Fluesheet's Shelf Layout

[Fluesheet]

Looking good!!
Maybe CVMW should make an FRA excepted tie strip just paint for awful looking track.

That would be interesting, for sure, Greg. And certainly faster than making all your own - more layout building time (yay) but less modeling (boo).

My last two turnouts were straight Fast Tracks builds, but I decided to use individual wood ties instead of the hybrid CVMW tie blocks or Fast Tracks' own twist ties (see earlier posts for rambling discussions on those).

A little 1929 prototype background first: the ties are arranged more or less to the AREA recommended practices for a #6 crossover as outlined in the Maintenance Cyclopedia I posted comments about earlier. From tie end to tie end (in the diagram) is 21'6", but the longest single tie is 14'; combinations of 10' / 11'6", 8' / 13'6" and 7'6" / 14' ties make up the total length. The paired ties were butted together alternately between the middle of the gage of the crossover track and then between one crossover rail and an inside rail of the main. I tried to duplicate that here (it's close, but not right).


Full sized photo here

If you look closely at the ends of the wood ties, you'll see some small shims - I needed these to account for a dip in the Homasote here, but mainly to shim up ties that were too thin. "Scale" 9"x7" wood ties are significantly thicker than the CVMW ties that lead up to the turnouts (and the PC board ties are thinner yet!), so they had to be thinned to maintain an even surface. Boy was that a pain. Unfortunately "profile" wood ties (thinner ties) are too thin, so weren't an option. I tried a couple thinning methods:
- Using a hobby knife freehand - very inconsistent; the blade would follow the grain. Immediate fail.
- I constructed a small styrene fixture that had a channel for the tie and had a #7 blade mounted in it, the idea being to slide the tie through and have excess thickness planed off. It was genious! It was also a failure! (sorry, no photo).
- Sand the ties to thickness on sand paper. It kind of worked, but I would end up with a tie out of square in one or more dimensions, leading to the shims in the photo. Plus it was slow. It also wore out my fingerprints.

Then, success! A "planer" using a drill press, a Dremel drum sanding bit and a guide. The big win here is that it is MUCH easier to control thickness AND the rough finish looks good - lots of wood grain. Props to Ben on the Model Rail Radio podcast for suggesting this. This is one of those "I should have thought of this sooner" items.

Full size image here.

I bought 3' strips of 7x9' scale lumber from Mt. Albert - the above would have been very difficult with ties cut to length.

After that, it was just a matter of setting up a stop on my Chopper and cutting the ties to various lengths in batches:

Full Size

Spacing the ties out using a straight edge (side note - get dental tools for your modeling tool box)

Full size here

And finishing off with thinned white glue applied with a pipette.

Full size image here.

End of day, July 17, 2011 (I got behind!)

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Have fun!