Scattered Thoughts . . .

B efore 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 ...

I had a hectic but productive day today.  I was pulled from one project to another project in mid-project over and over again today but I eventually got back to each project so I'd say I had a productive day. My main plan for today was to get back to working on the truss bridge I am building for our garden railroad but I kept getting interrupted. Our roads have been dug up for the past few months as they install a new water main.  They have already finished our road so the next crew is now coming by to run the water from the new main to our house.  So, while I was working on the brass truss plates for my model truss bridge, I was interrupted by someone from these crews working on the water.  He wanted to prep our house for connection so I helped him with that for a bit.  That is a whole other story that I don't want to get into at the moment so I'll get back to my day. After helping the guy at the front of our house, I went back to working on the truss plates....

A s 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.  Al...