The basics

This is a reproduction of the first entry I made on my small model railway layouts blog about my first meeting with the APA.


Those of you who know me will know that I am totally and utterly useless at baseboard construction. My woodworking abilities know no beginning. Indeed, I was once beaten into last place in a school woodworking exam by two girls. That was a good 30 years ago now...

So, I look for any excuse to hide from baseboard woodworking. Pink insulation foam, White expanded polystyrene sheet, Cork faced notice boards even foamcore display board has been subject to my baseboard building experiments. All have been reasonably successful to a degree. Layouts have been built on all these substrates.

In the previous post on this blog you heard me mention the new APA storage cabinet from IKEA and my desire to experiment with it. Well, yesterday I popped into IKEA and purchased one said APA box.

As with most IKEA stuff it comes flat packed in a quiet unassuming box. With all the fixings equipment and instructions to enable you to assemble it.

The package contains 10 parts:

The two ends come ready assembled as does the lid. There are 4 pine rails that are screwed between the ends and then a base and two end pieces that go into place as you assemble the rails. It all goes together very easily and in a matter of 10 minutes I had a storage box.

The box would indeed serve admirably as a stock box. It is remarkably rigid despite how light it is. You'd get quite a bit of stock in most any scale in there. But I was not interested in its rolling stock carrying abilities. Not yet anyway.

The next stage was to remove a front panel and see how it would look as a cabinet for a small diorama style layout.
Ooooo... Look at that. I can feel the schemes building up inside my head right now. The interior dimensions are officially 27.5 " long x 14" deep x 11" tall. The proportions really are very nice with regards to a cabinet style layout. The box did not loose any of its rigidity in having a front removed. I might just pop a bit of woodworking glue in the screwed joins but to be honest I don't feel it needs it.

One thing you can notice is that the base sits a good half inch below the tops of the rails, where you'd expect to run the tracks on top of. So some infill in there would be needed to bring the track up to that height.
Now here's a look at the lid. This too, is an excellent fit into the box and it got me thinking about the possibilities of fitting lighting into the lid to illuminate your scene. Hinging the lid would allow for easy access to change a blown bulb or get access to an awkward spot in the display.

All in all then, this is a superb little box with lots of potential for the woodworking challenged modeller. I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with it.