Hi folks
I'm getting close to track-laying time on my layout. I'm using Peco track and in the past have always used Peco code 80 joiners. I've always found it quite difficult to blend the transparent insulated joiners in when I've been weathering track.
So, two questions arising from the above:
1 Any cunning wheezes to paint the transparent plastic joiners successfully? I've often found that track cleaning flexes the joints just enough that paint will eventually flake off them.
2 Does anyone know of brown or black insulated joiners that will fit? DCC concepts make brown ones for their 'Legacy' range of code 75 FB track, but I have no idea if they would fit code 80 rail.
https://www.dccconcepts.com/product/ros-legacy-track-insulative-joiners-oo-pack-of-25/ (https://www.dccconcepts.com/product/ros-legacy-track-insulative-joiners-oo-pack-of-25/)
Thanks
Ian
I've got some I've had so long they have turned brownish of their own accord (bought in the Beatties Aberdeen branch closing down sale which gives an idea of their age). :)
I wonder if staining the joiners is a possibility? For some reason I think they might be nylon, in which case they should take up dye.
I have not had this issue.
I paint the side of the rails the fishplates, sleepers and ballast a uniform 'rust' colour. (Humbrol enamel.)
The track is always securely pinned down to a 1/4 (6mm) plywood track bed and fully ballasted.
I also pre-bend the flexi track on curves.
So perhaps the key is to stop movement at the rail joints??
Quote from: Ian McAulay on June 29, 2022, 18:30
2 Does anyone know of brown or black insulated joiners that will fit? DCC concepts make brown ones for their 'Legacy' range of code 75 FB track, but I have no idea if they would fit code 80 rail.
We could always print them with brown/black resin!! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: (assuming that we can make that work!! ) :laugh:
Quote from: Stephen Rainsbury on June 30, 2022, 12:18
We could always print them with brown/black resin!! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: (assuming that we can make that work!! ) :laugh:
That did cross my mind as a serious option, but sadly I don't think you can get resin that's mechanically strong enough. :-[
Quote from: GraemeD on June 29, 2022, 18:50
I wonder if staining the joiners is a possibility? For some reason I think they might be nylon, in which case they should take up dye.
I'm fairly sure that I've seen Peco list them as nylon, but that may have been decades ago and may no longer be true.
I didn't know you could dye nylon. May need to experiment...
Do you need rail joiners?
If the rails are laid well enough, in line and no kinks or strains, would a slither of plastlticard or insulating araldite or similar - to keep the rail ends apart surfice?
Ive seen it done on larger scales but don't recall a mention for 009.
Just a thought.
Quote from: Ian McAulay on June 30, 2022, 17:08
Quote from: GraemeD on June 29, 2022, 18:50
I wonder if staining the joiners is a possibility? For some reason I think they might be nylon, in which case they should take up dye.
I'm fairly sure that I've seen Peco list them as nylon, but that may have been decades ago and may no longer be true.
I didn't know you could dye nylon. May need to experiment...
Rit dyes appear to have a good reputation (my previous knowledge was limited to Dylon) and they have a separate range for synthetics. I'd considered dying as an option for making my own foam scatter material (even bought some green dye) but I've picked up so much at closing down sales in Aberdeen over the years (Beaties, Brian Sherriffs, A1 Models, North-East Models, Modelzone) and elsewhere it hardly seems worth it.
If the rail joiners are indeed moulded from nylon that is good as it absorbs water so should take up the dye well. I found it is used with 3D printed nylon.
https://markforged.com/resources/blog/dyeing-nylon-3d-printed-parts (https://markforged.com/resources/blog/dyeing-nylon-3d-printed-parts)
I'm half temped to try it myself...
Andy: A good thought, but I really do need to use joiners as I can't guarantee the rails staying in line. With handbuilt track I've used (in other gauges) in the past, it wasn't an issue as the rails were soldered to the sleepers and the sleepers were glued to the trackbed. I always cut the gaps after laying the track, so alignment was pretty much guaranteed. Peco 009 track on cork won't be so cooperative.
Graeme: Definitely time for me to experiment! Thanks for the link.
Ian
If your track is nailed down why would it move ? I never use insulated joiners , merely leaving a gap with no problems .
Alan
Quote from: Alan Feldon on July 05, 2022, 15:12
If your track is nailed down why would it move ? I never use insulated joiners , merely leaving a gap with no problems .
Alan
Expansion. Things can go horribly wrong when the temperature rises significantly.
