I know that lauan plywood is popular for roadbed with some of us, including myself. Has anyone tried to cut lauan plywood to make turnout pads or tried to cut into correct HO scale railroad strips. My thoughts were that this material would splinter so badly to make it usuable. Would one be better off just using typical cork roadbed on top of lauan plywood instead of cutting the lauan into strips. Have any of you have any thoughts or advice relative tot his subject it would be deeply appreciated?
Plywood of any type is sturdy enough for roadbed. If you glue your track down all is well. Nails don’t work so well, the glue layers in plywood are so hard that the track nails will bend over. Far as I can see, lauan plywood is about the same as plain fir plywood, except the grain isn’t so wild. Since road bed will get covered with ballast, we don’t care about the grain.
I made my roadbed. I covered the layout with sheets of white paper and laid out the trackpattern full size on the paper. Then I cut the trackwork out with sissors and used it as templates to guide the saw. I used my bandsaw for all the curved pieces. I used a tapered bit in the router in the router table to chamfer all the edges at 45 degrees. I didn’t use plywood, I used soft white pine that takes track nails well. I resawed 3/4 inch pine into three 1/4 inch pieces using the bandsaw.
My roadbed isn’t structural, it’s fairly short pieces laid down on top of foam. The 1/4 inch pine isn’t strong enough to carry the track 18 inches thru the air inbetween risers. For that, I think you need plywood.
lauan plywood is getting pretty expensive. i use the 1/2 stuff for my yards and drill a pilot hole where i want to put a nail. cut it with a fine tooth saw and use masking tape along the cut line to minimize splintering.
grizlump