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...
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