Building a Model Railroad Benchwork L-Girder

Primary component of benchwork of course is wood. Wood is available in dimensional lumber. Harder and harder to find is good, straight, clear lumber. When you do find it, it's expensive. This 1x4 piece is a little over $7.

About three and a half dollars for the 1x2. It also obviously is restricted to the dimensions you get from lumber yards. An option is to go to using plywood or in this case MDF. Which stands for medium-density fiberboard, and cut your own stock. A 4x8 sheet of the MDF is about $20.

And I can get 12 1x4 pieces out of that for a significant savings in costs, but obviously an increase in labor. If you're living in an area where it's hard to cut or you don't have the tools, spending the money on the wood makes perfectly good sense. On the other hand if you can rip it yourself you can save yourself quite a bit of money. The other disadvantage to using wood besides cost is as I said, dimensions. Putting the 1x2 to make an L-girder on top of here, leaves a relatively small lip here for screwing up into the joist.

I prefer to have a wider piece that I can cut out of the MDF. It gives me a little more room to get my drill underneath and work up as we'll see when we assemble it. In order to rip plywood or MDF down to dimensional lumber, you're going to need to cut it with a saw. You can either use a table saw if you have one, or for most of us a Skilsaw. Most Skilsaws come with a guide like this.

So this one happens to be an aftermarket version. You adjust it by clamping it with the screw here. This one has a fine tooth adjustment here. You can set the dimension either using a square to measure out against the blade. Or if you have a piece of stock on hand, you can simply set it against the stock.

I've already got this one set. Set your saw in place. Have your guide firmly. I find it works best if I keep my hand on this and help guide it. Now that we've got our wood cut we can begin to assemble our benchwork.

We'll need some tools to do that. A Skilsaw, framing square, some clamps, wood glue, a drill driver, preferably with a combination bit drill and screw driver, that really speeds up the work. Tape measure, a sabre saw when we come to cutting road bed. And of course, screws. First thing we're gonna do is build an L-girder.

One of the great advantages of L-girder benchwork, is that it requires virtually no critical cutting or measuring. And that was one of the reasons that Linn Westcott developed it. We're gonna build an L-girder which is basically setting the roughly two inch wide piece on top of our 1x4. We'll run a bead of glue, screw a series of holes to clamp it in place. And that's really all there is to it.

I'm using Titebond Wood Glue, any of the sort of yellow wood glues work well. So we run that, the length. One of the other great advantages of L-girder benchwork is that you can assemble it almost completely by yourself. Doesn't mean it isn't handy to have some people around, but they really aren't necessary. I'm gonna set the L piece on top.

I wanna make sure my ends are aligned. And then I'll start Right here in the middle. I'm making sure that it's flush on the backside. The bit makes an automatic countersink hole. And again, one handed change Find a screw.

And we'll just work our way down. Probably a screw every 16 inches, maybe as little as 24. I mean as much as 24 is all you really need. The screws are mainly there to make sure it's clamped. Our next step in the L-girder benchwork is to build the leg units which are really an integral part of L-girder benchwork.

Obviously to do that you need to decide how high your layout's going to be. That's a subject of great debate. However one simple way of approaching it is our stock comes in. Normally eight foot lengths, chopping it and half makes an easy way to go. I find a four-foot layout height is quite a comfortable viewing height.

Though if you have kids and you want it accessible you might want it lower. Some people prefer it even higher. These are eight foot 2x3s, which are relatively inexpensive. You need worry less about having these perfectly straight. Though you don't want them corkscrewed either.

I'll make my four foot mark. I've already measured them and know that they are in fact eight feet. Even when cutting something this small or narrow. It's a good idea to go ahead and mark a square cut. It makes it a lot easier when cutting with a Skilsaw to actually have a good square line to follow.

People who say they can't get good square cuts usually haven't marked them. I'll now get my Skilsaw and proceed to make the cuts. I'm going to build my bench work with the legs 30 inches apart. Though you can in fact, build L-girder benchwork to any dimension as narrow as 12 inches, maybe as much as four feet or more. That's one of the great advantages of L-girder benchwork is its flexibility.

In order to make these 30 inches apart, I need to get off the saw horses and work down on the floor. So that's what I'll do next. To assemble our legs. I've moved down onto the floor. I have my basic legs, my two bys.

I have a cross piece. This is actually temporary for the moment. And then I'm going to be adding cross bracing and you can use one by material for the cross bracing. I've ripped up some narrow pieces of 3/16th inch plywood that I like to use just because it's less bulky, easier to work with. The first step is to measure down from the top.

In this case I'm gonna come down about eight inches. I'm not gluing this because I want this spot to be removable. So I'm going to drill one side first. Put in my screw. And then I'm gonna square it up with my framing square.

Now I know that it's square to this board. So that if I line it up on the eight inch mark here we're gonna be square across. I said I was gonna build my legs 30 inches apart. So I still need to be spread out a little more over here. Again, it doesn't matter how much overhang I have on either side of this piece it's just a temporary marker.

