A Much Less Messy Day

Being ANZAC Day it was relatively quiet at the club with all the ex-diggers out with their comrades commemorating that day way back, a hundred years back, that the Aussi's and Kiwi's fought the enemy at Gallipoli. So it was a little quieter than usual down at the club.

So a quiet bit of work was done on the layout. Peter A was there working on the big bridge and also on the send level bridge that will be the nice all metal one he found up at Bundaberg at their train show. That scene is going to look very nice indeed.

I got into those sidings near the Cement Silos. On Wednesday I had glued down the cork for the two sidings and painted it at the silo area itself. Saturday I glued down the track using Liquid Nails - a very thing smear of it and then laid some draft snakes (you know, those round material tubes full of sand that you put at the bottom of the door to keep the wind out) on top to hold it down for 30 minutes. The glue pretty much takes straight away since it is in a very thin layer and almost acts like a contact cement, but the extra weight just makes sure.

While this was drying, I cut the cork for the two sidings at the back and to the left of that area and glued it down with Liquid nails. Not as thin a smear as for the track, as the cork is very porous and hence needs more glue to work best. Once the cork was down I gave it a single coat of grey paint to seal it. This paint is just a plain water based one that takes a couple of hours to go off.

Between talking, doing bits and pieces and drinking coffee, a couple of hours went by and I was then able to glue the track down. So I grabbed some used track that was in good nick and trimmed it to size as well as very lightly filing the ends to smooth them out so track rubbers and clothes wouldn't get caught on any dags. It also makes it easier to slide both the metal and plastic track joiners on. So the then smear of Liquid Nails went on with the paint scrapper doing the dean of smearing. Track was inserted into joiners and pressed down into position and some more snakes added to hold it down.

Thirty minutes later I was able to start drilling holes for the track power droppers and then soldering them into place. I used the trusty Dremel tool with the rotary steel wire brush to clean small spots on the track for the droppers to attach to and then tinned those area with solder. The droppers were cut and their ends also tinned with solder. We are using single stranded wire that is sold as bell wire or detonator wire at Bunnings. It is cheap and very effective as it can be bent and holds the shape of the bend and therefore making it easy to solder up tight and close on the rails.

So when I knocked off for the day at two, the sidings were all complete and power available to all tracks. Maybe on Wednesday I'll take a train down for a test run.