When the weather was poor and no work was being done in the garden, the US track got a bit of attention.
Work went on with the diamond, laying down "normal" crossing noses rather than the self-guarding variety and the second "K" crossing was laid with everything lining up across the two roads. I made life easy for myself by making the two crossing roads dead straight.
Then all the bits and bobs were added, being soldered in the main to the nickel silver pads spiked to the ties. The check rails were also soldered to small nickel silver pads which were soldered to the adjacent stock rails. The check and wing rails have planed ends rather than bent ends.
...and a shot of the completed diamond crossing though still lacking a good few tieplates.
I then ploughed on with the four turnouts on this board. I had a re-think about the methods for making and fitting the tiebars. I wasn't too happy with the operating rods being brass wire soldered to the PCB tiebar. I didn't really have room to have good fillets of solder to get a lot of strength in the joints and there wasn't enough meat in the copper film to allow a decent countersink to allow a good depth of solder. So I re-designed the brass pins to have a flange to provide a stronger joint to the PCB. This meant doing a bit of sausage machine work on the Cowells.
The first job was to turn down the stub to fit in the PCB tiebar to 1mm diameter. This was made 3mm long because I needed that length to give a good grip when the piece was reversed to turn the other end. The larger diameter was turned to 2mm diameter. It looks a bit wasteful using 4mm bar stock for the job but it's what I had in hand from B&Q's metal rack.
By the way, it turned quite nicely which is more than can be said for some of the other sections from that source.
I then finished up with a small pile of parts for the turnouts left to do, plus one or two to allow for the ping factor.
The parts were then chucked in the collet chuck and the ends which would operate the blades being turned down to 1mm diameter and 1mm high with a 2mm diameter flange 0.15mm thick.
Some of the finished parts are shown on the right. It took a while to do the job, each bit taking about ten minutes to do. A set up production lathe could probably do the same job in ten seconds for the lot.
It also took me a bit of time to work out the best way of doing it - like finding out the best length of part to hold in the collet chuck.
All the parts for the tiebar assembly with the PCB tiebar suitably gapped, two of the brass pins and the two point blades with short sections of brass strip soldered to them and drilled to take the pins. By the way, you can just see the solder fillet in the web of the point blades. This was necessary since I found out that the web was paper thin so some reinforcing was necessary.
The two pins are soldered to the tiebar using the solder paste (still going strong
)
The over-length stubs are snipped off and the bottom of the tiebar filed smooth.
The tiebar in place. It is slipped in under the point blades then lifted up so that the brass pins engage the holes on the point blade fittings. Then a strip of 1mm (40thou) Plastikard is slipped under the tiebar to hold it in position. You can see the end of the Plastikard strip just below the stock rail close to camera. The real reason for doing this is to provide a system which would allow the tiebar setup to be stripped down to allow maintenance. The end of the Plastikard strip will be hidden under ballast which would have to be dug out to get the strip out. This would be the only "damage" to the trackwork and that could be easily made good when the tiebar assembly was rebuilt. The top surface of the PCB tiebar will be covered in ballast to disguise it. On my first exhibition layout many years ago, a tiebar on a key three way turnout gave way at the start of the first day and I do remember all the cursing at the time when trying to repair it - hence the efforts to avoid any repeat.
...and a quick jump on to the completed board with four turnouts appearing magically.
This will be one of the central boards of four and it contains the most trackwork. The other central board contains a tandem and another turnout and that will be the next board to do after I've popped over to C&L and re-stocked with rail and cork underlay. I've mainly spiked the P&C work on every fifth tie and I'm leaving it like that at the moment until I get more supplies of spikes from Andy Riechert. I've only got 500 left out of the 3000 originally ordered and that will just about do the P&C work on the next board. I used to think building chaired track was slow.
Jim.