This year,
Model Railroader is running a series of articles on building a 4x9-foot, N-scale layout with "easy-to-transport" benchwork. (How anything that big qualifies as "easy to transport" escapes me at the moment.)
The article is entitled "Benchwork with folding legs." And indeed the legs
will fold--after removing twelve of the sixteen bolts holding them to the layout. You could take the same materials they show and, by just a slight rearrangement, reduce this to removing four of twelve bolts for exactly the same effect.
According to a picture caption with the article, "the legs need to be absolutely perpendicular to the L girders for the layout to be stable." In fact, legs are usually more stable if they flare out a bit, because they're already "falling over" in a controlled direction. At least they have some decent triangular bracing in place.
As an afterthought, they put tiny little casters on the ends of the legs, which (a) will only work well on absolutely smooth (and probably carpet-free) surfaces and (b) eliminate any possibility of leveling the layout without putting shims under the wheels.
Oh, and "the casters raised the layout another inch or so, but it [sic] made moving the layout much more convenient." Apparently there is some mystical reason why they couldn't cut an inch or so off the bottom of the legs, to compensate for the height of the casters.
Okay, rant over, but really--if you're going to do an article on benchwork, shouldn't some thought be put into the
design of the benchwork?
