Can you take a single piece of atlas code 100 flex track and bend it into a 13 inch radius circle ? This ho scale. And of course without destroying the flex track in the process.
Yes. I used it to make street car track and the radius for it is about 10" to 11" . I think a street car is the only thing that would look right on such a tight radius. Since mine is in a street, I filled it with plaster to the height of the rail and made grooves in the plaster on the insisdes of the rail for wheel flanges.
(emphasis added)
Strictly speaking, no, but that may not be what you are asking. The circumference of a full circle of 13" radius is about 82" [diameter (26") times π (3.1416)], so it would take 3 sections of flextrack.
If you are talking about a 13" diameter full circle, then the circumference is about 40", so still a little more than one section – and that 6½" radius would be tricky, but probably not impossible with Atlas flextrack.
If you just mean a 13" radius curve (and not a full circle), then never mind what I posted!
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but want to be sure we’re all talking about the same thing.
I almost wonder if he was trying out the old, “What weighs more…?” question to catch someone napping. [(-D]
If we’re strictly talking how charp it can be bent, you cna get way smaller than 13". On one of the layouts I built as a kid, we had the old Tyco Streetcar set (plastic ‘street’ pieces with rails embedded, it came with a battery tube to hold a bunch of D cells to run it but the trolley did have a standard 12v DC motor so it would run with a regular power pack as well). I used the street tracks, which I think were 5 1/2" radius, for my 'town and then ran some flex out to make a rural line and feed the train station. I was able to curve the flex down to no bigger than that street car track, maybe even somewhat tighter, before it would start to kink. Even the trolley had to be slowed way down to get past the sharpest part. Not sure what the point was other than to save as much space as possiblebut it worked, everything you should NOT do for track meant for regular locomotive hauled trains. It was a sharp S curve into a more swweping curve to go over by the train station, a short straight area, and another S curve to get back to the street tracks.
–Randy
I made the pit rail for this turntable from flex track:
It’s based on an Atlas turntable, so the bridge is 9 inches long. The track diameter is about 8 inches. Of course, I cut the rail down the middle so it’s not the same at what you’re proposing.
Therefore, I’ll say you may have a problem. As you curve the track more and more, you’ll find that the ties on the inside curve get closer and closer. At some point, they will touch and that will be most you can curve the track without modifying the ties or removing some of them. My recollection is that one side of the track has no connecting webbing between ties.