My First Hand Built Turnout

Second post in a series on how to build handmade n scale turnouts, including constructing some jigs to speed up the process - updated from my old blog

Jan 2017

Well it took a while - at least 6 hours spread over a few days - but here it is.  I think it isn’t too bad for a first effort.

I know it looks as ugly as sin, but this is just using what I had on hand, to see how hard it is. All I used was code 80 rail from an old piece of flextrack, a file, some Veroboard, a soldering iron, and callipers to get the track spacing correct.

Most of the ugliness comes from the veroboard used for the ties and my lame soldering efforts - I hope!  Anyway, when it was finished I hooked it up to some flex track and pushed a piece of rolling stock through and it worked fine.

In case you are wondering, Veroboard is a type of printed circuit board made up of strips of copper with holes at 1/10” centers. It’s very handy for small electronics projects. I cut the veroboard using a stanley knife. I cut between the copper strips by holding the board in a vice at just the right height so one copper strip was in the vice and scored the board along the top of the vice a number of times, front and back. The veroboard is then snapped off at the scoring point leaving a usable, if ugly, pc tie.

I basically used the method shown in the YouTube Videos Here. This goes through the whole process in 50 or so 5 minute clips. They need a bit of editing but it’s easy to follow. The first 20 or so show the main details.

It’s quite difficult holding the rail in a vice at a shallow enough angle to get a sharp point but with a bit of practice it will probably get easier. Another thing I didn’t count on was parallax error when laying the finished bits and pieces over the paper template. When you glue down the ties to the template the rails are raised a bit and it is just a little more difficult lining everything up before soldering.

Anyway, it wasn’t that hard and most readers will have most of what is required so – have a go!