Upgrading Tru Trac Turnouts.

[Michael B]

Today, I venture into the realm of H...hang on a sec...
Hold on...
Breath. Breath.

Today, I venture into...
HO scale.

Shhhhh, around here we do not speak it, we only whisper it.

Just whispering it makes me feel dirty and rather naughty.
Is it hot in here?

HO scale, what a scary place it is!
Why just look at this pic, and you easily see there is some kind of
evil socery at play.

 

[Michael B]

I first decided to hold a deep cleaning with mineral spirits.
I was sure to speak in tongues all the while so as to help vanquish the evil spirits.

After I removed the evil parts, a conductor was formed which will
carry power to our frog. I ripped a slot for it on the table saw first.


Here, you can see the top of the conductor is now soldered to the two rails that are already in place.

 

[Michael B]

Well, I got rolling and forgot to take pics of this next step.
If anyone needs it, tell me and I take some on the next one.

Anyway, I simply shortened both the points and spiked them in
place. Once happy, I soldered the point rails to the conductor.
This takes a lot of heat - I use my 100W gun AND my 50W iron at the same time. Lots of flux. I clean excess solder with my knife, then files. There is always lots of solder to clean up here.
Of course, the straight rail is cut and beveled beforehand.
Once the rails are in place, the drawbar is made using some rail.
It is not a straght piece - it is sort gull winged shaped, which keeps it from shorting.

Note
1) The diverging rail has no gap.
2) It is impossible for any piece of rail to "lose power"
3) The points will never misalign.


One thing to notice here is how crazy the guard rails are.
Time to deal with that...


So, I just made some new ones. These are shorter. I won't solder them in like the oem did, instead I attach two little pieces of wire to them that act as hooks which hold down the outside edge, and spikes are used on the inside edge. Some super glue to lock it down once I am happy.

Oh, I also relaxed that s curve a little bit too....

 

[Michael B]

At this point I am quite confident this turnout will not cause derailments, or shorts due to poor geometry. I am also sure that our air gaps are correct, so they cannot short either.

Now, let us dive into the electrical hook ups.

In my view, this is what you want - motorized, wired frog, wired signals, and outputs for control panel lamps. All without digital controls. It not hard at all, take a look...


Note that this is doing EXACTLY what a Tortoise does.
It's just their pins are on a circuit board.
To my knowledge, we make the only servo based actuator which has a DPDT switch.

 

[Jim at BSME]

Curious why your doing all this work with tru-scale roadbed turnout as opposed to just using atlas/peco/micro engineering turnouts?

 

[Iron Horseman]

So

Well, I got rolling and forgot to take pics of this next step.
If anyone needs it, tell me and I take some on the next one.

Anyway, I simply shortened both the points and spiked them in
place. Once happy, I soldered the point rails to the conductor.
This takes a lot of heat - I use my 100W gun AND my 50W iron at the same time. Lots of flux. I clean excess solder with my knife, then files. There is always lots of solder to clean up here.
Of course, the straight rail is cut and beveled beforehand.
Once the rails are in place, the drawbar is made using some rail.
It is not a straght piece - it is sort gull winged shaped, which keeps it from shorting.

Note
1) The diverging rail has no gap.
2) It is impossible for any piece of rail to "lose power"
3) The points will never misalign.


One thing to notice here is how crazy the guard rails are.
Time to deal with that...
View attachment 263188

So, I just made some new ones. These are shorter. I won't solder them in like the oem did, instead I attach two little pieces of wire to them that act as hooks which hold down the outside edge, and spikes are used on the inside edge. Some super glue to lock it down once I am happy.

Oh, I also relaxed that s curve a little bit too....
View attachment 263189

So basically you have converted a speed turnout to a regular turnout. I am not certain how that is an upgrade.

 

[beiland]

That TruTrac (Truscale) turnout is a 'gapless turnout'. We need some gapless turnouts.

Reducing Wheel Dips at Turnout Frogs

I've been working on a section of my track that contains some closely spaced curved turnouts (I refer to them as dbl-curves). The frog areas of these turnouts are pretty 'open spaces' that I have had some luck adding some plastic shims to in an effort to reduce some of this big wheel...

forum.mrhmag.com

Reducing Wheel Dips at Turnout Frogs

I've been working on a section of my track that contains some closely spaced curved turnouts (I refer to them as dbl-curves). The frog areas of these turnouts are pretty 'open spaces' that I have had some luck adding some plastic shims to in an effort to reduce some of this big wheel...

forum.mrhmag.com

Reducing Wheel Dips at Turnout Frogs

I've been working on a section of my track that contains some closely spaced curved turnouts (I refer to them as dbl-curves). The frog areas of these turnouts are pretty 'open spaces' that I have had some luck adding some plastic shims to in an effort to reduce some of this big wheel...

forum.mrhmag.com

Reducing Wheel Dips at Turnout Frogs

I've been working on a section of my track that contains some closely spaced curved turnouts (I refer to them as dbl-curves). The frog areas of these turnouts are pretty 'open spaces' that I have had some luck adding some plastic shims to in an effort to reduce some of this big wheel...

forum.mrhmag.com

 

[beiland]

I believe I also wrote about my search for gapless turnouts on this forum as well,...if you do a search for 'gapless turnouts'