Back to Bricklington

[potatan]

Thanks for the tips - I think I might try clamping it in and work sideways, excellent idea. I've been a little "generous" on some of the dropper wire lengths as you can probably tell. Oh and there is the slight issue of 3 of the pairs having their reds and blacks transposed despite my best efforts to double and triple check before soldering them to the tracks. All makes for some fun maintenance in future, hurray!

T'other side

[aleopardstail]

hey don't knock overly long droppers, far better to have full flexibility on where to put connector blocks than to find up only able to fit one in the most awkward place possible. easy to cut wore shorter, slightly more irate when its not quite long enough

[potatan]

Soldering is my Achilles heel. Well, soldering irons, more specifically. After problems with bits, then the soldering iron just point blank refusing to get hot, I returned it to my local Toolstation for another. After about 2 hours of using this new one, it, too, decided that heat was not something it wanted to admit into its life. So I returned that one too, but this time got a full refund rather than chancing a third identical iron from a clearly duff batch. Got a nice fancy one now with built-in helping hands and everything.

So of course, there has been progress now! The board has been flipped while I've been working my way through connecting the droppers underneath to DCC tags, before adding the Bus all the way around.

I twisted each pair of droppers (using a cordless drill with a crocodile clamp fitted to twist all the pairs together). I'd read about some sort of voltage drop or inductive leakage (I think my uncle suffered from that) but threw caution to the wind considering my layout is as wide as a small layout. I made sure to twist every other pair in opposite directions to counter the effect. My dad was an electrician and he taught me to do this to stop the electricity getting dizzy. Joking of course, I did it for neatness as much as anything but you can be the judge of that.

The droppers were very long so I cut them all to length as I went round soldering them down to the tags. This meant my diligent tinning of the droppers beforehand all went to waste, as did quite a lot of dropper offcuts. I laid them all end to end, measured them, and the total came to "I'm inexperienced and over-cautious". No harm done though, I might put the bits out for the birds to build colourful nests from.

I also took the time to add some reversible legs as to the board

tip: get a couple of wood blocks,

to help me work on it when it's got more than just a few meters of track on it, and will put these to good use for my next job which will be fitting a dozen or so point motors. You can see two of the legs next to the offcut wires.

Final form:

The point motors will use their own Bus, for convenience and good practice so I may have a go at using some fancy spring loaded connection blocks rather then soldering, just to try them out. Recommendations welcome.

[aleopardstail]

looks good, twisting the DCC bus (or any differential voltage AC bus really) helps, doesn't need to be that tight but it won't hurt.

different bus for accessories also makes a lot of sense (not least with short circuit protection if a train shorts on a point you can still change the points!)

Its looking good, and the ability to fpli a layout on its back or side really is something N gauge shines at.

not tried the spring clips, I find screw terminal blocks are good though, those solder tags are better for lower resistance in the join though

[potatan]

<MAJOR MILESTONE KLAXON>

I've completed the accessory bus and added all the point motors. One of them gave up after a single throw so I'll see if I can get that replaced; those DCC Concepts people seem nice. I've matched up all the motor "polarities" so that switching them is more intuitive using my handy mnemonic where 1 = On Course, and 2 = Off the beaten track (or Normal and Reverse in UK prototypical).

So I now have a fully functioning layout, if a little sparse. It does look a bit like it did 6 months ago but now it's much more coherent after a teardown and rebuild.

I have a couple of little jobs to sort now, like permanently attaching the power faceplate. The constant plugging and unplugging of the DC input managed to weaken the power inlet on the NCE PowerCab PCB so much that it snapped, which was a bit of a disaster. But at least now I have a spare one - or I will when I've repaired it. In my haste I ordered a replacement from an eBay seller who had sold 134 of them so they are clearly a bit fragile.

I have some spare capacity for a few other accessories when that time arises, or I could run another bus cable pair round the layout now I have the hang of it.

So I'll shortly be putting the layout into its permanent "rails-to-the-sky" orientation and hopefully leaving it like that for a long while, as I learn all about buildings, trees, roads and static grass.

Would you recommend anything in terms of tidy up before I flip it "permanently"? I'll bung a few sticky cable clips in there for some of the more rogue dropper cables but I'm not sure if I should do anything else.

I'm very pleased.

Easy colour coding - A=Arange, B=Burple:

On / Off:

Hopefully I won't see this again for at least a few weeks:

Bricklington finally pointed

[Phred]

Looking great!
I look forward to seeing what you do with the landscaping.

[potatan]

I've been tunnelling.

For my layout I've decided a quarry scene might be fun, so I've been thinking about hills, which of course means tunnels. These two sidings are going to lead to some sort of industrial stone scene where my white BIS-liveried Class 06 will shine, dustily.

Ignore my contouring for now:

Never having built a tunnel before, I watched about 5 videos about how to build a tunnel, and came away with about 10 methods. Usual story. So I thought I'd build a flat concrete sectional roof one for fun and rigidity.

The results were fine for size and strength, but I'll need another go as I got the curve slightly wrong at the final glue stage.

Once I've got it how I like I'll move onto making it look more hilly.

Some things I need to think about:

Accessibility - even though this is a very stable section of track, I'm sure there will be a calamity of some sort at some point requiring track access.
So do I make a section above the track removable (i.e. everything above the tunnel construction), or should I make the whole hill removable? In which case I'll need to do something to blend in the edges of the hill to the rest of the baseboard.

For a removable hill, would you consider putting it all on a thin card base, so the whole thing could come off and go back on in one piece?

The alternative was to create a third radius pokey-stick with a bulldozer head to just shove derailed trains out of the tunnel, but I'm sure there's a much more refined way. Trained hamster perhaps..

[aleopardstail]

make sure you can get into that to clean the tracks and recover derailed things that the nice Mr Murphy arranges

I'd suggest making the hill hollow, give it a removable back and side (painted black on the inside) and have maybe a few inches of tunnel at either end, the rest open for access

[Phred]

If it's going to be a quarry, and looking at the hill shape in picture, I should think that the base of the hill could be fixed while the upper section(s) could be detachable. The lower edges of the removable bits can be disguised with quarry rubble etc.

[potatan]

The lower edges of the removable bits can be disguised with quarry rubble etc.

Excellent idea!

I'd suggest making the hill hollow, give it a removable back and side

And another one!

I think I'll purchase some tunnel ends and work backwards (and upwards) from there

[aleopardstail]

The lower edges of the removable bits can be disguised with quarry rubble etc.

Excellent idea!

I'd suggest making the hill hollow, give it a removable back and side

And another one!

I think I'll purchase some tunnel ends and work backwards (and upwards) from there

one thing to keep in mind is put card over the tracks when working on the hillside above.. easier than removing bits of glue and plaster

[potatan]

one thing to keep in mind is put card over the tracks when working on the hillside above.. easier than removing bits of glue and plaster

Like a mini-dustsheet? Maybe I'll just cut my ill-fitting tunnel down by about 80mm then use that - there's nothing quite as satisfying as making a VERY specific tool for that one job

[aleopardstail]

one thing to keep in mind is put card over the tracks when working on the hillside above.. easier than removing bits of glue and plaster

Like a mini-dustsheet? Maybe I'll just cut my ill-fitting tunnel down by about 80mm then use that - there's nothing quite as satisfying as making a VERY specific tool for that one job

lol, basically yes and that should work perfectly

[Phred]

potatan wrote:
there's nothing quite as satisfying as making a VERY specific tool for that one job

+1 on that!
I think I derive as much pleasure from devising a little tool or jig for a job as I do from building the model itself.