Trackwork and Tortoises

Just to update the progress on the layout.

All the pointwork is now in, just needing the odd cosmetic chair and sliding chairs to be fitted, which I'll leave for a few days until it's all settled down, the mainline and crossover is also completed and has worked well with it's sweeping curve. I stiil need to lay the plain track for the five sidings but I want to work out the building sizes first so I can work around them.

And for those not familiar with 2mm, a few tools available from the 2mm Association to make the job a lot easier:
Various track gauges
Jig for making Vee's available in various angles
Crossing Jig for holding parts together whilst soldering the crossing together
And finally although I used individual sleepers you can make your points directly on to these milled sleeper tunouts which are available for various points.

Saturday 2/01/10

Meanwhile for a change from tracklaying and to give me chance to decide on the exact posistioning of building, It gave me the chance to start fitting the Tortoise point motors.

Previously I've fixed nickel silver wire to the point blades, which drop through the baseboard and connect to the point motors. In larger scales it is easy to solder these to the sides of the blades, but in 2mm their Is'nt as you havn't as much area to solder too, I opted for 0.5mm rod and with a bit of tidying up their is enough clearance for the wheel flanges.

The next job was to fit the Tortoise adaptor plates, these are a really simple/clever idea available from Exactoscale and are only about a fiver for a pack of five, they have got me out of a few tricky corners in the past when the Tortoise wouldn't fit into the available space and again have proved their worth today.

The Tortoises and adaptor plates were from an old 7mm layout I once had, so a saving was made on outlaying for new ones, problem was I'd opened the holes to fit a larger gauge piano wire, so when fitting the original piano wire it was too sloppy and just didn't work, so I opted for something in between.

First job was too fit two pieces of 1/16" brass tube in the slider bar these would go up through the base board and sit about 1mm below trackbase, then the 0.5mm rod fitted to the point blades would fit inside the tube. With the brass rod'd ID been about 0.9mm, this gave it a bit of play which was good as I wanted to have a bit of sideplay and not put all the pressure on the 0.5mm rod which would be the most fragile point of the operation.

Before fitting the Tortoise motors I always elongate the the screw mounting slots, this allows the Tortoise too have about 2mm of sideplay adjustment, which is helpful in getting the points blades in a central posistion, I have also made the hole in the slider bar a bit oversize to give me a touch more play, although this would probably not be needed if using the original piano wire as it is quite flexible.

Another problem I had was the lack of space available to fit the Tortoises, due to the baseboards been at different levels. Thankfully before starting baseboard construction I glued the Templot trackplan down, this gave me the chance to workout where the point motors could be fitted and where the baseboard bearers could go.

But even then I knew a couple would not fit in the normal way and instead of been able to fit the Tortoises to the side of the point with the slider, they would have to be fitted directly over the point itself.

I got around this by shortening the slider bar so it operates inside the base, this also required lengthening the slot in the adaptor base, an easy modification.

And finally a shot of the baseboard with the trail of Tortoises fitted.