Weekend Project -- Electric Train Table
Back before Christmas, Kris' sister Tiffany (aka 'Aunt Tiffany') gave us a Seattle Mariners Express Train set for Noah. We felt that we had enough Christmas gifts for him, so we decided to save it for another time. Well, Noah has recently been watching electric train videos on youtube, and one day lamented the fact that he didn't have an electric train -- so I took him out to the garage and we opened the styrofoam packages for the first time. Needless to say, he was most excited. :-)
I didn't want to run something as delicate as an electric train on the ground, so I told him we would need to build a train table for it before we could set it up. I told him him maybe Saturday we could build one, not real sure how I would build it, and of course Noah set the event in stone. Nothing could be scheduled on Saturday because we were building a train table!
Saturday morning came, and we ventured out to the garage to look for supplies. I had one L-shaped piece of plywood, 21 feet of painted 3/4" MDF trim board, and about 15 feet of 2x2. I really didn't want to have to run to a lumber yard, so I did some thinking, and figured out that if I cut off half of the long leg of the "L", and flipped around to fill the gap, I would have the 48x60 table top I need for the train set (a little trimming was required, of course). I had just enough MDF for the main frame, and the 2x2's would work for the table legs, and for the cross-pieces to go underneath the plywood seams.
Aerial view -- you can see where I had to join the two scraps of plywood together to make the table top.
By mid-afternoon, the table was finished and Noah was driving his train like an experienced engineer. :-)