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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

How I made a wooden platform

The station at Beeston Market is mounted on timber supported around three feet from the ground. It seemed sensible to make the platform from wood rather than concrete as in the case of the other platforms. However, I found when positioning a plank in the location as a temporary measure that underneath it attracted the damp (and an accumulation of woodlice, centipedes and the odd slug). I needed some way to protect the wooden platform - even though it is treated timber I could see the rot setting in pretty quickly! I considered wrapping it entirely in roofing felt, but that would be difficult to fix down realistically. I therefore decided to embed it in the existing layer of felt.

The first job was to make an incision in the felt roughly along the centre line of the platform, The felt was folded up and the platform plank was eased into the gap.

Next, the edges of felt were trimmed to a uniform width.

The edging strip was snipped at intervals to represent paving slabs. And more felt was cut to fill the gap in the centre of the platform.

The whole lot was then stuck down with bitumen-based felt adhesive and weighted down with a series of concrete blocks and rocks and left for a week.

When the weights were removed, Evostick was used to fix the odd few bits of edging strip which had not stuck.
It needs a little tidying-up and detailing, but the foundations have been laid.

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