Over the last two weeks I took up the challenge to build a turnout. Well after much perseverance I am quite happy with the result.
I made a few errors. The stock rails are little too short and the first frog I made disintegrated and came apart during a soldering job, so I had to basically rebuild the frog.
I used about 1 mm for the flange-ways and tried to keep close to the AMRA fine tolerance standard. I noticed that the wheels on the wagons and locos also need to be precise, so will need to look at each of the wheel-sets at a later time.
The sense of accomplishment seeing a few trains run through the point that I just built was all worth the frustration at the end. There were many times when I was about to throw in the towel! I will use this point in the yard somewhere.
I made a few sleepers using paddle-pop sticks and tried to keep to the VR profile as much as possible.
One advantage of creating your own is the spacing of the dead frog. Since I was able to reduce this area by about 3cms (on the PECO large points, this distance is about 10cm), my short wheel loco, the Y class, happily moves through this area without any pauses with both frog rails isolated. I still need to trim down the PCB sleepers and paint the sleepers. I am now keen to make another one.
I need to work out how to secure the point rails. One of the nice things about the PECO points are the spring-loaded mechs. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Here are some photos.
Tracing an original point and I used this as a template.
This idea was created by DKRickman and used from this
site
I used super-glue to fix the sleepers to the rails
Nearly completed point.
