Over-seasoned
Dark, cold, wet. Logs crackling in the burner. Quiet on the hill outside the house. Hibernation - practiced for all year - comes to the Tamar valley.
It is the time of year when thoughts turn inward, and the quickening of evening brings time for the out of mind.
I see my last post on this thread was in June. Shameful, but there it is. I've not been absent, but neither have I been extremely present. My head receives my head. This odd - seemingly endless - period of the 'new normal' (working from home, washing cardboard boxes, scouring the neighbourhood for eggs, turning the garage over to food storage) has made the road less travelled extremely slippery. And my grip upon it has been weak, at times.
Anyway, I've parked the VANWIDEs on the Shelf Of Doom. They were compounding my mental miasma; like a sewer inspector, I was very much going through the motions with them. Doing them because I was doing them. A beginning with no end. They're still there, lurking. But they'll have to wait. No more than a lot of things have had to do in this year.
So, in all this, and probably something I should have written three paragraphs up; I've gone back to the layout.It's still bare boards. But the trackwork is now complete.
Barring the fiddle yard, but I think I have enough left over from the reconfiguration to allocate there.
I have turned my attention (I've probably lost yours...) over to thoughts of point control. It will be manual. I have added droppers to the ends of the blades, in order to put the mechanism below the baseboard:
but now (typically, I'm useless at making decisions) I'm toying with the idea of making the wire in tube runs above the surface rather than below (they're all going to be buried in DAS (or similar) at some stage, anyway).
Nothing new here, of course. Instantly recognisable to aged millinery purveyors. But in order to take up the difference in throw between the point blade against the stock rail (1.0 mm) and the travel of the DPDT slide switch (3.5 mm) some 2.5 mm of accomodation has to be found. Omega Loops (I'm sure they should be on The Wall Of Crisps, alongside the Chutney Windmills) are the obvious answer, but I've never liked the mechanics of them. And then, wiffling about the internet last week, I came across a post by Paul Gittins
Over There on the system he's used on Braynerts Sidings. So I contacted Paul. and he very kindly sent me chapter and verse on How He Did It.
So, having the DPDT switches already, and a suitable selection of Albion Alloys non-ferrous stcok to hand, the only thing I needed (here, I'm assuming my mojo has returned, rather than got stuck here due to not being allowed anywhere else..) was compression springs. I couldn't find any (and here, a previous life as a teleprinter mechanic sent me into daydreams about endless grey shelves filled with every small spring you could possibley imagine..) of a suitable size, so set about trying t make my own. And this is where I am now. I'll spare you more words, and let the pictures plot progress:
Take 1: Upper: 0.4 mm PB wire around a plastic tube: proof of concept, mostly. Lower: A longer pitch, using a slotted screw:
Take 29a) A (sort of) jig:
Take 2 (b): It's a wind-up:
Take 3: The completed prototype
Not bad, even if I do say so myself. Plenty of accomodation for switch throw, here.
The plan now is to make end plates to compress the spring, and interal support sleeves, to ensure that the action of the mechanism stays aligned. 2 of these each for each spring. And then there's the two bits of wire to add to them - one end goes back to the switch tab, the other to the point. I'll try to make a drawing (it's far easier to explain that way - suffice it to say that there will be a disconnect (~3.0 mm) in the middle of the spring.
Anyway, thanks for listening. I'm happy to be here. That's a good thing (for me, anyway...
).
Peace
Jan
