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Having satisfactorily built a car, I started on the lift shaft. This is a conventional open tower of girders, diagonally braced on three sides and plated on the fourth “public” side. I decided on five floors as this gave enough to justify the complexity of the control system, without becoming too high for the lounge. The finished model stands 2.4 metres high on its baseboard, and has a dividing point almost halfway up from the bottom of the shaft so that it can be transported. The doors use the same pattern of construction as the car. They are passive, being opened by a plastic spacer roller on the car doors which engages with a narrow strip ramp on the floor doors. Fishing weights keep the doors shut when the car is not present. I considered a door lock/retiring cam mechanism such as is fitted to the real thing, but it was all too hard in the small space available! Fitting the car into the shaft required a lot of adjustments, as the car had to travel smoothly on its guide rails, and close enough to the lift doors to allow the engaging cam to work, but not so close that various bolt heads collided. During the construction, bolts were placed so that they were staggered, and slotted holes in parts were used wherever it was anticipated that adjustment would be required.

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