My first attempt at a sliding fiddle yard worked perfectly at home. First exhibition that was hot the neatly laid straight tracks, fixed at both ends distorted significantly. Had to cut expansion gaps to continue running.
YMMV.
In a stable environment unlikely to be a problem.
Expansion and the general flexibility of Peco track. The moulded track base is fairly flexy in itself, I have cork under that, so even if the next layer down is something rigid, there's already about 6mm of possible flex in the pins. In my case, the next layer down is 25mm of expanded polystyrene followed by 5mm foam core board. There's a lot of scope there for a little gentle track cleaning to leave unlinked rail ends out of alignment. I'm pinning the track down rather than gluing it (32mm stainless steel dressmakers' pins) so I need all the help I can get from the rail joiners.
I concur with Andy's comment re expansion in hot exhibition halls. The first exhibition layout I built (in my teens) was an N gauge one using Farish rather than Peco track. The track plan led to fairly short lengths of track and I left fairly generous gaps at the joiners, mainly because I liked the diddly-dum sound of the wheels over them. I count myself lucky on that, as at one exhibition which was in a marquee on a sweltering hot day, I was astonished to see that almost all the gaps had closed up in the heat. When the track cooled down again, the gaps re-opened, but not evenly, so I had to sort out a mix of some joints with wide gaps and some with none at all.
Ian
OK, so here's the result of the experiment...
I read the page that Graeme linked to, which was very informative: https://markforged.com/resources/blog/dyeing-nylon-3d-printed-parts (https://markforged.com/resources/blog/dyeing-nylon-3d-printed-parts)
I bought a bottle of liquid dye concentrate from Amazon, the same brand as shown on that link. (I've never used liquid dyes before; my only experience is the various fabric dyes in the Dylon range, which are all powders.) Photo below.
I poured about 5mm depth into the bottom of an empty jam jar then added water from a recently-boiled kettle to get an approximately 4:1 dilution. I don't have a thermometer suitable for this job, but as the jar was now slightly too hot to touch, I'm guessing that the contents was at or above about 60C.
I dropped a sprue of rail joiners in (actually some 00 ones that I also want to colour) and left them for 5 minutes. I fished them out with tweezers (not easy to find in a totally opaque liquid!), rinsed off under the tap and dried on a piece of paper towel. The result is in the photo below.
The colour in the picture is pretty accurate: the rail joiners have been dyed dark green! Using brown dye! The dye has definitely soaked into the plastic; it doesn't rinse off. The fact that the dye has soaked in (I think) confirms that the plastic is nylon or a similar polyamide.
I did a second test with the joiners left in the dye for 10 minutes. The result was a tiny fraction darker, but not significantly so. And still green.
However, I call this a success. Translucent dark green rail joiners are better than transparent in my view. I will paint over them when I weather the track and if the paint flakes, it still won't be all that obvious.
I hope this has been of interest.
Ian
What if we try green dye?
Perhaps you have heard of Gapmasters. They claim to make perfect electrical rail gaps. Their item number is GM016 for PECO SL-400 flex track.
They are known as American tie and timber company. I have not used their product.
Robin
Another product I never knew existed! Thank you, Robin.
The URL is: http://americantieandtimber.com/4.html (http://americantieandtimber.com/4.html) and scroll down; the HOe/HOn30 (009 to us Brits) version is almost at the bottom of the page. They are quite pricy at USD 2.50 per unit, with unstated carriage charge to us on the RHS of the pond.
They will hold rail ends very firmly in alignment as they are soldered. To provide insulation, extra gaps in the copper cladding would need to be filed. They definitely don't address the secondary issue of providing expansion gaps (see previous discussion), but derailment through misaligned rail ends just won't happen.
A slightly inferior home-grown solution, would be to solder an N-gauge copper clad sleeper lengthwise (ie right angles to usual position) under each rail with the gap in the copper under the gap in the rail. Cosmetic bits of sleeper base could then be glued in place to fill in the gaps. However, that wouldn't provide the gauge rigidity of the Gapmaster.
I don't think this what I'm looking for at the moment, but will definitely file away for future reference!
Ian
My attempts at dyeing Peco insulating rail joiners today.
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52198579269_7877cd4c98_c_d.jpg)
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52197307252_5b8a3104c8_c_d.jpg)
I used Rit DyeMore dye for synthetics and kept the dye hot in an improvised double boiler.
Left to Right: apricot orange, apricot orange followed by graphite, mixture of apricot orange and graphite, graphite
The colour differences are not so clear here, but a lot more marked when lit from behind. The orange looks raspberry coloured on white paper and a bit more orangy-brown against the sky or cool white light. The orange followed by graphite looks sort of brownish or a bit purpleish and a dark orange against the sky. The other two both look black on a white background but the mix has a dark red tinge lit from behind.
