Studholme 9 - tracking it down

 DB says:

Studholme took a pause while life got in the way again, and also because of yet another mental block: how should one affix the track at the ends? My initial intention (and implementation) was to glue it down with contact glue, and the ballast glue would further lock things in place - as it seems unlikely that this will be dismantled or set up that often. 

Or would it? There would be nothing worse than showing up at an exhibition to find the track had been banged up. 

So I thought for a few weeks about soldering each rail to a brass screw and eventually decided to use the old PCB method, even though its a bit ugly. I still have one little rectangle of PCB left over from Otaki (!), but fortunately Jaycar still sells this stuff.

So let the next round of trials and tribulations commence. The first challenge is to cut the big square of PCB into more useful strips of the stuff. I vaguely remember scoring this in the past with a Stanley knife (a million times) and then snapping it off. I think Rhys said this stuff isn't great to power-saw because of the dust.

With the help of a few C clamps and some bits of wood I was able to snap off a few sections about 1 cm wide. A few some strips were then prepared for the first module join to be tackled, and the plastic flextrack sleepers cut away. This was challenging as I'd already glued the track down on this module end, and its always more fun on code 80 Peco track due to the way the lower half of the rail it set into the plastic sleepers. In addition, the PCB is slightly thicker than it should be, but I'm not going to let that bother me. In fact I liked the little undulations as the trains moved through Otaki.

I held the strips up to the track layout and marked the length and where I'd drill and countersink screw holes to fix them to the modules, and cut shallow insulation gaps through the copper with a razor saw.

And then screwed them down...

The near ones were subsequently removed and the holes countersunk a little deeper to hide the screw heads more. I hope ballast will cover the rest - I'm sure I did a worse job on Otaki.  Note the cardboard slivers between the modules in the above pic, we'll come back to them in the next issue.

This post was supposed to end with the joins all soldered up complete and cut, but this has been weeks in the making already, so I'll leave the soldering for now and get this posted. 

The final thing I did today though was to fill all the screw holes and paint the fascia. I went down to Mitre 10 looking for the Resene 'Bokara grey' recommended in the NZ120 Fremo specs and found two test pots, but that's $12 for 120 mls of paint. That won't last long. I then remembered we had some Friars Grey left over from roofing jobs. When I got home I also found we had some non-roofing interior paint in a similar shade so decided to use that instead. Its obviously a slightly different shade to Bokara, but I decided to waste that $12 on coffee and a scone tomorrow instead.

Will give it a second coat tomorrow.