If you’ve been following along, you may remember that we built a bridge in China…well, not in China, the real China, but in the China Section of the Paris to Peking Railway.
I had cut the thing out of nasty old plywood I rescued from the detritus generated by the removal of the roof over my patio.
There’s kind of a funny story that goes along with this bridge and that detritus: my wife and I were both unemployed at the time, but had agreed to marshal some of our meager funds together to splurge on a dumpster for the detritus from the roof. We could only afford one dump of the dumpster. While I was up there tearing down this monstrous roofing project of something like 12×30 feet of double thick plywood covered with tarpaper and four hundred thousand nails, my wife was cutting back the foliage on the trees around the house. It was mid spring and hotter than the bloody blue blazes and the plywood was super heavy and really nailed down in so many places I used a circular saw to cut it into little pieces rather than waste time fighting all that steel. My wife expended similar energy on her pruning project – so much so that when the dumpster came there were huge piles of chopped down greenery surrounding the house. As the piles of pruning were obvious to the neighbors and passers-by and actually extended onto the sidewalk in several places, and as I had been very careful to keep the junk from the roof in our own backyard, just take a guess which project utilized our only pass at the dumpster. Go ahead and guess – I’ll wait. I still, to this very day, have massive stacks of quasi-chopped up plywood in my backyard!
Late this summer my wife announced we could afford another run at the dumpster concept…she’s tired, you see, of stepping around the vast pile of naily, scary, tarpapery plywood chunks and the seven and half million black widows living under it.
Under the threat of impending dumpsterdom it suddenly became imperative to use up as much of that plywood as I could salvage before the dumpster arrived. That was two months ago. No dumpster yet.
Anyway, that’s the story behind the crummy plywood used in the China Section Bridge. When I made the first measurements for the bridge, I figured 18 inches is plenty of height for the center of bridge…six inches of span above a portal that was a foot high. When I set the completed structure on the railway, however, it looked absolutely absurd. What was I thinking? How tall are these trains?
Today I used the Hitachi circular saw to drop the bridge by about four inches. As you can see, it looks much better, although height continues to be an issue. I’m afraid the problem is in that six inches above the portal…at two feet to the inch, that’s a twelve foot tall cross section on the bridge. Why would you build a bridge that massive for a road over the railway?
This is half-inch plywood – nice and stiff, and durable as the day is long. And as much of a pain in the keester to cut as anything! I’m looking at that schwoopie top edge of the bridge….THAT’s what I have to re-cut, moving it down to just three inches above the top of the portal. The only power tool I have to do that is my father-in-law’s really scary jigsaw, and it doesn’t like that material.
Here’s what I’m thinking. I may be wrong, correct me if I’m right. This bridge carries no weight – it’s just for show. Why, for heaven’s sake, do I have to continue working with this nasty plywood? What if I decided to donate the plywood to the Dumpster Gods and instead carved the bridge out of foam? It doesn’t rot if you coat it with a good heavy paint, it’s lightweight and easy to cut, and DANG if that isn’t what we’ll do!
Thanks for working with me on this. I knew I could rely on your insight to help me figure this out.
FOAM! The miracle material! Maybe it’ll replace popsicle sticks and plywood altogether!
Nawp, maybe not.
