The first task during the week was to glue the two layers of plywood together so that they all formed one big continuous sheet right around the corner. Sounds simple enough… It was at this stage that it became apparent that the warping in the plywood was quite strong and even though the plywood was weighted to try to remove the warping as the glue dried, this was going to be a problem. More about that later.
The next step was to locate the permanent joists so that they would not interfere with the track switch machines. Gordie’s marvelous paper layout drawing was again taped to the plywood, aligned with the registration marks, as it would be placed and removed many times.
Then the joists were located and cut to length.
The next Saturday proved to be quite interesting, as we needed to actually attach the joists to the L-girders, add add the risers to level the plywood. Given that there was simply no place to move the plywood to get it out of the way, as John said, “After considerable thought and brainstorming. . .
we decided to raise the Curlew yard laminated plywood up . . . Way Up . . . . Way – Way Up !!!”, which is exactly what we did.
Of course that provoked lots of comments about it being a good height for me, but I’m not sure about that.
Finally, we got down to the business of setting heights, using my trusty laser level, which of course works best in a darkened room. Fortunately there were no grades to contend with, as it had been decided that the entire Curlew area was to be level, to facilitate future operating sessions.
And of course you need to make the risers to install.
While Brian avoided all the chaos by working under the layout on the DCC system to install buzzers for the short circuit detectors.
Before all of the extra hands left, we lowered the plywood down onto the newly installed risers and admired the fact that our clever plan to go up actually worked out quite well. Unfortunately, no one got a shot of that, but it was not really that exciting anyway.
Unfortunately, in spite of all of the careful work to get the tops of the risers just so, the warped plywood (remember it?) conspired to not play nicely, as it was stiff enough to actually warp the L-girders when it was clamped to them, instead of levelling out nicely, but’s another story…