With +Hornby Model Railways track pieces old and new we finally finished our model railway layout hooraah! We put our trusty freight locomotive to the test, only to find it stopping and jerking in several places along our track. Thinking caps on. The loco only stops on the second hand slightly grubby looking pieces of track and so the process of elimination begins. Our best friend Google suggested three possible solutions to clean up the track and raised several issues with each method:
a) solvent liquids - can damage plastic tracks
b) oil based cleaner - difficult to remove oil residues and can accumulate more dirt
c) abrasive rubber - scratches formed in the rails make future oxidisation more likely
We came to a conclusion that using rubber abrasive would solve our problem for second hand pieces of rail. To avoid scratching the metal too much or spreading the oxidisation we will use solvent based track cleaner for future track maintenance.
Here is the result of how using a +PecoTrain abrasive rubber helped clean up the track allowing the loco to move through the track.
Our aim when building a model railway table was to make it easily portable and more manageable.
We wanted to make full use of a 244x120 plywood sheet for our table and had it cut into 4 even sections. The frame to support our plywood sheet would split into three sections and be bolted together, allowing us to dismantle it into three separate tables when necessary.
We discovered that our plywood needed better support as it collapsed at the joins. We added more support beams directly under the plywood joins.
The finished frame looked like this, standing 1 meter tall. We could have taken more care to keep the legs straight but overall the structure is solid.
To prevent the plywood from warping with exposure to moisture I painted it with PVA glue diluting it as instructed on the bottle.
The finished product
What we needed to build the table
244cm x 120cm of 9mm plywood (cut into four 60cm x120cm sections)
2"x4" timber frame (six 80cm sections and nine 113cm sections)
Four 2"x4" timber legs (we chose 1 meter height)
Eight 2"x2" timber legs of the same height for all inside legs.
120mm wood screws for frame
90mm wood screws for legs
130mm M8 bolts, M8 wing nuts, M8 washers to hold the three frames together
