Question on foam baseboard and installing tortoise/blue point turnout switches


Burbs

Member
I’m in the planning stages for my benchwork for my HO layout and I’m leaning towards using 2” thick foam insulation board instead of plywood. The issue I’m seeing here locally that finding 2” foam board is hard but finding 1.5” seems a bit easier. My benchwork will have center supports so I’m not worried about the baseboard not being supported enough.

I do have two questions however:
  1. If I can‘t find 2” XPS boards would it be ok to use 1.5” with .5” on top to equate 2”? (I realize I’ll have to glue the .5” on top but that’s not an issue)
  2. I did Google “installing a tortoise switch to foam board“ and it appears they recommend either glueing a 4” piece of 1/2” plywood to the bottom of the foam and then installing the switch to that. Or I saw someone installing it flush from the bottom on piece of perfboard. I didn’t see anything about blue point therefore that leads me to ask, what have some of you done to mount either Tortoise or Blue Point switches to foam?
Thanks
 
I don't use tortoise switch machines so I can't help you there but a word of caution about using foam without plywood...It's loud.

I used 3" foam over an open grid benchwork made of 1"x 4"s without plywood. The result is the foam acts as a sounding board. I greatly reduced the noise by adding hardwood floor underlayment beneath the cork roadbed to absorb some of the vibrations. The result was satisfactory but if I were to do it over again I would glue the foamboard to 1/2" plywood.

Good luck!
Paul
 
Unfortunately, I only have one picture of a BluePoint switch mounted in foam. But that's because I only bought one of them as an experiment. My bench work was open grid with 2" foam on that. I had a hard time trying to find machine screws longer than 2" to mount the switch to the foam with a piece of wood backing.
I ended up routing a hole in the foam to accommodate mounting the (ply) wood backing with the 2" screws, then mounting the Blue Point to the plywood. I really like the Blue Points for the short, crisp action of the throw rod, but the cluster of terminals to solder to are a pain, and they are spendier than I cared to go with, so I went with the Bullfrogs.....
IMG_2347.JPG


Here is one of the Bullfrogs mounted the same way.
IMG_2346.JPG

I had cork road bed glued to the top of the foam, I didn't have that big of an issue with noise when running trains. When I installed the foam on the bench work, I made sure that I had adhesive on every piece of frame work that the foam was touching.
I never have seen the 3" foam, but on my up coming layout, I'm going to 1" foam.
In your question #2 you mention gluing a piece of plywood to foam then mount machine, yeah, I just didn't like relying solely on the glue/adhesive to hold the plywood, that's why I recessed them so I could add the mounting bolts, but that's just me......o_O
 



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