Post Surgical Activity

My surgery was thankfully along the lines of what I'd done for the layout: pretty much a textbook procedure. No complications, nothing messy or extensive, just get in, get it clean, and get out. I'll be on restricted activity for a couple of weeks, naturally, so now I'm deciding what to do during that time. I've already set my sights on the wooden trestle, taking key measurements and rendering primary components in software.

Originally I was going to laser the whole thing, but this particular bridge poses some special issues, the principal one being that it's curved—and not just a simple radius, but a compound curve with easements. This makes it agonizingly difficult to plot out the size and shape of each side brace. It's not impossible, but it takes a massive investment of time calculating every angle in three axes to an incredible level of precision. Ultimately I determined that the effort required to do this was likely greater than simply cutting and installing all of these parts individually by hand.

While I was certainly encouraged by my luck with the wooden truss bridge (above), I wasn't feeling the same level of confidence with this beast. Being on serious pain narcotics also wasn't helping—all of those angles and calculations and whatnot were just turning my head to mush!

Ultimately I decided the trestle would be a hybrid project: the bents and bent cross braces would be lasered, because these were all dead flat, easy to measure, and simple to draw; the stringers, too, would get burned, since the curve of the track can be reliably matched photographically, producing a far better result than if I'd cut and assembled the stringers from a series of straight parts. Meanwhile, the side bracing and girts would be cut by hand from stripwood; this would not only afford the greatest accuracy, but it would create a superior cosmetic effect in the end.

So, you can expect a few random posts coming up over the next week or so as I take best advantage of occasional periods of relative clearheadedness between doses of narcotics, and dive headlong into the wooden trestle project. As an aside, it's got me thinking... could this possibly be the last structure for the G&D? Oh, right, the dock on the lake. OK, so it's the penultimate. Hard to believe the project is coming so close to completion!

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