They are more reddish than I hoped. I was assuming the orange would be more yellowy and the graphite would be a very dark blue rather than a pure 'carbon' black but the dye when very much diluted has a Ribena tinge.
I will try again with a mix of much less orange but I suspect it needs yellow. That is if I can find some more rail joiners!
sorry Ian and Andy I dont understand . My method would leave an expansion gap for hot exhibition halls etc . -your method wouldn't as this would be filled with a nylon joiner !
Alan
Quote from: Alan Feldon on July 05, 2022, 15:12
If your track is nailed down why would it move ? I never use insulated joiners , merely leaving a gap with no problems .
Alan
Alan
Must have miss-understood what you mean. By nailed down I took it to mean fixed solid. ie a rail is soldered to pins in the baseboard, thus both ends of the rail are fixed in place.
In plastic sleepered track the rails are free to move along the chairs, thus giving generally linear movement closing slightly any gaps, so yes that'll work - until two rail ends, in separate sections touch. Insulated rail joiners mitigate this. I would still include expansion gaps at metal rail joiners on longer runs
In my case the two ends of the track were fixed solid (to Copper clad sleepers pinned to the baseboard) The expansion caused the track to snake, quite significantly.
Quote from: Alan Feldon on July 08, 2022, 15:09
sorry Ian and Andy I dont understand . My method would leave an expansion gap for hot exhibition halls etc . -your method wouldn't as this would be filled with a nylon joiner !
Alan
That would be true if
every joiner was an insulating one, but if there are enough non-insulating ones with gaps, the rail ends should never hit each other.
Even then it does not necessarily mean the end of the rail has to butt hard up against the insulating web in the joiner that separates the two rail ends. There can still be a small gap, though the additional thickness of the web may limit how big it is sensible to make it.
From memory I think I worked it out that the maximum likely expansion for a length of flexitrack was about 0.5 mm over a temperature change of something like 30 degrees C.
Matters arising from discussion so far:
Dyeing rail joiners:
Following discussion at the ScOONs Zoom meeting last week, Graeme and I are going to carry out some more experiments. We will report back here.
Expansion:
I looked up the thermal expansion coefficient for nickel silver and found several values ranging from 16.2 to 19.2 parts per million per degree celsius. (Probably different compositions of nickel silver and the coefficient also seems to depend on the temperature range over which it is measured. This is also beyond my understanding of metallurgy!)
Let's take a generous 20 (to make the sums easier) and see where that takes us. The temperature an exhibition layout is exposed to could plausibly range from 0C in a freezing attic to 40C in a sweltering exhibition hall. That gives us an expansion of 20x40=800 parts per million over that temperature difference. For a metre of rail, that's 800µm (microns or micro-metres) or 0.8mm. It's not a huge amount of movement to accommodate, but it's also certainly not zero.
A confounding factor is that the rail doesn't slide frictionlessly in the chairs on the sleeper base, especially after weathering and ballasting. I think my conclusion is that the gaps need to be little and often for safety.
There's probably some advice on this out there on the internet, but I haven't done any serious searching.
Ian
Quote from: GraemeD on July 10, 2022, 17:22
From memory I think I worked it out that the maximum likely expansion for a length of flexitrack was about 0.5 mm over a temperature change of something like 30 degrees C.
I was still typing when you posted - our figures for expansion seem to be consistent.
I've found the link I think I used as a source for cupro nickel thermal expansion.
https://www.scottprecisionwire.com/technical-data/alloy-data-sheets/copper-nickel-alloys/ (https://www.scottprecisionwire.com/technical-data/alloy-data-sheets/copper-nickel-alloys/)
Quote from: Ian McAulay on July 10, 2022, 17:36
A confounding factor is that the rail doesn't slide frictionlessly in the chairs on the sleeper base, especially after weathering and ballasting. I think my conclusion is that the gaps need to be little and often for safety.
Ian
Yes I 100% agree 'little and often' is the way to go. A tiny gap at every single normal, non-insulated rail joint may well be the best way.
I have two layouts that are now over 40 years old all built with this principle in mind. They were built in an outside gararge, they are now stored in my loft railway room and have been to exhibitions in sweltering heat and freezing cold. I have had no isuses at all with expansion of the rails.
My main layout in the loft, again with track laid using this same 'little and often' aproach to expansion gaps, has never had any issues.