Page 6 - May June 2000

and nut epoxied into one of the stay ends. It is desirable to have another piece of tube glued into the other stay with a nice running clearance. This is easy if you have a lathe; if you are a member of the majority who don’t, then it seems to work OK if you coat the bore of the hole in the timber with epoxy resin and then re-drill when it has cured.
11. Only one board needs two sets of legs and the ‘one legged’ board therefore has just a ‘wide leg’ with the folding stay.
12. I have used the ‘cookie cutter’ approach to the track bed with the base only present around the line of the track and polystyrene foam as the basis for scenery elsewhere. Attaching the foam to the frame can be a problem, I always make a ‘ledge’ for the foam to rest on; either by extending the track base or by attaching a piece of timber (say 6mm square) to the framework. I have also found that the latex adhesive sold for flooring and cork tiles works well, but is difficult to remove from fingers etc. I am usually peeling bits off my hands for days after.
13. It is important not to get carried away with the cookie cutter track base method because any board design needs to have enough top surface to prevent the framework from lozenging (i.e. going diamond shape).
14. Most people use a walkaround throttle for switching so that they can be close to the action; therefore it is sensible to have most of the turnout and uncoupler controls adjacent to the devices they operate. I use small slide switches (3.5mm throw) mounted in brackets (see Figure 9) screwed to the top of the rear panel timber to operate the turnouts and to switch the frog polarity. The photo (1) shows the original design of bracket which has very little room to solder the wiring onto the switch, hence the change. The switches are connected to the turnouts by 20swg (0.036) piano wire.
inwards without running into each other and holds the leg stay assembly in its folded position (see photos 6 & 7).
9. I have tried two different methods of providing stays for the legs, both work but neither is entirely perfect. The one shown in Figure 6 has no loose parts for the ‘wide leg’ and opens and closes automatically as the leg is raised and lowered (see photos 8 & 9). The apparent discrepancy in the width dimensions is to allow some clearance for the whole thing to operate. With the legs packing one inside the other, one leg has to be narrow and this means that a different method has to be used for the narrow leg. A ‘loose’ length of timber
joining the bottom ends of the two legs is one option. So far I have been unable to decide what to do but I have found that once the module is set up the narrow leg doesn’t really need its own stay, so I may do nothing.
10. Details of the pivots for the leg stays are shown in Figure 7. The fundamental part is the assembly of tube
Photo 6 (above)
Legs folded
Photo 7 (left)
Legs open
Photos 8 & 9 (right) Legs unfolding
6 ROUNDHOUSE