I originally intended to use a large cork notice board as the baseboard for my model railway, but several of my regular blog readers who are also railway modellers suggested that a half of a pasting table would be better. As a result, I paid a visit to the branch of THE RANGE at the Outlet Shopping Centre near to the Historic Dockyard Chatham and bought one.

Yesterday I took the pasting table apart. The two halves were easy to separate as they were only held together by two hinges, and the legs were dismantled so that the soft pine they were made of could be reused. This left me with two sections that are constructed using a sheet of hardboard on a pine frame.

At this point I realised that the hardboard was only attached to the frame by U-shaped staples and that the corner joints of the pine frame were just pushed together. I was concerned that the pasting table baseboard might be a bit flimsy if I left it as it was, and I therefore carefully removed the staples, glued the corner joints together, and then glued and screwed the hardboard back onto to the frame. I then cut one of the legs so that it would fit inside the frame and glued it in place so that it could act as a centre brace for my baseboard.

Before doing anything else, I then sealed the hardboard and the frame using two coats of PVA glue as I find that this makes painting wooden surfaces much easier.