Gibbon, Cozad & Western - "The 100th Meridian Line"

[C855B]

Are you going for the form lines?

After sleeping on it... a good chance. I was more or less thinking of treating the form lines as a texture. I was working on a texturing technique a couple of years ago with heavy-bodied acrylic paints and the result could very easily be used to represent the straight-line textures left by the forms.

I take it you had a thought on this.

[wcfn100]

I take it you had a thought on this.

I can now. 

If you go with styrene, it could be a easy as scribing the line then knocking down the ridge with your finger nail.  If you use laser board, it could be done by masking and maybe a texture paint?  Glue some small thread on the surface?

Lots of ideas, but it may be dependent on you buold method.

Jason

[wazzou]

I did basically as Jason described on this bridge.  The bridge clearly wasn't the focal point of the photo but I can get a better one if you'd like.
It would be pretty tedious on that many spans but where there is a will, there is a way.

[C855B]

My thinking on the texturing method isn't as tedious as you would imagine. Here's the test I mentioned, which wasn't intended to reproduce anything. It's an abstract using Bob Ross-esque methods of color blending, but with a texturing tool rather than a brush. To simulate form lines, I would use a much finer texturing tool with a straightedge - immediate thinking being a cheap hair comb - and "standard" acrylics rather than the thick stuff.

I dunno... just a thought. :shoulder-shrug:

[C855B]

And now for something completely different.

Refining the layout electronics plan is getting a lot of attention right now, and in searching for a "better way" ("better" sometimes meaning "cheaper", otherwise meaning "easier"), I stumbled into Arduino support bits. I've honestly been avoiding the Arduino world, I don't need to be sucked into another hobby!

Anyway, while I was only looking for cheap prototyping boards for a couple of quickie test rigs, all sorts of cool stuff to solve problems bubbled to the surface. Here's a box o' goodies that arrived yesterday, all eBay buys:



I've been around electronics design for decades if not actually doing it myself, and I cannot believe how inexpensive this stuff is now!!! You see the boards I was after in the upper left. I needed two, but got 10 for 70¢ each. Double-sided, high quality fiberglass substrate, and pre-tinned. These would be $4-5 each in the "prime" electronics market, or I'd have to buy bigger boards and cut them down myself.

The "find" was the relay boards, intended for using with Arduinos in robotics. The board with four relays was $4.50 after the "buy 3 of any item!" discount. They work perfectly as frog power relays with the Tam Valley Depot QuadLN servo driver board... already tested it! That's $1.12 per frog, versus $6 each for the TVD relay. Less of a bargain at $4.98 with the single relay board, which also worked with the QuadLN, but I found comparable, maybe better single-relay boards shipped from Taiwan for $0.99 each. With optoisolator drive, too. Incredible stuff. Shipping was free for all of it. How they can sell this stuff for basically the cost of postage is completely beyond me.

Upshot with the relay boards is their potential for model railroad applications. Only gotcha is 5V control power. I could not find anything equivalent for the "standard" MRR 12V. This worked great with the TVD board, but won't work with the TVD single-servo version, which drives the relay with 12V, although with a 5V logic signal.

The LEDs are fun. Box of 200 old-style 3mm and 5mm LEDs, in five colors... for $6, including the handy box. 3¢ each. Great for indicators on test circuits.

Ribbon cable, "rainbow wire", with 10 IDC connectors was über-cheap, too. Solved another problem. Robyn's been bugging me about all the little packages coming in the mail, so I show her just how inexpensive this stuff is, cheaper than the cost of gas to get to our nearest electronics emporium.

My main reservation is finding these great solutions and, knowing how transient this market is, the product vanishes and the search starts over. The 4-up relay board is such a deal, however, I'm thinking seriously about getting a big enough supply for the whole 10-year layout project.

[bdennis]

Mike,
Re your comment:
Upshot with the relay boards is their potential for model railroad applications. Only gotcha is 5V control power. I could not find anything equivalent for the "standard" MRR 12V. This worked great with the TVD board, but won't work with the TVD single-servo version, which drives the relay with 12V, although with a 5V logic signal.

12V relay boards are around.. I have a few of them for applications I have. I found them on ebay.. - search for "8 Channel 5V 12V Relay Shield Module Board for Arduino"

Will floow along with interest re what you use them for.

[C855B]

Yup. Thanks for the search tip... found one that'll work just fine: http://www.ebay.com/itm/12V-1-Channel-Relay-Module-Optocoupler-Low-Level-Trigger-Expansion-Board-Arduino-/112053316365

99¢ each. The TVD single-servo board provides a 12VDC VCC to the relay sub-board. It would probably work with the 5V boards, but why court problems? The four-channel board works straight out of the package, and, better yet, cuts a bunch of wiring.

At this point I'm only trying to solve frog power, but there will certainly be future opportunities for isolated relays as the layout unfolds.

[bdennis]

Mike,
Good stuff and Yep I agree, the relay boards are dirt cheap. for the price they come in handy. Just keep an eye on the current they use.. Esp when all 8 are on. I think mine was using about an 1Amp.