And even the 30 inch dimension isn't terribly critical unless you're dealing with some particular space consideration on your layout. We'll add the first piece of cross bracing. Again, it's not terribly critical just where this goes. Cross bracing will ensure that it stays square. If I were working with one by material instead of this plywood, I would put one diagonal brace on this side of the legs and then flip it over and install the other one on the other side.

But using the lighter weight material I can put it on the same side. Screw is in, the legs will be rigid and they won't come out of square. that's the nature of cross bracing and why we use it. Now I'm going to take my sabre saw, and just trim this off to length. Main reason you want to cut it off is just to make sure you don't catch your leg on it and hurt yourself.

Now that we'll have got this one, we'll build another one just like it and proceed to assemble the L-girders onto them. I've finished building my second set of legs and now we're going to put feet on them. We're gonna use what are called t-nuts, with a bolt that screws into them. And this allows us to level the legs because concrete floors and basements, most of them are purposely sloped, but none of them are dead flat in any case. And you wanna be able to level your benchwork so that everything sits square.

Now we'll take a three-eighths inch bit and drill the holes in the end of the legs to install these. One of the reasons for using two by lumber for the legs is for just this reason, to give us room to put in the t-nuts. You'll want to have drilled the hole deep enough to allow the bolt to move in and out. Now we'll put the t-nut into the hole, the prongs down. And hammer it in place.

All you have to do obviously is run in the bolt. Don't screw it in all the way. You wanna run it in about halfway, because that allows you to then adjust the feet up as well as down. And now we'll flip around and do the same thing on the other leg. Now that we have our legs assembled, we can begin to put on the L-girders.

Again, one of the advantages I like about L-girder benchwork is that I don't have to have a partner to help me put it together even though it doesn't hurt to have one. All I need to do is set this up here for the moment resting it on my temporary joist. And then I clamp it in position. And again, these kinds of squeeze bar clamps are very quick and handy for that kind of work. Once I've got it clamped, I'm gonna put one screw in here just to secure it in place.

Now that I have the screw in position I can remove this clamp and I can angle the legs out to about 90 degrees. That'll make it easier as I pick up and put on the other set of legs. How far apart you put the legs is to some extent purely a matter of convenience, though if you're building a larger layout and you know you need them in particular positions that can affect your choice. We'll do the same thing. We'll clamp this in place and screw it.

The last part of L-girder benchwork. Just to add some diagonal braces from the legs up to here that's actually a step that we can do right now. Or in some cases you may want to wait until later in the process, but we'll show how to do it right now. I've cut some triangles from that same 3/16ths I used for this. You can use quarter-inch ply, whatever ply is handy.

These can be cut easily on a table saw, but they can also be cut with a Skilsaw. They also don't have to be triangular. There's no reason you can't use a rectangular piece of wood. What we're going to do is use this to allow us to bolt onto this piece of one by, so that it's flush with this edge. Since this is in set.

Ideally we'll cut this at an angle but it's not absolutely necessary since this will reach down and catch it. Same thing here that can always be trimmed later. I'm going to attach this to this first. And for that, I will use a little bit of glue. And then I'll screw it in place.

For this thinner ply. We wanna use shorter screws. I've been using one and a quarter or one and a half inch screws for most of the assembly for this a one inch screw is plenty. I put these, resting them on top of the temporary supports. I could in fact, if I decided I wanted this at a slightly different level, have adjusted these and still could up or down anywhere.

Even if I have trimmed my diagonal braces across the entire length. Presumably you want them somewhere up close. Though I can also trim these off out of the way. Eventually we'll be putting joists across here to which we'll attach our track risers. So the fact that these are sticking up is not really a problem.

Again, this is gonna come in here and set right like that. And now we'll attach, we'll screw down there and we'll be set. We'll check the square of the legs before screwing that in. The final step is adding the joists that will actually support the risers for the road bed. These joists can also be of any length that you determine.

I've made these just slightly wider than my 30 inch benchwork, but they can easily overhang by a foot or more on either side. One of the advantages of L-girder benchwork and this style of framing, is that you don't necessarily have to have a rigid square line along the front of your layout. It can curve and bend by offsetting your Joists so that you can have a flowing edge. You can also attach ends onto these to support a fascia once you've completed your scenery. So this is again, is a very flexible, easy to use style of benchwork.

I'm going to position my first joist, clamp it in place and then screw up from underneath. I'll do the same thing. Work my way down. When I go and work on the other side, I'll make sure that these are square to my L-girders. While not critical, it makes it a lot easier once I'm starting to lay road bed, to know that everything's squared up and I can measure consistent distance between each one from side to side.

With the joists in place we have rigid flexible benchwork. With our road bed risers, we'll be able to have scenery below as well as above. The benchwork is easy to use, can be assembled by one person. And is flexible no matter what your layout design.