Adding a second deck - Part 2

 The second deck for the end of the narrow gage branch is coming along fine. In the previous post on this subject I was using a piece of 1x1 board to support the gatorboard pieces, but it seemed to me that it deflected too much under load, and I didn't want anything thicker to minimize the thickness of the deck. So I thought of using a steel beam, and consulted my neighbor who is a blacksmith, and while she had appropriate pieces of steel in stock, she advised that steel would be awfully heavy and suggested aluminum C channel would be good enough and much easier to drill holes in. So I bought some aluminum channel and mounted and leveled it. Also, I replaced those ugly steel straps with a couple of threaded rods, which seemed much easier to accurately level and adjust over time if needed. Then, since all of it would be underneath the upper deck, I primed and painted it all sky blue, as shown in the following photo:

After a few weeks of examining the gatorboard resting on the aluminum channels, I couldn't see any evidence of sagging or any other reason not to go ahead with the project, so I removed the three gatorboard panels and painted the bottoms sky blue and the tops with earth brown sprinkled with ground foam. It's so much easier to do painting like this at the workbench instead of up in the air! I also painted the fender washers I'll be using to hold the panels to each other with brown paint so they'll fit in with the scenery. All that's left is to paint the edges of the panels with my dark green fascia color, and I can put them back up on the girders. Here are a couple more progress photos of painting the panels:

In preparation for painting the edges, I applied lightweight spackle to the edges with a putty knife, to cover up the bare foam texture that might be too rough. Here's a photo of one of the fender washers painted with brown + foam:

So far, so good...

Covering up a hideous wire run

If you finally get around to doing something that's been on your do list for at least 20 years, is that something to feel good about, or ashamed? I can't decide - I feel both. I guess it depends on how important the thing was. In this case, almost all of the layout track power wires were fed up to the ceiling joists and out to the rest of the layout from my centrally located DCC layout control system, next to a post, out in the open. They always needed some kind of a cover to hide them from view, but I never seemed to get around to devising one. Here's a picture of what it looked like, over on the right hand side of the photo:

It started bothering me more when I started publishing YouTube videos of the layout and the vertical column of tangled wires really disrupted the views of the otherwise nice (or at least acceptable) scenery. Then, as discussed in my previous post, we started installing an upper deck in the same area. This meant that the mess of wires would be an eyesore on both decks. Somehow, I couldn't live with it anymore. So, the fix is now designed and in progress. Help is on the way. We devised a plan to attach two inward-facing "C" aluminum channels at the corners of the post, and slide pieces of styrene between them, covering up the wires. Here's what it looks like now (with the upper deck temporarily removed):

Such an improvement! The next step will be to paint the whole thing with white primer and then sky blue, followed by scenic treatment such as trees and bushes. Then you'll never even know all those wires are in there. And if I need to add wires, it is easy to slide out the two styrene panels if needed for access (assuming I keep from sticking them together with paint). Progress!

Incidentally, the small maroon red box dangling to the left of the column is the transceiver for the BLI "Rolling Thunder" subwoofer system which needed relocating to accomplish this project. But the cable (in yellow) they provided literally fell apart when I went to relocate it, it was so cheaply made. So now I'm now hunting for a better cable, and hoping the system will work again. I don't use it very often though, because the low-frequency rumble that it generates makes the entire house shake, not just the train room. Probably an example of "too much of a good thing." Also, did I mention that the (exclusively) BLI decoders that work with it don't follow NMRA standards and are difficult to understand how to program? Don't get me started. I have only two BLI locomotives that work with it, and have no intention of ever acquiring any more. But at least BLI got me to mention them four times in one paragraph! I'll give them that.