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
