BoxfileV; throwing it.

As well as how to connect the modules together I had also been thinking about how I was going to actuate the single point blades. The list of potential problems was reasonably long. There was not much space under the modulettes. there was not much space on top of the modules. The mechanism had to have a fair bit of grunt to throw the stiff point blade. The mechanism also had to be able to switch power to the frog. Whatever was chosen, the 3 modulettes still had to fit into the box file.

Sounds rather easy really, doesn't it. Here is how I did it.

First up I soldered a piece of piano wire to the point blade. There was a right angled bend passing through a hole in the baseboard.


This then matched up with a miniature DPDT slider switch underneath the board. A hole was drilled through to actuate the point blade wire.

If you look closely you can also see that I had drilled a second larger hole in the switch. This was 'tapped' to take a Jacar screw thingy. These are more normally used to space out and hold Computer circuit boards. By 'tapped' I mean that I drilled out the hole to the right size and then force threaded the screw into the hole with the good old electric screwdriver.

To get the length for the actuator, I used some of the bits that are more commonly used to attach computer cables to desktop computers.



The second switch on the modulette was still to be actuated from the same side as the first one, so needed some extensions.


The long actuators can be unscrewed when the layoutette is traveling, so that it will all fit in to the box.

Next up is the track for the other 2 modulettes, some wiring and then immersing the track in 'concrete'.