Pointless?
It has been a long time since my last post. This is not just because I’m busy with other duties. It’s also because I did not want to write while in the depths of despair! I finally took the model railway rite of passage and tried to build my first point. My long suffering friend Richard, who as a highly competent school teacher is used to dealing with ‘special case’ pupils undertook to teach me the black art of bending rails and filing vee’s It stated off well. I calibrated my printer and printed out a point from Templot. It is one that will end up in a siding, as I was advised not to build a mainline point as my first attempt. it is a BH-4SF GWR curved D+V-6 RH (that’s what it says on the paper) I have bought DCC concepts rail, flux, solder and track gauges. The sleepers are from C&L and are the thin ones that match the DCCconcepts track, I also bought Exactoscale GWR 2 bolt chairs. I even joined the P4 society to buy a vee filing jig. So I was ready to go.
I manged the first bit without any errors. That is to say, I could stick the pieces of A4 paper together, and cut the sleepers out.
Under supervision I cut and filed rails for a ‘6 vee’ and then using Richards ‘not yet patented, but it jolly well should be’ vee gauge jig, tried to solder the two rails together.
Then it all went pear-shaped. I simply could not solder the rails together, finally after an hour we gave up and I was persuaded to try and use nickel-silver rail instead. Result one vee soldered on first attempt! Not only that it is much easier to file the nickel-steel rail than the stainless-steel rail.
One angry e-mail to DccConcepts later and I was advised to buy a 3mm wedge soldering iron bit and use more heat. A few weeks later after our annual new years bash, we commenced again but with not much more luck. After a couple of hours, I gave up and started muttering about using Hornby Set-track. My teacher is made of sterner stuff and he sent me off to make the dinner and got down to work. He managed with a lot of sweating and words that won’t be allowed on RMWEB to solder the blades and one check rail. But even he was wanting to drop the DccConcepts rail.
As an experiment, I tried to solder it to copper printed circuit boards: no luck, soldering a dropper wire to a section of flex track: no luck L
This was the state of play until this evening, I am lucky to be surrounded by good neighbours, one of whom works repairing electrical equipment. ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the solder was his comment. And he bought along a sample of Multicore 60/40 grade ARAX Acid Cored Solder Wire, made of Sn and Pb alloy for metal fabrication. With not much hope I took a piece of wire and tried to solder it to a piece of DccConcepts track without any mucking about with glass fibre pens for cleaning and all that rubbish. To my immense surprise, It worked first time. I must admit I got a bit carried away and within two minutes I had soldered a piece of PCB to a rail, two bits of rail together, and a pair of pliers to a rail. (the last one was by accident). Mind you he stressed very strongly the need to neutralize the result, apparently unless I do the house will be melted down when I wake the next day.
But I can solder! Suddenly the world seems full of possibilities.
So to sum up: I was wondering about going back to Tillig track, But I’m not prepared to give up on the flowing point work and OO gauge sleepers.
I think that I will use the pack of track and rail that I have bought. After that I will change to the new PECO track for ordinary track. Points will be built using nickel silver rail, although I will use the 10M of stainless steel rail as for the outside rails on points as there are not many soldered connections on these rails. This is because I’m a Scrooge and cannot face throwing it away.
I feel the need to say that I AM a big fan of many DccConcepts products and use their pointmotors and still will, and their fabulous DCC modules that allow both push button and DCC operation of points are billiant. I will almost certainly use the ALPHA system for control via fewer wires and find their new surface mount point motors very interesting. But I believe true loyalty means saying what you think is the truth and I have to say their stainless-steel rail is not for me and I STRONGY suggest you sample it for soldering purposes before buying large amounts of it.
Just so the DCCConcepts don’t feel that I om on a crusade! I have to say that Exactoscale need to look at their moulds. I thought it was just me but my friend agreed the GWR chairs 2 bolt mould is too worn out. The chairs on one side of each section consistently snap in two when being pushed onto rails more than the ones on the other side!
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