I'm now going under to get some wiring done. The layout will be DCC operated and will be treated as one electrical section. I decided to use 1.5mm twin and earth cable and strip it to supply the two conductors for the DCC bus and the copper earth wire for the droppers.
The droppers were cut to 4 inches long to get through the top baseboard and the original baseboard top about two inches underneath. I used a long series drill to make the holes and poked the droppers through. This was much easier than I had thought since I envisaged spending ages trying to locate the lower, hidden holes.
The droppers were connected with the 1.5mm wire with the brown for the rail to the front of the layout and the blue for the other rail. The droppers are folded round the wire to give a mechanical join then the joint has solder applied. It's not quite up to Richard's copper work on his Duchess' footplate.
The difficulty working with these boards is that there was no provision made for wiring so a lot of drilling has to be done with a pin chuck, which is not all that easy.
The main wiring is nearing completion on the board with the bus running from between the white connector blocks at each end of the central spar and the droppers at each end coupled to the bus. The next work will be to make the inter-baseboard connections.
Part of the connections will be the plugs and sockets used. I am using the EDAC 5i6 series of connectors which are used in the professional audio industry. They come in 20, 38, 56 and 90 pin configurations. I mentioned them to Richard (Dikitriki) a few days ago and he didn't know about them so I thought I might give a bit of a description.
I'm using the 20 pin variety. The plug (male) is on the right and the receptacle (female) is on the left. The pins are shown between and they are the same for both plug and receptacle. The pins join by being oriented at 90 degrees to each other and mating with the slot at their tips. The screw in the plug is used to assist plugging and unplugging. The steel pegs at each end of the receptacle locate in the hexagonal sockets at each end of the plug. The sockets have an internal slot and the pegs have a protrusion which locates in these slots. The plug and receptacle won't mate unless the protrusions and slots line up and there are six possible positions for each pair giving 36 permutations of positions to use in preventing wrong coupling. The advantage of this design is that the wires can be soldered (there is a crimped version of pin) out of the plugs and receptacles then when all the connections have been made, the pins can be inserted from the back until they lock in place. So wiring the plug can be much easier than trying to solder wires onto fixed pins.
Here's a pin inserted in the receptacle to show its orientation across the receptacle face. The pin in the plug is orientated along the plug face.
The one other tool that you should have is the pin extraction tool which is pushed down the hole of a pin where it depresses the small, sprung lock flap and the plunger can then push the pin out. As usual these specialist tools cost and arm and a leg. I found a price of £47 on the CPC web site and they are one of the less expensive ones.
I remember mine costing about £35 twenty years ago.
If you don't have a tool, you can get away with using something like a jeweller's screwdriver but it does tend to mess the pin up and maybe cause problems if you re-use it.
I found that other essental tools are a small vice and a wooden spring clothes peg - to hold the pin when soldering the wire to it - as shown here.
The pins with the wires soldered to them are then pushed into the plug from behind until they lock in the holes. The sleeving round the soldered joints is just from habit. When fully populating a plug you want to avoid any risk of stray strands of wire or wisps of solder causing shorts. Also, when placing pins in a plug they should be placed symmetrically around the centre screw so that the force of mating or parting is spread evenly to avoid the plug tipping and seizing. This might require fitting dummy pins just to ensure that this is so.
The cap is then fitted to the plug. The clamp section can be orientated to exit to the side, as shown here, or to the top.
If truth be known, this was my third attempt.
Getting the knack of getting the wire ends the correct length took a bit of digging back into the memory banks and working with 1mm flexible cable didn't help matters since it is quite stiff. But I got there in the end.
And finally the side is on the plug cover and everything is finished.
The flexible cable I am using is five core 1mm flex from Screwfix. I don't need the fifth core but the four core 1mm cable is quite a bit more expensive.
The next bit will be fitting the receptacle to the other baseboard.
The costs (from CPC) for the above are £7.34 for the plug, £4.74 for the receptacle and £9.54 for the cover which is just under £22 for the three and these were the cheapest prices I could find on a longish Internet search. The other important items are the pins and these are 25p each but you have to purchase them in packs of 100 for £25
Jim.