i completed cutting the rails for my 22/25" curved turnout with a #12.5 frog.
As you might expect with such a long frog, the rails “wing” fairly far from the tip of the frog and there is little for the wheels to ride on. I’ve made sure the guard rail straddles that section of the frog to keep the wheels aligned with the frog, but, of course, the wheel bounce.
I was thinking of filling in the gap with solder and using Tony Koester’s suggestion of using an old hacksaw blade to cut the solder to an appropriate depth for the wheel flanges to ride to minimize the bounce. (see image below)
At least at the moment, the are no ties under that section of the turnout. while a piece of copper foil soldered to the bottoms of the rails and held in place when the solder is added, I am wondering if aluminum foil or something else might also work to keep the solder at rail height?
This issue was somewhat to what I experienced with #8 Atlas turnouts. A friend used a Dremel and filled in the gap with stryene. This is a frustrating process b/c I thought it was an issue with my wiring.
I use thin plastic strips cut to size. If needs be, I stack them until I know the flange depth is met. Instead of solder, if I were to think if adding bulk material, I would resort to epoxy first. Dam the ends with tape or foil, and then pour the epoxy. Try to get it to just above the flange height. Don’t fill it up to the tops of the rails because that will just be a ton more work.
i used sheet styrene cut into a wedge shape on my #6 custom line turnouts, i -think- it was an 0.010 or 0.015 shim that i ca’d in … five or six years ago, still haven’t painted them, guess black doesn’t show too readily ??
I’d be interested in what you finally settle on doing to fill those flangeways. I was looking at this problem with a lot of interest a few months ago when I was anticipating trying to utilize a lot of nice German made Fleischmann turnouts on my new layout.
Fleischmann & Peco (early ones) often have deep flangeways to accomodate the larger flange wheels of many European trains.
I believe I recall seeing references to ‘sheets’ of metal filler pieces that could be bought for these turnouts. But I believe these filler pieces were aimed at the flangeway depths rather than the guard rails that also need slimming up??
So we have 2 candidate materials suggested thus far to use in shimming up the height of those ‘canyons’ between the rails presented by the frog points,…styrene and metal:
Metal,…I think would present too many arcing and shorting problems, particularly with DCC operation
Styrene,…perhaps too soft to resist excess wear by those sometimes too-sharp wheel flanges
