Yesterday I make a trip to Utrecht in Holland to the big “Eurospoor Model Show”. Nice show, nice layout to see and very good shopping ( a lot of MT freights car)
Some clinics were presented and this one, well not easy to do but affordable could be very interesting for the people which go from DC to DCC wiht an already existing layout.
To make a DCC friendly turnout the major part of the project is to isolate the frog. Many brands of turnout did’nt have an isolate frog and this is not always used when you wired your layout to conventionnal DC.
There is only one way to isolate the frog on alredy placed turnout; you need to cut the frog to isolate it from the rest of the turnouts rails and put a small wire going to a switch to change the polarity of the og.
Most of us use a dremel to do that and the cut is heavy, sometimes the near rails are blessed and the plastic ties could melt.
Yesterday a english man demonstrates an other approach. He use very small rond jeweler saw blade to make the cut. You need to drill a small hole just near the place you want to cut the rail; a hole of 1.5 millimeters is far enough, this hole need to go through the whole roadbed. The jeweler blade is attached to a stick and passed trough the small hole. Under the roabed a weight of nearby 700 grams is clamped to the end of the blade.
Using the stick he carefully cut the rails whitout disturbing and blessing nothing. In a small minute the frog is cut neatly. The cut is a average 0.3 millimeters, invisible.
You just need to solder a small wire to the frog and use the already drill hole to put the wire under the roadbed.
Vaccum the area, make some repairs to the ballast and small touch of color to the rails and you have finished.
How about the kiss principle. You can make the point not contact the side rails and achieve the same thing as long as the other end is insulated which was usually done with DC insulation of frogs anyway. You take what used to be a negative and make it a positive. The ways to do this are non conductive paint or a small plastic stop that goes below flange height.
Hello, Marc and others “divided by a common language” -
Marc uses the term “blessed”, which sounds weird to American ears. I believe it comes from a French verb, which means to injure or damage - so the above statements make a lot more sense if you replace “blessed” by “damaged” when reading them.
Just trying to help the understanding on this forum, where not all are natural English (or is that American?) speakers.
Good point, Gerhard. Blesser, pronounced as “bless say”, means to wound, injure, or to damage. Marc is attempting to translate the infinitive form of the French word into the past tense in English.
I agree entirely with the jeweller’s saw. Fast Tracks’ Tim Warris demonstrates the use of such a saw in his on-line video how he severs his frogs on his DCC friendly turnouts. Mine was costly, but that may just be due to where I purchased it and that it also had to be shipped to me. But I still feel it was worth it. You can’t see the cuts, even if you use a “one foot rule”.
Marc, the idea is a sound one…thanks for passing it on. [:)]
That is because alot of stuff in model railroading is not first hand information but just people repeating what they heard. To go off topic as an example, electrical fires. Seams that the forensic people say that it is very hard to start an electrical fire but a great many of house fires are blamed on electrical malfunction. The forensic guys say that is bull. As for DCC, there is a lot of talk but not much hard evidence for doing this or that and even the manufactures will not try to clear up the misconceptions because of liability concerns. I don’t know how things are done in your country but here you have to be ever watchful of lawsuits. When I give legal advice I always have to state that I am not a practicing lawyer for litigious reasons. There is a great product for DCC that senses the polarity of the frog and switches it the right way but they have a tried and true method of isolating the frog and that is the only feedback you will get from them so you got to do research.They don’t make such a device for DC but if can be done on DCC you know it can probably be done on DC.
I have a somewhat different opinion of the DCC-friendly work.
I use some Shinohara turnouts on my HOn3 line. While I use DC, my tiny HOn3 locos at switching speeds are stopped just as surely by a short in DC as a short in DCC. Some of my turnouts are handlaid, and those have powered frogs, and points tied to adjoining