[C855B]

Yes! That's why the optoisolator versions are so important, the relay board can have its own power supply when necessary. My only criticism of this feature is while they give you a pin for the external V_CC, they don't provide an extra ground pin for it, so you have to cobble your own connection instead of it being plug-and-play.

[wazzou]

@C855B -

I got to thinking about your Arched Bridge and thought it would be a perfect use of a Silhouette or similar cutting device.
You could both cut the smooth arches and scribe the form lines with much more accuracy.

[C855B]

A short time ago in a thread not so far, far away....

I stand corrected. The Festool "bread knife" blade is the bee's knees. I think I figured out what I was doing wrong before to lead me to conclude it had a binding problem, so I did this just five minutes ago:



A long curved cut in 2" 25psi pink foam (the denser stuff), effortless, and best of all, TOTALLY DUSTLESS.

The problem, it turns out, was trying to use it with the shoe against a straightedge. The blade wants to seek its own direction a little bit, and while you can correct it freehand, with a guide it will push against the guide and bind. Straightedge is no problem with a conventional toothed blade, so for precision straight cuts I will still deal with the dust.

That is a thing of beauty.

Thanks, Ed. And Gary. This is cutting out the embankment for the curve at "Oro Grande", in the northwest corner of the layout, with a slight climb into "Daggett". Your appreciation for the form over in Gary's thread made me rethink this area of the layout a little for what will be a better result. Of course the curve stays, but the original plan was to clutter that corner with a small bit of industrial switching, a spur descending into a gully from the mainline and ducking under a girder bridge at the far end. Nope... the LDE should be the curve alone, and let Robyn flex her scenery muscles a little. At most, maybe have a bit of highway (US66) in the valley which disappears into the background under a "Ship and Travel Santa Fe" on the girder bridge.

My mind's eye is convinced it'll be cool. Thanks again, guys.

[GaryHinshaw]

It has a beautiful flow that will one day grace a magazine cover. 

I can't wait to get back home and start work on some landforms.  But I'll have to resist the urge to halt work on track-laying!

[C855B]

Adding a Missing Feeder

@GaryHinshaw and I were chatting in the background last week about my painting myself into a corner, putting a new section of track down and forgetting the feeder. I have been following his lead in making sure there are feeders to every six feet or so, and normally not relying on mechanical joiners for continuity. "I have good joiners on one end," I said, "and it's not a separate block. But it'll only have a single feeder to the entire 12 foot section. It'll work, but for how long? How would you address this?" I decided at that point it would more trouble than it would be worth to rip stuff up to fix it. However...

Minor changes to the track plan resulted in a need to split this block for intermediate signaling due to added turnouts downstream. No choice now, add the feeder. After sleeping on this for several evenings, with a key suggestion from Gary it dawned on me that it was possible to add a feeder with the track down and not make a big fat mess of everything (globs of solder, melted ties, burned roadbed, and so on and so forth). Track is Micro Engineering C55.

1. Gently break adhesive in the area of the feeder. I use a palette knife.
2. With a #11 X-acto, cut the webbing underneath connecting four adjacent ties over the new feeder location, then slide the center two left and right:



3. This yields enough room to drill my "standard" feeder access:



4. After cleaning up the drill shavings and any remaining dried glue around the patch area, prepare feeder wire (strip and tin), apply flux under the rail centered between the two relocated ties, tin underside of rail (just a dot!), locate wire to be soldered, then Gary's helpful tip, wedge the wire to be attached into the rail with a sliver of wood. Solder by touching tip of iron to exposed tip of wire. Not for too long, you'll know when solder has melted and it is attached to the rail:



5. I trimmed off the excess wire with an X-acto while it was still wedged. Repeat for the other side:



6. Gently feed wires through access hole:



7. Slide ties back to original locations:



8. Step back and enjoy your artistry for a few seconds. OK, that's enough. Push a smidge of your preferred track adhesive in the patched area, pin down, and move on to the next item on the infinite to-do list:



Thanks, Gary!

[GaryHinshaw]

That turned out well!  I think the only change I would have made to the process is to feed the wires in from underneath before soldering.  I'm not sure my feeders would have survived your last maneuver.

Now I'll have to try it on the two sticks that I need to retro-fit... 

[C855B]

You use solid wires IIRC. You're right, from above wouldn't work, they'd be too stiff to squeeze down the rabbit hole. My process is to keep the wires minimally curved through the soldering process so the heat doesn't melt the insulation at a sharp bend. Also, you're more generous with the strip length; I guess that doesn't matter, really, we just want to be sure that the conductors don't touch. I just have a "thing" about minimum length of exposed wire... which makes absolutely no sense at all given the two big parallel lines of bare nickel-silver.

That moving the ties thing surprised the heck out of me, frankly. I took the photos of the process hoping for the best, but if ties melted, etc., well, that's what the "delete" button is for. I will adopt the tie technique for attaching regular feeders, too, since my record for soldering into the normal gap is less than sterling.