Turnout 3

Post 3 from my old blog - building hand made turnouts:

Here is a picture of my third effort. Still not too bad but realistically not much better than the first:

The soldering is a bit better but I goofed a bit here. Trying to improve my soldering I used some flux but since I didn’t have any electrical type flux on hand I used some Bakers Flux instead. This ‘worked’ but it is strongly acid and would probably corrode the joints after a while. I went out to an electronics store and got a flux pen for my next efforts.

This turnout took at least 4 hours to make, which is still way too long. Hopefully with a bit of practice I can get it down to under 2.

Turnout 2 was a disaster. I tried to rush it way too much and stuffed up completely. I ended up using it to practice cutting electrical isolation gaps in the rails with my Dremel tool.

My First Hand Built Turnout

Post 2 from my old blog - building hand made turnouts:

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. (Read more)

Some Posts From My Old Blog

As I mentioned in my first post, I had an earlier blog with a number of entries about building handmade turnouts. Unfortunately the blogs’ Wordpress database got borked so I had to start again, but I did manage to retrieve many of the posts.

So without further ado I’ll put them back up.

Post 1 from my old blog - building hand made turnouts:

Even though I have been interested in building an n scale model railroad layout for quite a while now, what really got me interested again were sites like this or this and especially this guy have been building their own turnouts.

They made it look rather easy and they certainly look much better than store bought turnouts, so I was determined to give it a try. This also fits in with my interest of doing as much as I can rather than buying it.

So over Christmas I gave it a go. Armed with a new file and some old code 80 flextrack I began my first adventure into model railroading…