A little bit of shop time, and spring fever.

I finally spent a little time in the workshop this past weekend, but not much.   After fixing the humidifier on the furnace and repairing our vacuum, I got to spend a little bit of time working on the band saw box project again.

I cut two S-curved pulls for the drawers out of some of the ebony that I had purchased for the pegs on the desk project.  The pulls turned out very well.  I like the ebony a lot. I attached the pulls to the drawers on the band saw box, and the entire box is now ready for final sanding and finishing.  I am pleased with how it looks considering it is my first project of this type.  I hope to do the final sanding and finishing in the next couple of days.  I think I will use a clear danish oil finish on the box.  I’m also going to try to "flock" the interior of the drawers with green-felt flocking.  This will be my first attempt at flocking.

I also spent some time in the yard yesterday getting spring fever, and planning the garden railroad expansion for this spring and summer    I want to extend the small loop of track that we installed last year by running a straight run of track for most of the entire length of our back fence to the left of our garage.  This will be about 120 linear feet of track with a small loop at one end to return the train to the other direction (on a single track).   The other end of the track will enter the garage through the small "hatch" that we had built into the wall when we built the garage, and then a small turn-around loop will be placed between the two cars in the garage (right on the concrete floor).   The "straight" run of track along the back fence will be suspended about 2 feet above the ground on a shelf attached to the fence.  I think I will make the shelf out of pressure-treated lumber for simplicity and low cost.  The far loop of track will use the raised "stringer" method of trackbed that I installed last year and talked about previously in this blog.  I have been very pleased with how the loop installed last summer performed through the winter.  This seems to be a very stable and weather and heave resistant construction method.

My goal will to have the new rail line built by June.  The two lines (last year’s line and this year’s line) will be able to run independently, so we will be able to run two trains at a time without conflicts.