Cutting my own railroad ties in HO was a bust. I built a trolley with clamps to hold the wood as it moved through the saw blade, giuded by the miter gauge slot. It worked great - no binding and clean slices. Unfortunately, I could not come up with a way to make consistent, uniform 1/16" slices. My test cuts ranged from .020" to .110", with variations from one end to the other of no less than .020". That's far too much variation on something that is supposed to be .0625" thick. The problem is in the cheap rip fence on the saw. A variation of .020" is not a problem on a piece of furniture, but it is just not good enough for HO ties. So.... Saturday I placed an order for ties, track, and track guages with InternetTrains.com. I am going with Code 70 rail. Because IT.C doesn't offer PC ties (that I could find) I am foing to try to restrict the need to only the points. Does anyone know how turnouts were handlaid before there were PC board ties?
Week Five Report Feb 9—Feb 12 Mon—Thurs Nothing. Feb 13—Friday Trimmed north end of harbor. Bit the bullet and wired up nine more roundhouse tracks after quitting real work at noon. Only four more to go. Biggest mistake on this layout--not pre-wiring the big roundhouse. While it's not very far from the edge, it's still more of a reach than my old back appreciates. Four more tracks--eight more solders--charge! Feb 14-15—Sat/Sun Painted last upstairs room. Started the head end of large accelerator complex. Used the roofs from eight car shed kits for stainless steel walls. Accelerator complex will be ten feet long and disappear into a cliff. It's one way to handle where the decks come together. Pete
PeterZ wrote: "Does anyone know how turnouts were handlaid before there were PC board ties?" Peter .. handlaying a turnout without PC ties is done pretty much the same as with PC ties, except you'll likely build your turnout directly on the roadbed instead of on a bench. Replace soldering certain locations to PC ties by making all attachments of all turnout components to ties (about every 4 to 6 ties) by using spikes ... or my personal preference .. hot glue. Be sure to allow free movement of the switch points though. The beauty of handlaying a turnout directly onto the roadbed is that you can "fuzz" the rails into alignment to easily fit most any situation. Not very easy to do that with a bench constructed turnout. You will still have to solder the point of the frog, and I use a small strip of brass shim-stock for the throwbar between the switch points. This won't work unless you insolate the frog. Go for it and have fun!
My order for ties and rail has been shipped and will be here Friday (according to UPS). The bad news is that turnout ties are out of stock, so it is back to cutting my own. I have some ideas about what went wrong and how to fix it that I will try after the ME ties arrive. That way I can cut them to the same thickness. Bill, I plan to build my turnouts in place for just the reason you describe. I already have a jig in mind for grinding/filing points to the correct angle. I don't plan to insulate the frogs (not set in stone) so the two sides of the throwbar will have to be. Perhaps hot gluing the points to a slightly thinned tie for a throwbar will work. If that won't hold then soldering the points to a thin (.005?) brass shim held to a tie with hot glue. Once set up I can cut the shim. Hopefully I will have some track and at least one turnout down before the end of this party.
Well, finally my boring legs are just about done. To get the nolix built, at least at the starting stage will be easy as I have only two pieces to install and its good to go, for the spline road bed. Again a job I thought would take about 30 minutes took about 2 1/2 hours working with a friend to cut notches into the top of the legs so the benchwork would rest in the notches.
But isn't that always the way?! You (or at least I) just don't remember the times when things went better than expected. Pete
More of a 10 day report; and progress is a bit behind schedule too . I have completed my fiddle yard. Not the biggest of jobs, but starting from scrap wood it did need quite a bit of work to complete. Little things like fitting a microswitch to change frog polarity, a manual traverser thing at the stub end and a 'flexible' connection to the layout proper were additional complications. My plan to complete the coke complex and start 'decorating' it have slipped seriously. I have got some oil kits (Walthers distributor and refinery) to bash into a recovery/by-products plant (Where they take the gases from the coking process and refine them to get various chemicals that can be sold. Not done much these days - too expensive.). Thought this would be a couple of evenings work. I made up the storage tanks and tank car filling station OK, but that was two evenings work . Started the refinery and found stage one is fitting 15 small, mostly curved platforms with etched brass handrails. Aarrggh! 58 of the little bu**ers. The worst part was that each had to be cut from the fret, where they were held by tabs that were not part etched and at least as strong as the rails themselves . The instuctions made it sound easy, which it probably is if you are used to brasswork, but for me it became a process of extracting them with little enough damage for me to fix. Then many had to be curved (fortunately I found a better way than the instructions said) and all had to be superglued to the platforms. I'm not desperately keen on CA - I have managed to really stick myself together once, and had several close shaves - so having to do this lot did not impress me much. Eventually got them finished Monday night: Last night I put the little support brackets on the underside. They are on the sprue at the back of the picture. I'm sure it's downhill from here. (Quit laughing at the back.)
Well we have broken the post count of the other layout parties, so I guess this one is a keeper... thanks guys.
Cool!!!! Great to hear Rick Now maybe we can add Two more weeks to this So I can try and get something done
Well, because of two back-to-back work trips I missed a lot, but this weekend I'll finalize the wiring and get the backdrops up... The good news is I got in some great railfanning at Barstow and Tehachapi
I think I'm going to bail out on this topic a few days earlier than it's originally scheduled ending. We mostly got done what we wanted to do, which was extend basic scenery from the begiining of the yard to Downtown. That in itself is a lot of railroad. But we also got done a lot of the roundhouse facility before the yard; the first deck beyond Downtown nearly to the high bridges; some of the harbor; and a lot of the second deck beyond the high bridges. I'm getting busy at my real work, and the weather will start turning good shortly, so we'll be outside. Since the weather is supposed to be bad this weekend, we may do some work. Great party, Rick! Thanks for hosting it! Pete
Pete, You aren't bailing, the original party was done last week, we're into the two week extension. Glad you could join us, I'm still plodding along. Usually I get about half done of what I thought I would, but I finish the other half within a month of the party. Usually I'm into three heavy work periods for the year, two of which are layout parties. So I will have completed number one "push" for this year in about a month. By the way, I love your layout.
As is often the way in this hobby I got sidetracked on several other projects. I built an Atlas roundhouse kit. It arrived in the mail and my 4 yr old boy insisted we attack it ....or rather i'm building it. Got it assembled and painted. Next is weathering, lights, and a base with detailing and turntable, then .... i also bought two diesels and three dummy diesels, one of which will get a TV camera installed in it once it arrives from japan. I also got diverted fixing up some second hand rolling stock that arrived in the post. and I bought acrylic doors for the train shelving... and... You know how it is But today i got a few hours work done on my original objective - getting the benchwork done. I've been experimenting with real light galv channel as framing. I'm not entirely happy with the rigidity, so I have to decide whether to rip it up and start again, or add some more members to boost it a bit. We are going away for all of next week, so at this rate I ain't going to make it, but I enjoyed the party anyway Rick, and I got some stuff done even if it wasn't the intended
Rob, I usually don't get done what I intended as I have noted before, but I have found these parties a good spring board for a flurry of activity before the sloth sets in again. So if you got something done you might not have because of the party, that's all to the good.
WEEK 7 - LAST WEEK TO THE PARTY TIME TO SCRAMBLE... LOL... I'LL BE ASKING FOR FEEDBACK IN A SEPERATE THREAD AT THE END OF WEEK 7.
