beyond the brow of the bridge needed a visual aid. Enter - a length of old draught excluder, a length of bendy ply and a cardboard cut-out of a mine entrance.....
The exercise allowed us to play with the steepness of the road, which looked quite exciting.
Taking the bull by the horns, the bridge was cut down to the essential section and screwed into place. Ply strips were glued inside the end section to allow the sides to be extended, flush with the existing.
Several sections of roof batten and plywood were cut up for spacers and fixing strips. We press-ganged Laurence into action, as we like to keep him busy!
A piece of flexible plywood was coaxed into position, then curved and nudged and curved and prodded, and then fettled until a reasonable shape was achieved. A clearance hole was cut out for the track, although the actual tunnel mouth will be further forward. A plank was clamped in place to hold it in the desired position. Then blocks and spacers were glued and screwed to the inner wall.
Then the outer wall was cut to the same profile and fixed to the other side. But then 'Geometry' raised it's head. Because the outer wall is cut shorter, the road at that point is technically much lower down the slope and so the road and parapet should be much lower, which might look very odd, so we'll have to look at it in detail, next week.
The bridge will span across the track and into the mass of rock beyond (where the mine entrance is cut through). The bridge parapets will then become fences or dry stone walls up into the hills beyond.The area where the mine track goes into the fiddle yard will be kept open. The idea is to treat it as a cutting, and have trees simulating being down in the cutting, with their canopies just getting up to wall height. Again, we'll have to see how that looks.
From the front, we think it looks very promising. The side wall of the old entrance will be extended up to the new entrance, which will be forward of the plywood cut-out. This will enable a sloping rock mass to be formed between the entrance and the roadside wall. The resulting road looked every bit as exciting as the mock-up suggested, if not more!
None of us could believe the progress we made on the bridge/roadway/mine entrance today. Another satisfying session.
Geoff will fit some ply back boards to secure the ends of the curved plywood sides, which will enable us to get on with the other panels and features next week. The tunnel mouth will be the difficult job; trying to make the transition look realistic.
The final task of the day was to take the two boards apart and check the pin realignment, which looked like it had worked OK. We'll test it out next week.
