What do these sell for? I acquired one from a deceased friends
family. Used it once. It worked fine. Hove Cose 70 and 100 spikes.
but no instructions. John Armstrong.. Got some Code 40 rail also.
Hows the weather in your area.
On Jul 24, 2008, at 10:30 PM, Richard Karnes wrote:
> All --
>
> OK, I'll bite. I was a hand-laying fanatic. Still would be, except I
> drove the golden spike a couple of months ago. Except for background
> tracks and hidden tracks, all my trackwork (including all turnouts and
> crossings) is handlaid. (My layout is 12' x 43', double-tracked, with
> about seventy turnouts, five crossings, and one double slip switch. It
> took me about ten years of spare time between honey-dos to get from
> zero benchwork to 100 percent trackage completion.) However, I also
> have extensive experience laying today's flextrack and
> ready-to-install turnouts (Shinohara, Tomalco), thanks to Roger
> Nulton's Monon. If you are a member of the NASG, you get the Dispatch
> every two months and you have seen my review of the various track and
> turnout products. And if you ever subscribed to the "1:64 Modeling
> Guide," you saw my articles on building crossings and turnouts.
>
> So I can tell you this -- If you lay your own track you are not
> constrained by the geometries of ready-made turnouts and crossings.
> You can make curved turnouts to any radii and crossings of any angle.
> Curved turnouts are no more difficult to build than straight ones.
> Crossings are easier to build than turnouts. Neither one -- once you
> get the hang of it -- should take you more than an hour, not including
> painting, staining, ballasting, and throw mechanism.
>
> And let me tell you this -- Laying ready-to-install turnouts is not a
> simple as it's cracked up to be. Tomalco's turnouts always need to be
> checked for gauge because they are glued together. I have heated and
> regauged rails on most of these, and spiked the rails afterward to
> prevent shifting. But the real time-consumer with flex turnouts is
> laying out smoothly-flowing trackwork. There's a lot of trial and
> error. This is compounded by the fact that a Shinohara #6 is
> substantially shorter than a (correct) Tomalco #6, so using anything
> but the real thing as a template won't necessarily work.
>
> Making the Shinohara turnout DCC-compatible (grounding the closure
> rails to the stock rails and isolating the frog) is not a trivial
> task. The throwbar must be replaced. At least with Tomalco, you can
> ask owner Larry Morton to furnish you with DCC-compatible versions.
>
> I have to tell you that I was immeasurably helped because of my
> ownership of a Kadee spiker. These modified staplers were quite pricey
> at the time they were offered -- in the 1970s, I believe. Kadee still
> sells parts and spikes (staples) for them, but no longer markets a
> complete unit. Apparently the Feds got after them because the device
> cuts and ejects, at a rather high velocity, a short horizontal portion
> of each staple as it drives the two outer spike-shaped staple remnants
> into the tie. This is a potential hazard for, say, onlookers'
> eyeballs.
>
> I would encourage any of you who are interested in hand-laying to
> purchase one of these spikers on eBay, if it weren't for the fact that
> mine began to come apart on my last trip to lay track on Roger's
> layout. The main body of the tool (not available as a separate part)
> had a chunk come out of it because of crystallization of the metal.
> This is probably because of a combination of metal fatigue over the
> years plus impurities in the metal alloy. Therefore, I suspect that
> many of these Kadee spikers, because they are of the same vintage, are
> beginning to, or are about to, crumble. Too bad. If you run across one
> and really want it, ask the owner how large his layout(s) was/were.
> Ultimate failure due to metal fatigue depends on the number of stress
> cycles (one cycle per pair of spikes driven) to which the device has
> been subjected. Mine was also used on my previous layout, which had
> twice as much track, hand-laid, as the current one. Most layouts
> are quite a bit smaller, so fatigue may not yet have taken its toll.
>
> Dick Karnes
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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