Benchwork Mock-up
August 31st, 2009
This morning I printed out the Siever’s benchwork templates to mock up the layout benchwork. Just need to decide on what height I want the layout. 44″, 48″ or 52″ would be the choices.
My old layout’s upper level was at 52″ if I recall. It was ok, maybe a tad high. So I’m aiming at the 48″ height right now.
Dark iPhone shot of the benchwork plan:
The room certainly looks bigger on paper than it is I think, heh. The bed shown won’t actually be there for quite a while though, so I’ll have some additional space there for stuff while getting the layout benchwork up.
Are you planning to keep your recent cabinets? If so, they would provide a ruling height to start from. Add in any additional workbench capacity you want, and there you have an ideal height. Plus, if you pick 48 inches, you can railfan sitting down.
Yup, the cabinets will remain under the layout. They’re only 36″ tall though.
I grabbed the tape measure this evening and found 52″ not to be that bad actually. My upper level must have been closer to 55. But being able to sit and see the layout would be nice too
I’ll have to grab the tape measure again, heh.
I am curious why you tore the old layout down, if you already stated why i apologize!
Decided to go with a 47″ track height. The benchwork will actually be 43″ (I found Sievers will custom cut leg heights for you), with 4″ risers. The 47″ is right at eye level when sitting, high enough for me when standing to not looking like I’m towering over it, low enough for wife to easily see it, and low enough that it won’t look freakishly tall with the cabinets underneath the layout.
Hey Josh,
Two reasons for the whole change.
#1) Currently we have 3 bedrooms. Master, Nursery, Guest. And the “study” which is my layout/computer room. The wife and I do want to have any child one day, so that means the current guest room would become nursery #2.
We’d still like to have a guest room though for whenever family/friends visit (they all live New Orleans still). So short of buying a new house down the road, I thought we could redo the study to accommodate a guest bed in there. This whole room change might not happen for at least year, but there was no reason for me to continue work on a layout that would eventually need to come down in the future. My original thought was that the layout could simply be moved into the garage, but scraped that idea do the hassles you encounter in a garage.
#2) While I was happy with the layout, I also wasn’t. The plan just wasn’t going in the direction I wanted. I really wanted a continuous loop layout so I could ‘railfan’ it and also dabble with automation a little, but ended just “going with the flow” of the room and ended up with a layout with a crazy staging setup.
So with both of these things on my mind, I decided to reduce the layout to a smaller, single level, single scene layout on just the East wall of the room.
Thanks for the reply! I think it is a good idea to keep things simple. I am thinking about building an n scale layout around the walls of the family room. I like to run mainline trains with broad curves. I built a small n scale layout to see how I would like it. To my surprise I really like n scale and plan on sticking with it!