Christmas of 2023 was fast approaching, but, due to cancer treatment issues, I was in no shape to dig out our traditional, and very heavy, decorated tree from its storage nook and drag it to the corner of our room for some much needed, and at the time maybe final, seasonal cheer.
Instead I went poking around some of my model railroad stuff as well as a number of The Wife’s craft bins, all light-weight and managable crap that even the surgically damaged could handle, and we filled that corner with this impromptu display set up on a small folding table.
Only we liked the ambiance it brought to the room so much (I spent many recovery-hours looking into the lighted windows of those buildings letting the posibilities hidden behind those tiny panes take my mind far from the confines of my chair and pain.) that we left it up after the season was over. In fact we left it up for over three years!
But there were logistical issues, a conflict between a table in the corner and the need to access the drawers behind it, and on top of that, after three years of our less than fastidiousness when it comes to cleaning, it was looking pretty tired and worn.
The tired and worn issue pretty much demanded a refresh. And to address the logistical issues I had the bright idea of building an articulated table using black-iron pipe like the one I put in The Van and talked about here.
After all, same sort of space and access issues, so why reinvent the wheel table all over again?
For the refresh we decided to deal with the dust issue; of which we have plenty between the two of us living together in a relativly small space, a raw concrete floor that constantly sheds a fine, grey powder (we tried sealing it once but it stunk like hell for weeks and wore through almost as quickly), and the side-lights of the back door being open much of the time onto a clay patio backed up by woods; with an acrylic display case that could quickly be dusted off in the evening with the day's dirty sock regardless of what was inside the case.
These cases are surprisingly expensive so we went with a modest 16x12 version, but like several aspects of this project - OK, not just this project but a disconcertingly high percentage of all my projects - all did not work out as planned, so I'll be coming back to that display case shortly.
For The Van’s table I welded the critical joints between fittings and pipe because any rotational movement here would be problematic disasterous. For this project I decided to drill through the fitting/pipe joints and drive a finishing nail into the slightly undersized holes to lock things together.
Yeah - that didn't work at all!
Something I didn't discover until the pipe-support was mounted to the wall and the platform for the display case was mounted to the pipe-support.
Between the relatively soft black-iron pipe and the malleable nature of the nails, things weren't so much locked down as they were flopping all about with a surprising amount of slop.
So the whole damn thing got disassembled in order for me to weld the joints like I should have done in the first place.
Not that my welding has improved any over the years. Damn! That's ugly!
Notice that at this point the pipe-suport is painted black (except where I had to grind it clean to make those abominable welds). Yeah, that didn't work out either.
Once it was mounted against the white, sorry, Bohemian Lace, walls, rather than making the bold statement I was going for, the stark black pipe looked like shit. The fix was a rattle-can white put on right over the black so the piping didn't stand out so starkly against the wall.
Pipe suport modified and taken care of (Not really, but I'll get back to that.) it was time to deal with the platform and the display case it would be supporting.
I needed a way to ensure the display case stayed put on the platform, but also left the top of the platform unencumbered in case we ever wanted to put something directly on the platform without the display case.
My solution was to flush-mount some rare-earth magnets (right now, in the photo above, stuck in a stack to the bottom of my calipers) under the bottom of the display case, then use center-finders (one of which is thete waiting to be used at the end of that green arrow),
The red arrows point to magnets epoxied flush. The green arrows point to aligned holes large enough to pass a 120v plug through, which means there's plenty of room for passing loads of low-voltage wires through for lighting up whatever is inside the display case.
The whole magnet idea was one aspect of the project that worked out like I hoped first time!
The underside of the platform is decked out with:
A power-strip with multible 120V sockets as well as 3 USB 5V outlets.
One Woodland Scenics Light hub (lower left corner) designed for adding interest to model railroads with 4 individually dimable ports. At $20, not hugely expensive, but the various accessories that plug into it are a bit pricy.
