Gentlemen,

All day long I've been fighting stiff muscles I apparently haven't used in awhile.? I've also been trying to recover from a long nasty summer cold, so that might be part of this too.? Since I replaced the drive on my turntable some weeks back, I decided to get used to eyeballing the alignment to the various stall tracks. In the past I had a fairly expensive situation with a indexing drive, well, that stopped indexing!

So I also thought it would be a good time to clean all those stall tracks and figure out why one didn't seem to carry electrons anymore!? So one by one, I emptied all six stalls of the roundhouse and then 5 of the six outdoor tracks.? I then removed the roundhouse itself in preparation for the cleaning crew!

The stall that didn't work was the farthest from the layout edge--about 5-6 ft.? well beyond my short arms.? I traced wires up to the area from underneath, cussed at my wiring at bit but determined it was probably okay underneath.? It finally came down to the point where I couldn't determine where the wires were soldered to the rails.? So I crawl up on the layout on a couple o kneeling pads with a paint scraper a removed ballast (yard mix from Arizona Rock) only to find no wiring connected to the rails. I crawled back down and found a note indicating I had made a change in alligning the two far tracks a couple of years ago, so I must have just forgotten to solder them, but I did manage to ballast it!??? Well since I needed to do it now, I also decided that I could fudge the track just a bit more and make things look and operate better.? Note:? I've never used sweeps or spine alignment tools, but I use 'fudge-a-bit' fairly often!? To get this done, required drilling holes, running some wire, and then laying some new flex track, then ballasting and gluing on my knees and sometimes face down across my roundhouse footprint.? Hopefully the glue will be all dry and solid by tonite.? I'm getting too old for this sort of thing as I know the vacuuming and rail cleaning has yet to be done.


Bob Werre on labor day!

Jim,? You are correct.? One of our older members (all scale club) had one and offered it for sale, but another member bought it immediately for a song.? He lives close by so I'm sure I could have borrowed it.? However originally I had been looking for dirty track or a under the layout wiring issue.? It's like anything many of us get into--the clothes washer overflows so you check out the pipe and find out later that the backhoe in the backyard you hired to dig up the broken pipe has now crashed into your patio--one of those things!?

I'm getting better fatigue wise, but I'm just not used to not being able to play the part of a monkey when it's needed!?? I came back after a meeting last night, and the ballast is secure, so tonight I'll clean up the excess.? Then I can replace the roundhouse and it's interior details, then bring back the power.? My mainline looks like a 50's deadline of steam engines, so that will come last.?

One thing I'm sure most of us have dealt with, is make sure you wet the ballast thoroughly before you put down your scenery glue.? More than once we discover that the application really didn't soak in all the way, so you end up with a crust that eventually breaks revealing loose ballast.?

Bob Werre
PhotoTraxx

Bob.? It sounds like you could use one of those horizontal layout access thingies that Micro Mark sells.

Jim Martin

On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 4:52 PM, Bob Werre <bob@...> wrote:

Gentlemen,

All day long I've been fighting stiff muscles I apparently haven't used in awhile.? I've also been trying to recover from a long nasty summer cold, so that might be part of this too.? Since I replaced the drive on my turntable some weeks back, I decided to get used to eyeballing the alignment to the various stall tracks. In the past I had a fairly expensive situation with a indexing drive, well, that stopped indexing!

So I also thought it would be a good time to clean all those stall tracks and figure out why one didn't seem to carry electrons anymore!? So one by one, I emptied all six stalls of the roundhouse and then 5 of the six outdoor tracks.? I then removed the roundhouse itself in preparation for the cleaning crew!

The stall that didn't work was the farthest from the layout edge--about 5-6 ft.? well beyond my short arms.? I traced wires up to the area from underneath, cussed at my wiring at bit but determined it was probably okay underneath.? It finally came down to the point where I couldn't determine where the wires were soldered to the rails.? So I crawl up on the layout on a couple o kneeling pads with a paint scraper a removed ballast (yard mix from Arizona Rock) only to find no wiring connected to the rails. I crawled back down and found a note indicating I had made a change in alligning the two far tracks a couple of years ago, so I must have just forgotten to solder them, but I did manage to ballast it!??? Well since I needed to do it now, I also decided that I could fudge the track just a bit more and make things look and operate better.? Note:? I've never used sweeps or spine alignment tools, but I use 'fudge-a-bit' fairly often!? To get this done, required drilling holes, running some wire, and then laying some new flex track, then ballasting and gluing on my knees and sometimes face down across my roundhouse footprint.? Hopefully the glue will be all dry and solid by tonite.? I'm getting too old for this sort of thing as I know the vacuuming and rail cleaning has yet to be done.


Bob Werre on labor day!