The pieces of the mountain we are fabricating are filling the shop and well out into the parking lot as well. We are finished the structural frames and almost through the pencil rod subframes as well. The wiring crew is pushing hard and managing to keep up with the lath work. In a few more days the sculpted concrete work will begin and everything will change in a hurry! Stay tuned...
It works!
Today dawned sunny and warm - perfect to do a little work on the railroad. Before I could start there was some preparation - as always. I first rearranged the yard, full of pieces we are working on. Then I put away Friday's steel order with the forklift. There was a bunch of pipe to move as well but at last I could get to the stack of rail. Then it was time to bring out the hydraulic press, the new bender and the welder and set everything up. This setup time included putting the hydraulic cylinder into the new bending rig. It was 1:00 pm before I did the first trial bend. I'm happy to report the new bending rig worked perfectly! I love it when a plan comes together!
The process isn't fast however. I first drew out the desired radius onto the concrete, then positioned the bender and gave the rail a tweak, moved the rig 10" down the rail and repeated and so on. It's best to do a little at a time an work up and down the rail until the rail matches the chalked radius on the cement deck. Then the tougher job, to bend the second rail to match the first. It took about two hours to do one twenty section of track and another half hour to move it to the front yard with the forklift and tractor. Since I was working by myself today it took a lot longer than with a team... but with today's practice piece I now know exactly how to do things. Tomorrow we'll do three more curved sections plus some straight sections to finish the track in front of the house and turn the corner up the side yard. Then it's a three hundred and fifty foot straightaway to the back corner of the property. That will go a whole lot quicker!
Making a rail bender
I've been itching to lay down the last of the railroad track around our yard for a very long time. First we had to finish the house and establish the grades in the yard. Then we got Becke's modular home on the property and had to readjust the grades in that area. Once that was done the wonderful weather of summer made it far too warm to do the heavy work of laying track. The fall has been super busy to date but today it was finally time to begin the task. The first order of business was to build a new rail bender as my first attempt worked but the home made tool was a little light for the task and was starting to deform badly as it takes a great deal of force to bend a rail and I had under engineered the tool. We acquired the CNC plasma cutter since my last attempt and that made the task a whole lot easier and quicker! I designed the files on the computer and then let the machine do the cutting from the half inch steel plate. A little grinding, fitting and a bunch of welding completed the task in less than two hours from start to finish. The result is a very sturdy rail bending jig. I'll hook up the hydraulic cylinder tomorrow and start bending some rail. I'll post a video of that tomorrow.