I have already made up 8 trestles. Making more would be a bind and time consuming, thus I was playing around on the way back from London yesterday with the idea of using adjustable breakfast bar legs (like the ones I’ve just installed in our new kitchen) to hold up certain parts of the layout. You can get them adjustable to about 920mm which is just about perfect. They come with a base plate (with 7 screw holes) and then a small grub screw holds the leg to the base plate via a clever tightening mechanism. They are sturdy, easy to take up and down and avoid the ‘trip hazard’ that the trestles might be.
So, how many do I need? Well it makes sense to replace the two current sub-prime legs (wooden held on by two wing nuts on bolts) with these legs and for the new board to have two legs to hold up the section that juts out. Then to avoid the trip hazard problem, I could probably do with two at the ends of each of the hidden sidings.
Thinking a little bit further and I found that adding one more leg to that total would allow me to erect the other 4ft x 2ft board that I’ve already made up as a kind of modelling table where tools etc (and cups of tea) could be kept.
Taking that to the final thought, why not (not for expong) have a lifting 2 foot by 2 foot section to complete the circuit, allowing easy access to the centre of the layout for operations purposes. cool eh"?
So these legs are £23 each in B and Q (ouch!). But on the modellers’ friend (ebay) I got 9 legs for £80 inc P+P (yes I’ll have to sell a few things to pay for it, but what a saving over the £207 B and Q wanted!).
The above image shows black blobs where the legs will go. The 8 trestles are also fully utilised.
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