Remedial work

Buoyed by my success with the tiebars the other day, I decided to have a crack at rebuilding one of the common crossings on the layout. I'd been in two minds about tackling it for some time but had kept procrastinating. The problem was that I'd used thin metal strip rather than copperclad strip to connect the vee and wing rails, so the crossing had required some additional packing to bring it up to the correct height. However, I'd rather overdone the packing so there was a bit of a hump in the centre of the crossing. At the time I'd thought it 'would do' as it wasn't immediately obvious on looking at it, but as usually happens with such things, the more time passed the more I realised it really wasn't ideal at all and that the problem was quite evident when running stock over it.

I managed to extricate the offending crossing without damaging the surrounding track. Then, using the soldering iron, I removed the metal strips so the wing rails were detached from the vee. Then came problem number one. All my vees were soldered up using 188 degree solder and the only thing that stopped them coming apart when soldering up the rest of the crossing was by not dwelling too long with the iron. Well, you guessed it, in the course of unsoldering the crossing, the vee came unsoldered too! Darn! Lesson number one - silver solder your crossing vees so they don't come apart later!

Some time later I had reformed the vee to the correct angle (one of the EM Gauge Society crossing vee jigs would really have made this so much simpler, I just don't have any way of getting hold of one short of going to an EMGS show - unless any of you good readers happen to be an EMGS member and could get hold of one for me....?)

It was time to fix up the crossing again. Previously I'd done this by sticking a printout of the crossing template (from Templot) onto a piece of chipboard with double sided tape, stuck the connecting strips to the template using double-sided tape, tinned the strips, tinned the underside of the rails, then positioned the vee and wing rails using drawing pins to hold them in place before applying heat from the soldering iron to cause the tinned surfaces to join together.

There were two problems with this approach, although I'd sort of managed previously despite them. (1) Trying to push drawing pins into chipboard is pretty difficult and its even more difficult as a result to get the straight (coupled to the fact the large head means you can't see how straight they are very easily!). (2) Just relying on the tinned surfaces melting together to hold everything in place is a bit hit and miss.

So, this time around I replaced the chipboard with a cork floor tile (soft enough to make pushing pins in much easier but form enough to hold the pins in place), and replaced the drawing pins with quilters pins (the local craft shop had all sorts to choose from), these being much longer (although there is the risk of them bending, even when pushing into cork, if you're too rough with them) allowing for more pins to be used and with greater precision to hold the rails in place. Also, although I still tinned the copperclad strips, I used lots of flux and a blob of solder carried on the tip of the iron to make each joint - much better.

However, all this being said, I have to confess it still took me several hours to get the job done. Lesson number 2: always check, check and check again to make sure angles, measurements and alignments are exactly correct - one thing I keep on being made aware of though my own mistakes is the really small tolerances you have to work to in P4. There's a tendency to think "It'll do", but, as I've already said, this soon comes back to bite you! I had to take the crossing apart and start again several times because things weren't lined up quite right.

Even now, after placing the rebuilt crossing in situ, I realise that the angle of the vee is slightly too acute - it's only a fraction of a degree but enough to be obvious when sighting along the adjacent rails.... the question is is it enough to merit taking it all apart again, or can I get away with leaving it...???

Soldering for dummies!

I had a crack at finishing the other Masokits tiebars the other day. I just needed to solder up the ones I made a while ago and then either make a couple more from the etches or try to salvage some from the duff lot (the ones I forgot to clean before soldering!!), which I managed to do.

I learned two big lessons:

1) Use flux!!! To anyone with any soldering experience this should be obvious but my lack of said experience meant that I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to solder up the wretched things without using any flux, naively thinking that the fact I had pre-tinned the copperclad, wrapped the etches around it and applied lots of heat from the soldering iron (with no additional solder on the tip either) would magically lead to it all soldering up nice and solid. WRONG! The solder melted, sure, but wouldn't 'stick' to the etch. After some time getting frustrated with this, I hit on the idea that some flux might help, and maybe a little blob of fresh solder on the end of the iron too. Well, what a revelation! A good slop of Carrs green label flux so the tiebar was practically swimming in it, and hiss... the moment the iron touched the metal, the whole thing soldered up beautifully, solder flowing nicely into all the joins and cracks. Lesson learned!

2) A bodged solder job can be rescued! I followed Flymo's advice, given after my last post about the tiebars, selected the ones that weren't hopeless, dipped them in some Carrs acidip to clean them up, then, with my new-found discovery of flux (see point 1!) proceeded to resolder them. Job done!

Masokitsm

Grrrr... I have spent almost 6 hours of this weekend trying to make up four - yes, just a measly FOUR - Masokits tiebars! So far, seven have gone in the bin!

