Questions, Answers & Tips -
“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.
MRH-Jul 2014
