Brass Truss Plates

As you've probably seen in recent blog entries, I'm still working on the homemade truss bridge I designed and built for our little garden railroad.  Although this bridge is looking pretty good, I felt it was still lacking something (see photo at right).  After painting it a few different colors and thinking long and hard about what is bothering me about it, I had decided to add some details in the form of truss plates and bolt/rivet details.   

I thought about making these truss plates out of wood but cutting wood as thin as I would need would make them very susceptible to warping and splitting so I ordered some brass stock to make these truss plates.  I also ordered some round head brass nails to make bolt details.  I'll drill holes in the plates where I want the bolts and then glue everything in place.  

The brass stock I had ordered earlier in the week arrived on Thursday.  So, yesterday, I cut the shapes needed for truss plates.  Although brass is a rather soft metal, this still required some work.  I managed to get the plates done for one truss in a couple of hours yesterday.  Well, really, I probably put in an extra hour by having to make a jig for cutting the brass stock to rough shapes.  So, it took me about three hours to make these 12 truss plates.  I still need to make another 12 for the other side of the bridge.  

I used a hack saw for cutting the brass to rough shapes and then used my belt sander for grinding down to the exact right shape.    

I'm really liking these truss plates!   Here is a close-up photo...

Once these truss plates are solidly in place with the bolt details, then I'll repaint the whole bridge since I'll need to paint these new truss plates.  In order to get everything to match, I'll need to paint everything.  

I think I'm going to go a bit darker with the paint this time.  I've been torn trying to decide whether I want a darker green or a lighter green.  Either would work but I think I want a darker less saturated green...  almost like a charcoal leaning into the green shades.  Then I'll highlight edges and details with lighter paint applied with a dry brush technique.  Then...  I think most of the weathering I will add (mostly in the form of rust) will be on and around these truss plates.  

Looking at the photo, above, of the close-up, I'm now also wondering if I should add a bit more detail to the bottom girder...  uggg...  this project is never going to end!

I hope to get the rest of the plates cut to shape today.  I'm not sure about getting each truss plate drilled for the bolt details but I'll attempt to get that done today too.  (EDIT:  It is now bedtime and I got absolutely nothing done on this project today.  I ended up getting side-tracked with a couple of other home projects that couldn't be delayed.  Hopefully I can make some headway on the bridge tomorrow.)

At some point, I need to also do the lawn...  the grass is very long and completely covered in leaves.  I haven't done anything with the lawn for at least two weeks.  We got quite a bit of rain in the past two weeks and my health has been quite lousy so that delayed getting any landscaping accomplished.  Maybe I'll get to that in the next few days.