MikeOwnby
Active Member
All you new guys: Make your room conditions constant. Temperature is easy, but you have to do the humidity thing too.
I thought I'd pop this in here just because I've seen a lot of "new layout" threads here on this forum, and a post from another place was brought to my attention. This person, after more than a year and a half of his layout functioning perfectly, suddenly came home to <gasp> buckled tracks! And yeah, I'm not trying to make light of it. I've had it happen, and it is freaking traumatic. The thing that got my attention was that what happened to him was just about exactly what happened to me, and for a LONG string of responses people just completely ignored the most obvious gremlin. Everything was about temperature and metal expansion and the rails. No.
Now look, after 18 months your layout has already undergone all sorts of temperature changes if they exist. And this guy says he maintained a fairly average 70-ish temp, give or take. But here's the thing: temperature changes tend to be pretty darn immediate, and metal will let you know right away if you've pissed it off. Not one of the first dozen troubleshooters brought up anything about the wood. What take time is wood. It'll bleed off and suck back in any moisture you care to give it, and it'll grow or shrink right along with it, but it does do it slowly and it's like a seismic fault that's storing energy. It'll overcome whatever mechanical or structural devices you have in place after a year (or a year and a half) of starving wood of moisture, and you'll find out that it got tired of being thirsty and decided to let you know about it. My own epiphany on this was not a happy time, but I did luckily manage to fix the damage. How? I put a humidifier in the room and let it run for a month. Yes, a MONTH. I'd cut out some flex track to relieve the pressure that was seriously pretzel-ing a couple of my turnouts, but it took that long before my layout finally expanded back to its original size enough for me to put even slightly filed down pieces back into the same places.
The lesson, boys and girls: Temperature is NOT all there is to a happy layout room. While metal rails will expand and contract rather quickly, the underlying benchwork will actually react much more dramatically in the end even if it takes longer to do so. Leave your business-card gaps and non-soldered joiners every so often if you want to (it's good advice for larger layouts no doubt), but for the love of pete also go out there and buy whatever humidifiers and dehumidifiers will keep your benchwork from overtopping those precautions. I have both ever since "THE INCIDENT". I live in a place that gets very humid in the summer and very cold and dry in the winter. It cost me probably close to $400 if I remember right for both units, but how much is your benchwork, your trackwork, worth? I've kept my temperature in the 75-deg range and my humidity in the 50% range to accommodate both summer and winter, with just switching out on which piece of equipment is doing the job. Not only have I not had a repeat of "THE INCIDENT", I've also never had even the slightest variation in connections that I'd previously wondered about before I got smacked in the face.
It's a pretty good preventative investment that not a lot of folks seem to be talking about, if the posts on that other place were any indication. Make the investment before the damage occurs, and you'll be much happier. Considering what this hobby costs overall, it seems like even a few hundred dollars is a pretty wise investment to keep it running right.
I thought I'd pop this in here just because I've seen a lot of "new layout" threads here on this forum, and a post from another place was brought to my attention. This person, after more than a year and a half of his layout functioning perfectly, suddenly came home to <gasp> buckled tracks! And yeah, I'm not trying to make light of it. I've had it happen, and it is freaking traumatic. The thing that got my attention was that what happened to him was just about exactly what happened to me, and for a LONG string of responses people just completely ignored the most obvious gremlin. Everything was about temperature and metal expansion and the rails. No.
Now look, after 18 months your layout has already undergone all sorts of temperature changes if they exist. And this guy says he maintained a fairly average 70-ish temp, give or take. But here's the thing: temperature changes tend to be pretty darn immediate, and metal will let you know right away if you've pissed it off. Not one of the first dozen troubleshooters brought up anything about the wood. What take time is wood. It'll bleed off and suck back in any moisture you care to give it, and it'll grow or shrink right along with it, but it does do it slowly and it's like a seismic fault that's storing energy. It'll overcome whatever mechanical or structural devices you have in place after a year (or a year and a half) of starving wood of moisture, and you'll find out that it got tired of being thirsty and decided to let you know about it. My own epiphany on this was not a happy time, but I did luckily manage to fix the damage. How? I put a humidifier in the room and let it run for a month. Yes, a MONTH. I'd cut out some flex track to relieve the pressure that was seriously pretzel-ing a couple of my turnouts, but it took that long before my layout finally expanded back to its original size enough for me to put even slightly filed down pieces back into the same places.
The lesson, boys and girls: Temperature is NOT all there is to a happy layout room. While metal rails will expand and contract rather quickly, the underlying benchwork will actually react much more dramatically in the end even if it takes longer to do so. Leave your business-card gaps and non-soldered joiners every so often if you want to (it's good advice for larger layouts no doubt), but for the love of pete also go out there and buy whatever humidifiers and dehumidifiers will keep your benchwork from overtopping those precautions. I have both ever since "THE INCIDENT". I live in a place that gets very humid in the summer and very cold and dry in the winter. It cost me probably close to $400 if I remember right for both units, but how much is your benchwork, your trackwork, worth? I've kept my temperature in the 75-deg range and my humidity in the 50% range to accommodate both summer and winter, with just switching out on which piece of equipment is doing the job. Not only have I not had a repeat of "THE INCIDENT", I've also never had even the slightest variation in connections that I'd previously wondered about before I got smacked in the face.
It's a pretty good preventative investment that not a lot of folks seem to be talking about, if the posts on that other place were any indication. Make the investment before the damage occurs, and you'll be much happier. Considering what this hobby costs overall, it seems like even a few hundred dollars is a pretty wise investment to keep it running right.