Thursday 4 December 2014

Point Maintenance

In-between train-set updates here's a quick post showing some maintenance on Landswood Park.

The tight kick-back siding point had failed some time ago, which didn't matter that much as it was rarely used (little can get round the corner anyway). However when one of the other points failed it was time to do some repairs. Both had failed the same way - the soldered joint between the blades and the tie-bar, a common weak spot on hand-built points.


Fortunately I had thought ahead when I built the layout and that part of the point was covered in plastic chequer-plate rather than set into clay setts. The plastic was simply eased off, exposing the joints that needed re-soldering. Once repairs were complete and tested, a little impact adhesive was used to secure the plastic back in place.

The points on Thakeham Tiles were constructed with much more thought and have pivoted joints at the both ends of each blade, so shouldn't suffer this issue, but as Landswood Park is built in a box-file there was no space underneath the board for such tricks.

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