The Traverser

Finally I have something new to add.

This week I built the traverser. For anyone wanting to make a similar one, the frame is built from ply on the ends and top, and 65x12mm dressed-all-round pine. The frame is 1450mm x 450mm, with the left-hand entry being 250mm long and the right-hand one 200mm.

The table itself is 40x18mm DAR pine and ply on top, and measures 350mm x 990mm. I bought 300mm drawer runners from this company online and received them by courier within a week for about $27 all up.

Here it is with the table fitted, showing the construction

And when complete.

 The handles were from Bunnings and just add a nice finish.

I bought fully-extending drawer slides to maximise the traverse of the table and get as many roads as possible onto it. Part of this involved building the table one road-width wider than the drawer slides. As you can see in the picture above, the outer slide is affixed to the frame and the table is affixed 50mm from the end of the inner slide.

In the picture below, the table is fully extended out. When installed, the entry road will align parallel with the inner right-hand side of the table.

Once the drawer slides are fully closed, you can see that the entry road now aligns with the inner left-hand side of the table.

Pretty straight forward idea, derived from a lesson learned on my previous layout where the drawer slides I bought from Ikea only allowed for a 200mm traverse, despite being 300mm long.

Next job is to build the legs for this, and the right-hand return loop. Both should be fairly quick jobs, so it won't be long before there's some more permanent track down and I can move from carpentry to modelling.

Cheers,
Ben