It's been just over two weeks since I posted anything and I don't seem to have much to show for all the work I've been doing.
In the garden, with our present spell of good weather, I've done a bit more clearing in preparation for the extension onto the lawn.
The north bound extension to the oval in the garden will go between the apple tree - just to the left and to the rear of the compost bin - and the wall on the right. This picture shows the original situation with a pretty impenetrable route past the apple tree and the trig point on the wall buttress on the extreme right.
...and after a bit of work, the way is cleared with the apple tree in full view and the next two buttresses on the wall revealed. The buttress with the trig point is now hidden on the right behind a large pile of prunings which will be burned in a few months' time when they have dried out. Note the missing copings on the wall which were displaced by the bushes. The stones had actually fallen - more likely had been pushed - to the inside and I have been able to dig them out of the undergrowth to be cleaned and replaced on the wall.
Inside, I had made a start on the track with a fair bit of experimenting on how I was going to build it. I wanted to be able to build it all off the baseboards in the house.
The first decision I made was to build the track on battens - like the Bassette-Lowke 0 gauge track of many years ago. This meant that I should be able to build everything to plan indoors and transfer it straight to the baseboards outside. I opted to make the battens of 3mm styrene strip. The decision came about after earlier discussions about wiring and I opted for the 3mm thickness so that I could run 2.5mm cable busses under the sleepers between the battens so that connections to rails would be a matter of a short lead between the busses and the rails, with no need to drill holes on the baseboards. DCC experts might have some comments about running busses so close under the rails.
A section of the Templot plan was printed out and stuck together to give a plan of a six foot length of plain track in the station throat - this to use as a guinea pig for track construction. The plan was then taped to a length of Contiboard. The longitudinal battens were stuck down on the plan on the outer ends of the sleepers and clear of the rails so that the rails were clearly shown for alignment
This picture shows the length of the Contiboard - just about seven feet long to comfortably accommodate the six foot length
This close shot shows the detail more clearly with the styrene battens under the outer ends of the sleepers. The small square is used to make sure that the rail is exactly in position. I find it easy to get parallax errors when the rail is well off the plan - especially with the extra 3mm caused by the battens.
Then came a few days of frustration and experimentation. Initially I had used the MEK solvent supplied by Cliff Barker to stick the sleepers to the styrene battens. However this wasn't too successful with more than 50% of the joints not making properly and the other ones didn't stand up to much handling. I then dig around for alternatives to give better joints. I first tried some MEK which I had got some years ago when working with glass fibre. This stated that it was a 50% solution and the results were much worse than with Cliff Barker's MEK with no joints being made. I then dug out my bottle of C&L Butanone and tried that and the end results were also very poor. I then had a dig around on Google to see if there was any solution and the options were possibly Pipe Weld for PVC piping or the Plastruct Plastic Weld. I managed to get a 50ml tube of Pipe Weld in the local B&Q and tried that out and that seems to produce good results with almost 100% success. However, another thing I did was to roughen the surface of the styrene with a big glass fibre stick that I got from Brian Lewis many years ago - this was recommended by several sources. So I made the cardinal sin of changing two variable in a test.
But I've got a result.
I might also get some of the Plastruct Plastic Weld to see if it also works. Someone on Ebay offers a 100ml bottle of an equivalent complete with syringe for applicatoion, so that might be worth a try. The fumes from the Pipe Weld are a bit strong so I would be interested to see if the Plastic Weld might be a bit better in this respect.
And a big jump to the completed six foot panel.
In true Templot fashion, there ain't a straight line anywhere.
It's actually a big reverse curve with a ~70ft radius one closest to camera and a ~150ft radius one at the other end with big dollops of transition in between.
I've also changed my method of construction and feed sleepers onto both rails and put them down on the styrene battens. Laying just one rail first, then inserting the second rail after the sleepers were stuck down, was actually a bit more difficult since forcing the second rail through all the chairs takes quite a bit of force as you get more chairs engaged.
Other things going on have been making some track gauges, making fixtures to machine Slater's wheels down to ScaleOne32 standards and machining up bases for crossing noses on pointwork. I also did a good bit of business at the S scale Autumn meeting - I traded a Mike Williams G3 wagon kit and a yard of G3 track for two 1:32 wagon kits so I've got to get at least one of the kits built to use for testing of pointwork.
Jim.