For those who have built turnouts using the Fast Tracks jigs, would it work to glue (and maybe spike) wood ties while the rails are in the jig instead of using the PCB ties? (I know a PCB tie would be needed for points because of the pressure on them during operation.)
I’m pretty skeptical that would work over the long term. First, spikes would not be viable. Any spikes I know of are far too long for the low-profile wood ties. Even if you could get them in, they probably wouldn’t hold very securely.
As far as glue goes - you might be able to find an adhesive that would be strong and durable enough to work over time, but you’d also need wood that would be strong enough. I would posit that you’d need some sort of hardwood, like cherry or mahogany. Oak may work, but only long-term testing would tell you that. While you can get high quality plywood ties (I think the Fast Tracks tie strips are some sort of birch plywood from Europe somewhere), I doubt the adhesive holding those very thin plies together would be enough to prevent the outer plies from breaking loose under the rails over time.
But hey! If you’re feeling up to it, do some experiments. I’d be very interested in the result you’d get.
1 Like
I’m confused about what this question is asking for. It was my impression that the Fast Tracks system was only using the copper-flashed PCB ties for the few structural alignments holding the jigged rails together, with something like QuickSticks (which are multiple-ply plywood laser-cut to form the ties) GLUED to the rails for all the other ties in the assembly.
While you could certainly put countersunk screws into wood ties and resistance-solder the rails to them, instead of using gapped copper pads on PCB, you would probably not want to use glue to hold the whole of the turnout on either individual wood ties or a precut QuickStick-like sheet. The assembly will come under racking stress as you position it for installation and I’d expect the glue joint precision to fail.
Model spikes into the ties just won’t hold anything in alignment, even if you use an extra ‘thickness’ of plywood in the ties. You’d need the model equivalent of anticreepers, for one thing, and while I’m all in favor of carefully reproducing OTM, the idea of holding tie spacing with clamp-on items at 1:87.1 seems like very poor return for the amount of work and pain. It might be different if you could hold the jigged rails accurately in the fixture and line and surface them in place before individually spiking as you might do for a hand laid turnout, but the result is still going to be rickety compared to one that has its control geometry ‘fixed’ by soldering to PCB tie material.
It has occurred to me that you could make a modified PCB tie by soldering small copper or brass pads to the metal on the PCB, and then using veneer inlay or cut pieces of a flitch from a QuickStick style plywood tie to match the look of the other ties. You’d simply need to pad the bottom of the other ties with sheet of the same thickness, which would also vastly increase the rack resistance of the assembly as a whole.