Two Evemodel power distribution moduals, each with screw-terminals and 2 different kinds of plug outlets for a total of 28 outputs each. These boards can take an input of anything between 3 & 24 volts, AC or DC and the voltage of the DC output is also configurable. One limitation is that all outputs on a modual are the same voltage, somewhere between 3V and 24V depending on how the modual is configured, but at $14, which includes a supply of pig-tails for both kinds of plugs plus more resistors than a guy could ever use, I can live with not being able to brighten or dim individual outputs.
They are equiped with an adjustable current limiter which is pretty sophisticated stuff for a $14 device. The voltage remains constant but I can dim/brighten LEDs by adjusting the current. And if I really want to have different brightnesses between strings, the resistors can be soldered in series into individual output strings to vary the brightness of each relative to each other if so desired.
One 24V power supply to run the 2 Evemodel moduals. Which can each be indipendently configured for different output voltages.
All of this is mounted to the bottom side of the platform with self-adhesive, ambidextrous (it locks to itself), Double Lock, (similar to Velcro but without the lint-trapping hooks, or debris collecting loops.) for easy removal and replacement as needs evolve.
This also means I can pop the power-distribution modules, all mounted together on a single small board of thier own, off and tilt them to make plugging in various strings of lights without standing upside-down on my head (upper half of photo), then just snap the whole board back in place (lower half of photo).
While I was messing with the bottom of the platform I glued a string of LED's around the perimeter thinking that they would add a nice glow under the completed project to compliment whatever was in the display case up top.
I was wrong - on or off, there was no visible under-glow.
Fortunately these strings of 20 to 24 fairy-lights, in a variety of whites as well a colors, can be had for slightly less than a $1 per string, and that includes the battery-box with switch - batteries included!
All I have to do is cut the string free of the battery-box and solder a connector on instead. (Paying close attention to polarity! Otherwise there's no light.) I salvage the micro switches for potential future projects and we have more button-batteries laying around than we'll ever be able to use!
The sharp-eyed among all y'all (I recently found out that technically y'all is singular and 'all y'all' is plural. Seriously! Look it up.) may have noticed a discrepancy between the platform with the electronics mounted on it and the earlier images of the platform with the magnetic mounting system.
That's because the modestly sized but afordable 16x12 display case we originally bought, shown above, as well as the platform custom designed for it, turned out to be too damn small!
I wanted to build a little camp-site scene around this VW bus, but there clearly wasn't enough room.
Just one more thing that didn't work out as planned.
So we splurged and bought a larger, and ridiculously expensive, 20x16 display case.
Of course this meant I had to start from scratch and build a whole new, larger, platform to accomodate it.
While we were at it we decided to add a skirt around the front and two sides of the new platform to help hide some of the wiring and pipe so we doubled up the thickness of the platform's perimeter for more surface area to attach the skirt.
And once we switched from black to white piping something had to be done about the black cord feeding the power-strip!
I tried painting a small test-patch of the cord with the same paint used on the pipe, but after a week the paint still hadn't cured, so instead we fished out some lightweight white cloth, took the cloth and the power-strip over to the surger (in the other barn), and sewed a white sleeve around the black cord.
Not perfect but it looks better than before (we had to order some white tie-wraps to fasten the cord to the pipe because all we had in stock was a few hundred black tie-wraps.) and all this is pretty much out of sight behind the skirt anyway.
Now we just had to populate the display case.
Running out of time to get too sophisticated, we grabbed the micro-block Peach Tree Garden scene because it is colorfull and already strung with lights.
To get a bit more Christmasy (we just barely got this project done on time for THE DAY) we refurbished one of the trees from the original Christmas display, agitating it in a bucket of soapy water to dislodge the grime, stringing it with new lights and a garland, and chucked that into the case as well.
Of course we couldn't leave well enough alone and ended up populating the 'garden' with a few people, such as Elmer (we knew him as Robert - or Dad in The Wife’s case.) with his inevitable fishing line in the water.
Here it looks like we have a (shady) business deal gone bad and someone ended up getting chucked over the side!
OMG!!!
ReplyDeleteBeyond AWESOME!!!!
Merry Christmas!!!