Truss Plates Installed

Before it rained again today, I managed to get the truss plates drilled and installed on my garden railroad homebuilt truss bridge.  Now that I see these plates installed with the bolt details, this is definitely one of the things I felt the bridge had been lacking.  What a tremendous difference these relatively small details make!  Well, maybe I shouldn't call these truss plates a "small detail"...  it was a bit tedious making them and installing them.

I had originally intended to glue these truss plates in place but, after I drilled all the holes in every plate using a drill press, I felt I could easily drill tiny partial holes into the bridge through each hole in the truss plates and then hammer in a nail.  I drilled the holes only halfway into the bridge trusses so that the nails still had a bit of bite.  Plus, the diameter of the holes was smaller than the diameter of the nails so that also helped to keep the nails in place.  The holes were only large enough to keep the wood trusses from splitting.  

Actually, the drill bit for this was so small that I broke one bit while drilling the holes.  Fortunately, I had two new, unopened 1/16" drill bits on hand waiting for a mishap such as this.  The difficult thing was finding them amongst my tools!  Thin drill bits do break quite easily.

This seemingly little bit of added detail has made a tremendous difference in this model bridge.  I'm really liking how this turned out.

Tomorrow, if the weather cooperates, I plan to lightly sand the whole bridge again and then prime these brass truss plates.  I have only a little bit of spray primer left but I think there is enough paint leftover to spray all the little truss plates.  Afterward, I'm going to need to repaint the whole bridge to make everything match in color.  

Believe it or not, I'm still torn on color.  I do like some darker bridges but I also like some lighter green bridges.  What I do know is that the next shade of green that I mix needs to be far less saturated especially if I go darker.  The current color, as pictured here, is a pretty good lighter shade of green but it is covered by a lot of weathering powders and it didn't turn out as expected.  It is "okay" but not what I had in mind so, after I prime the brass, I'll start mixing paint and doing some test brush strokes to test the shade of the color.  

Another issue I'm having is that the color of the bridge looks completely different in the house compared to how it looks outdoors under the sun.  The brightness and color temperature of the light changes the appearance of the bridge drastically.  Of course, this is a bridge for outdoors so I need to go by how it appears under the sun.  

At the moment, the cross bars across the top of the bridge are just loosely sitting on top.  I'm thinking I should make that a single top part by joining all those cross bars together with a some running strips.  I don't think I'll need to fasten this top piece to the two trusses but if those seven cross bars are mounted together, then it will be easier to store and handle.  How I want to accomplish this is still a bit fuzzy in my head though.  I might want to add some diagonal crosspieces too to add shear load support.  This is where it gets fuzzy because I don't know how detailed I want to go with this.  And, I might need a lot of clamps for gluing and I don't have a lot of clamps, especially small clamps.  We'll see how it goes.  

While I'm working on this bridge, I also have design thoughts running through my head concerning designing and building a train station and an old coaling silo building.  My biggest obstacle here is that I want these to be fully weatherproof so I can leave them outside all year long since I have no room to store them indoors.  That is a problem I need to overcome so I've been thinking about it for months as I work on other aspects of this small garden railroad.

The truss bridge is coming along though and I especially like these truss plates and bolt details.