I finished it off in a couple of hours at the weekend. This is the end product.
The sleepering through the turnout is Scalefour Society ply & rivet build. The dark brown sleepers at the ends are ones cut individually from C&L trackbases.
The whole thing is stuck down firmly on my test-track/reviewing board. This serves the purpose of allowing me to look at a vehicle to see if it is "right", to test the fitting of the Sprat & Winkle couplings, and to see how it runs through pointwork. Not as good as a full shunting plank or test track, but a sight easier to have on a workbench.
There is a tie-bar fitted that I _think_ that I got from the Scalefour Society.
Although you can see it is soldered in place, I have yet to work out a latching mechanism. I may drop into Maplin tomorrow to see if I can find some form of surface-mounted switch that does the trick, possibly in conjunction with an Omega loop as well to take up the extra movement.
What to do next? Hmmm... Let's wait and see.
Looking good! That seems a pretty tight angle for a turnout though, especially in P4 - I presume you won't be running anything bigger than an 0-4-0 through it unless it's got lots of sideplay in the axles?
ReplyDeleteI'm interested to know how you get on hooking it up to an operating mechanism as I still have to do this with my turnouts (as well as installing those Masokits tiebars!). I've got a number of ideas of how to do this, including a rather nice idea someone posted about on the S4 web forum a while back, but I've not quite got round to figuring it all out exactly yet. I was veering towards some sort of basic crank and rod under the baseboard for the actual operation.
By the way, did you see my reply to your comment about a BRJ index back on November on my blog?
Matt
Well, as you'll have seen from the size of the board that it's mounted on there is nothing that is going to "run" through it. There was a deliberate decision to build it that tight to check for buffer-locking, and swing, and so on.
ReplyDeleteI've just been asked to build a demonstration board for use on the Scalefour Society exhibition stands. That is going to have a more realistic B6/B8 combination on it, but it will also have some tight parts to demonstrate what is achievable in P4.
And of course, back to the Beer and Buckjumpers theme, I will hav esome "internal" track as tight as this A4 when I come to building the industrial part of the layout.
I'm still musing on point operation myself. Given that I have to do something for the demo board, I'll probably try a Tortoise, plus some sort of manual/rod/lever alternatives, again to show what is possible. Then for the layout I'll see what is most straightforward. I'll keep folk posted anyway.
I must have missed your reply on the BRJ thing. Going over there right now...