New Fiddle yard!
Entry posted by wenlock
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When I built the original fiddleyard for Sherton Abbas, the plan was to have a 4 foot six diameter "turntable" that would avoid having to touch the stock during operating sessions. The reality was that it was just too unwieldy, heavy and cumbersome to spin right round, so ended up just being used as a sector plate. I've been considering building something lighter and more manageable for sometime now, but other modelling projects were always much more interesting, so it remained a "get round to it project!"
During the Railex show http://www.railex.org.uk/ back in May I met Tim Horn who makes some very nice base board kits https://www.timhorn.co.uk/ and he mentioned that he was designing some sector plate type boards. His carpentry is streets ahead of mine, so I took the plunge and ordered one
The board is 1500 mm long by 600 mm wide, came fully assembled, is beautifully engineered and I'm rather pleased with it!
Tim Horn sector plate
The board comes with a pair of carpenters dowels and bolts to attach the board to the layout and a rather clever duplicate end plate incorporating pre-drilled holes to fit everything on to.
The end plate was simply glued using PVA woodworking glue onto the end of the layout and allowed to set overnight.
End plate in situ
Once the glue had dried the carpenters dowels were fitted into the pre-drilled sockets and the board was slid into position. Legs were recycled from the old fiddle yard and fitted onto the left hand end of the board which simply cantilevers from the main layout.
Fiddle yard in Situ
I wanted to incorporate some alignment bolts, to ensure that the off stage tracks lined up with the main layout accurately, but found the ones available in my local DIY store had too much play to be of any use. I'm sure there are better, more accurate ones available, but I decided to have a go at making my own. I found some brass tubing and brass rod at my local model shop http://www.lendonsmodelshop.co.uk/ that fitted together very accurately, so this along with a couple of strips of brass sheet was purchased.
Brass tubing, rod and strip.
The tubing was cut into 30 mm lengths and soldered to the brass strip to make the sockets that the bolt could slide into. The bolt was made simply by bending the brass rod into shape and then rounding off the end that enters the tubing. Holes were then drilled into the brass strip, so screws could be used to fit the finished bolts to the wood work.
Alignment bolts
I decided to use track from C & L https://www.clfinescale.co.uk/ I hope I'm forgiven for using 3 bolt chairs on a Great Western Railway fiddle yard! The main layout track is 31.5 mm gauge, so the gauge is increased to 32 mm to match the C & L track over the 50 mm lead in at the start of the fiddle yard.
C & L track
Power to the fiddle yard is provided by routing a negative and positive feed under the fiddle yard to the pivot end and then connecting to each individual track. the short length of track at the front of the board is for DCC programming as is fed separately.
Power feeds
Finished Fiddle yard in situ
I'm very pleased with the end result, the sector plate pivots smoothly and the tracks appear to line up well. The old fiddle yard only had 3 tracks and got a bit congested at times, so having 5 tracks to play with should make things much easier. As a result I've now got room for more stock, watch this space
I'm taking Sherton Abbas to Guildex https://www.gauge0guild.com/Guildex Telford Guide 2019.pdf this weekend, so the fiddle yard will get a fairly rigorous testing, lets hope everything behaves
Best wishes
Dave
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