I Have Some Points to Make

This week on Tuesday night we visited Lefty and Son’s place just up the road in the next Suburb.  There was about 8 or 9 of us there if my memory serves me correctly.  PK was supposed to attend, but his car suffered a fit just outside the PA hospital.  Apparently the good folk from the RACQ got him and his old almost 25 year old car home, and an auto electrician was able to do some sort of transplant surgery on the old Camry and the damn thing might still have another 20 years of life left in it.  That is probably how long it will take for him to get around to installing his Clothesline in the back yard, so he can then insulate and line his shed, as a prelude to building his HO and N scale empires inside.

So Lefty has been given some offers of help to install some wall brackets that will allow a roof to be provided to his top deck on the layout.  This will assist in keeping dust and other particulates from the layout and provide a base to mount his overhead LED lights onto.  We await his call to arms to provide assistance.

PK was going to drop off his Fast Tracks dual gauge jig on Tuesday night, so his non-show was jeopardising me building some dual gauge points this weekend.  But PK did come to the rescue when he rocked up at work for a coffee early on Thursday and handed over his fast Tracks jig, so my plans could go ahead.

I was able to sneak over to Austral Modelcraft on Saturday morning before soccer and picked up two lengths of code 83 rail so I could spend this afternoon in the shed making two dual gauge points.  I had already cut the PC board sleepers last weekend.  So today was just cutting the insulation joints on the PC board sleepers between the two rails, then slowly measuring, cutting to length and grinding the various shapes of the rail lengths in the points.  These were then soldered up and various pairs of HO and HOn3 1/2 bogies were run through them.  Once complete I installed a throw bar.  The points seem to work.  Hopefully I will get around to looking at installing this set of points into the entry to Rocklea Sidings next weekend.

So after completing the first sets of points, I then thought about starting the second.  A quick scan of my supply of PC board sleeper strip material revealed that I had one length left in the packet hanging on my workbench.  That was not going to be enough.  I then went to the location where I left my last few point building projects and found another length of PC board strip along with another half a length.  Well that was just enough.

So the PC board sleepers were cut off, the rails cut to lengths, and eventually everything was soldered up and this point also seems to work.  Although the actuating throw bar was giving me some trouble, it has been added and this one set of points also seems to work.  This set of points is due to the lead into Acacia Ridge yard from the Clapham Yard end.  It provides a small HO loco storage siding at this location.

My first task next weekend, will be to put both of these points on a small test track and ensure that they are correctly electrically isolated, before I put them on the layout.