Yes, I've made these things before, but they don't get any easier the second, or third, or fourth time around. They are just SO fiddly!

Question to those more experienced than me - is this par for the course with this sort of thing, or does it indicate a particularly high level of cack-handedness?!?

(OK, I admit that four of the seven binned items would have been fine except for the fact that I totally forgot to clean the brass etches before I started that particular batch, so there was no chance of them soldering up properly! It may have had something to do with a certain alcoholic beverage being consumed at the time.....)

By the way, the 'm' at the end of this post's title is intentional!

Masokits tie bar

I made one of the Masokits tie bars this afternoon. I managed to break one etching in the process (wiggling one of the tabs too much trying to get a good fold made it snap off!) and all things considered it was probably the most fiddly thing I've ever done (I can see why they're called 'Masokits' now!) but it was also extremely enjoyable (there's nothing better than being completely absorbed in making something) and the end result looks pretty neat (although the photos are cruel to say the least - the actual size is about half the size it appears in the thumbnails below!). Next job - installing it.

Soldering woes

The last few days, in between feeding and changing our 2 week old baby, I've been trying to make some progress with track laying on the layout. I've not got far - and not just because of the baby!

What has held me up is something I hadn't even given much thought to before - the electrical connections to the turnout. I've been trying to follow the instructions in one of the Scalefour Digest sheets (the one about turnout construction using C&L components). It says to cut small lengths of copper-clad strip and glue them to the 3 timbers beneath the crossing-V and also to the two timbers at the heels of the switches - between the switch and stock rails. Then it says to drill holes through the copper-clad, timbers and baseboard, pass a wire through each and solder it so it's flush to the top of the copper-clad; then lay the rails as normal and solder where they pass over the copper-clad strips to make the electrical connection.

Now, I've had all sorts of problems trying to follow this method:

Initially I glued the copper-clad strips to the timbers using 5-minute epoxy, but didn't account for the fact that the '5 minute' refers to when it's touch-dry, not when it's stuck solid, so as soon as I started drilling with the mini-drill, the copper-clad simply came loose.

Next I tried with super-glue and left it over night. However, when I tried to solder the dropper wires into the holes, the heat from the soldering iron melted the glue! Even disregarding this, using normal 188 wire solder and flux I ended up with a huge blob of solder on top of each piece of copper-clad, but no bond between the copper-clad and the wire (maybe because I had the top of the wire flush with the top of the copper-clad so the heat wasn't getting to it properly).

So I switched back to epoxy and left it to dry a bit longer. In the meantime I experimented with soldering wire into drilled copper-clad and found that solder paint is the best option to avoid the big blob. Also, it makes more sense to leave a bit of the wire sticking out above the top of the copper-clad while soldering, then snip and file flat. But once it's been filed flat there is so little solder that the join is pretty weak and I don't like the thought of a weak joint buried beneath the ballast etc.

Having put it aside for a while I've been thinking about it and started to wonder exactly why the copper-clad strips need to have dropper wires soldered to them anyway. Surely they are simply there to make the electrical connection between the rails. The power feed can be supplied direct to the rail at the toe of the turnout can't it?

Soldering

I had another go at some soldering earlier this evening, in preparation for making up the handrails for the Toad brake van. The main question that had been bothering me was how to hold everything securely and squarely in place while soldering. The solution I've come up with (and which is probably obvious to anyone who has done any soldering at all) is to create a makeshift jig allowing each rectangular 'set' of handrails to be pre-assembled and held securely in place while soldering.

I drilled four holes in a piece of wood to locate the handrail fastenings in, and used thin strips of plasticard fixed down with double sided tape to raise the handrail wire off the surface of the wood by .5mm or so. The wire was carefully lined up with the corner fastenings using needle nosed tweezers and secured with small pieces of Carrs hot tape.

The joints were given a drop of Carrs yellow label flux (not sure how necessary this is when using solder paint? is the flux simply to help the solder flow into the joint or does it have anything to do with the strength of the joint?), then a drop of solder paint was applied to each corner/joint with a cocktail stick before applying the heat for a second or two. Initially I didn't use enough of the solder paint (actually I'd failed to shake/mix it thoroughly enough so I was only applying a watery residue) - I discovered that you can actually apply a fairly liberal blob of the stuff since as soon as you apply the heat most of it burns up. After a couple of minutes I removed the assembly and washed it with some washing up liquid and warm water.

The joints appear to be secure and there aren't any noticeable blobs of solder so I think the experiment was a success. Just need to get on and make all those handrail fastenings.....