I got tired of having pieces of wood and no trains so I started to put together some of the trackwork for the LANI railroad. I started on the section that will be mostly inside a tunnel for obvious reasons.
The track is made by soldering the metal rail to a PCB tie which is a wafer like material that has a coat of copper on the outside. The rail is soldered to the copper surface and held in place quite nicely. This is as opposed to using miniatures spikes and spiking the rail down with those (uh, I'd rather solder, thanks).
After a decent section of rail has been soldered down, gaps are cut in the copper surface of the ties to not short circuit the electrical connection. The gaps can either be cut with a small triangle hobby file or by tapping a cut-off wheel from a dremel on the surface (you can guess which I did).
When all is said and done, this section of track will actually be coming out of a tunnel right about... here. The area where the tweezers and tools are sitting right now will be a small town.
I put together a short video of the train (if you can call that black chassis without a shell a train) running on the track...
This handlaid track has been brought to you by....
The letter U...
The number 8....
And this soldering iron...
On a side note, I took a picture of my overall work area, and realized a number of things I have were given to me by friends and family...
No comments:
Post a Comment