Questions, Answers & Tips - 3
“I lay out the roadbed using one spline strip,” John said, “and
adjust the risers holding up the roadbed from joists fastened to
L-girders to give me the curve or tangent line of roadbed that I
want. Once the spline strip is lined up to the planned straights
and curve, I fasten the risers permanently to the joists.”
“Using the 16’ lengths of lath can be difficult at times but it
makes the smoothest curves and a lot of sub-roadbed fairly
quickly. Just be sure to acquire or borrow at least 20 clamps.
I use that many to construct eight feet of sub-roadbed at a
time,” John said. “I also pre-cut many spacer strips from ½”
B/C plywood from Home Depot also. I take a 2 x 4 sheet of ply-
wood and cut a bunch of 1” wide strips and then cut those into
spacer blocks.”
“I tried the Masonite spline method using seven 8’ long strips
with no spacer blocks as Joe Fugate shows in several of his vid-
eos, but I found that method much messier than lath strips and
spacers,” John said.
Full details of John’s construction methods are posted in the
MRH forum discussion linked below.
Andy H. is partial to home-cut spline. “As a member of a club in
northwest Indiana we used a spline sub-roadbed that was ripped
out of #2 grade 1” x 6” boards that were either 8 or 10 feet long.
They were ripped to ¼” wide and the spacer blocks were cut
from the same material to either 3/8” to ½” thick by 1-1/4” long.
Longer ones were used under turnouts to mount the switch
machines.”
“For a single track we would use three or four splines, depend-
ing on the thickness of the spacer blocks we used. For areas we
planned on installing a turnout we would start to sister extra sec-
tions of spline to widen out the sub-base.”
“On top of this we mounted Homasote ripped to the size we
need for a given area,” Andy said.
A professional cabinet maker will have the tools to cut splines for
people not blessed with a shop full of power saws. If you don’t
have a tool to do a job, see if you have a makerspace near you.
Many of them allow you sign up for just a day or a week, instead
of a full year.
Spline roadbed:
.
– MRH
Wiring for N scale
Q.
I am running DCC in N scale. I plan to have a bus cable that
is connected to a terminal strip which then serves a number
of feeder wires in a block. What gauge should the bus be?
What gauge should the wire be that connects the bus to a ter-
minal strip? What gauge should the track feeders be?
– Dustin
A.
For DCC wiring, resistance and voltage drop for the signal
are important. Charlie Comstock and Joe Fugate recommend a
12-gauge two-wire main bus, and don’t forget to buy two col-
ors of wire so you can color-code them. You will need enough of
each color to cover the length of your main lines, at a minimum.
For droppers from the rail to the bus, 24-gauge feeders are suf-
ficient if they are shorter than about two feet.
“For purposes of debugging, I recommend you connect the feed-
ers to the bus using terminal strips,” Fugate said. “I much prefer
using a screwdriver to debug a short to using wire cutters. I’ve
seen modelers who use bare copper wire feeders on both sides
of the risers and solder the feeders to the bare copper. While
this is certainly simple, you can debug a mystery short only by
clipping feeders with wire cutters.”
“I prefer to use 12 gauge bus wires (stranded with insulation)
and connect a drop off each feeder every five feet or so to a
screw terminal barrier terminal strip. Then I connect the rail
MRH-Jul 2014
