MegaBlackJoe

Hello, my name is Tim. I am a fellow railway modeler from Russia. A friend of mine is a dcc engineer - he has a small team that produces sound dcc decoders. He is a well known manufacturer in Russia and in fact has done 3 successful projects with sound locomotive decoders. So far he has dcc sound decoders that fit into OO and N scale locomotives. These are NEM652, Plux16/12/8 and NEM651 decoders. Now his idea is to develop Next18 sound dcc to fit N scale and Z scale. But because the development process needs funding, he would like to study the demand first. I would be very grateful, if you could tell if Next18 is popular in Great Britain. If we can see a demand, such a decoder can be made with the help of crowdfunding. We would need around 300 people wishing to purchase Next18 DCC sound decoder. At this point, the price can be around 75 GBP, but it can drop further if more people purchase this. I am not giving any links since it's not an advertisement of services, but rather a research of the market. So what do you think?

Because there is no separate section on this forum. I am writing to this thread. Just to let you know that I am developing a switch motor for handlaid Z gauge turnouts: this is the first ptototype, it has been improved since I last shot this video.

Gentlemen, could anyone suggest a DIY cheap frog polarity switcher? I am trying to build a railroad switch based on a linear micro servo. This is a Z gauge railroad switch for a handlaid track. I am using DCC for trains, but for switching I would like to use buttons (without any DCC decoder). I already have a device which switches the servo by presing a button, but it doesn't reverse frog polarity. I am now looking for such a device. Because parts are very small, I can't fit a microswitch to this micro linear servo. Could someone please suggest a very cheap preferably DIY, frog polarity reverser? I tried to search MERG website, but since I am not a native speaker, it's hard to find any such device. I have noticed that microswitches are used a lot to reverse polarity, my question is - can I use the same button that triggers servo movement to switch polarity?

Justin, by the way. What are you going to use to switch turnouts? Are you going to use Marklin parts or probably servomotors? It would be really interesting to know.

I run Templot as an administrator, it only works when I do so. The reason I am asking - I would like to change sleeper width and distance for turnouts. I have already done it for straight and curve track, but turnouts are not the same. I would be grateful if Martin could explain how to change the distance and width of sleepers. I tried to register at Templot forum, but my credentials didn't work. Templot is a great software I am amazed by the fact that it has been in development for more than 15 years whereas railroad modellers in my country only start adopting handlaid track. I would really appreciate your help Martin. I tried to search the user manual - but tutorials and documentation for turnout sections are missing. And since I am not a native speaker - it's very difficult to understand what specific terms mean. For example, sleepers and timbers is the same word in my language, so honestly I don't know what is the difference between these two words. Is there any chance to get a picture that would indicate distances between the elements of the turnout and the terms indicating these distances and how are they named in Templot? That would be so kind and great of you. Thank you very much indeed.

Hello Justin. I see that you are using templot. Could you please tell which settings you are using for a turnout or even share them?

Hello, My name is Tim, I am a Z gauge modeller from Europe and would like to use templot to handlaid Z gauge track. I am currently interested in changing the sleeper spacing for a straight track. So far my experiments were unsuccessful. I know that sleeper spacing between the edges (not the centers) should be 1.4 millimeters (scale value) whereas sleepers are 1 mm in width. When I enter values in inches, they are scaled to smaller values. Could someone help me to enter correct values in inches so that I could get the desired values? I also don't understand which rail length should I enter if I am using long rails similar to flex track only without sleepers? In fact I don't need the rail marks, but when I enter the real length, I also need to specify distance between each sleeper, which takes time. Any advice would be highly appreciated. Thank you.