A simpler solution to fitting point motors!

 First update of the day, and I have started work on marking out the points in their final positions. I have also cut out the first hole in the polystyrene for the point motors. I looked through the instructions that came with the SEEP motors and decided they are unnecessarily long-winded!

So this is how I'm going to do it:

Firstly, I have drawn around the points using a black marker onto the trackbed. Obviously this makes it easier to see where the hole needs to be made! Here you can see I have put a push pin through the hole in the tiebar where the point motor pole will be located. This was done in 3 places; the centre, left hand travel and right hand travel positions...

...which gives us these three small holes:

Instead of doing that, the instructions tell us we should drill through the tiebar with a tiny drill bit. NO THANKS! They then say to expand the pilot hole with a 1mm drill bit. Again, NOPE!

Here's what I did instead:

I skipped straight to the end and drilled a hole slightly bigger than the throw of the point (this was of course drilled from the centre pilot hole I had made with the push pin.)

So my next step was to mark out the hole on the polystyrene for the point motor to sit in:

You can probably see why I didn't want to glue any trackbed down that had points on it now! Makes life SO much easier. All I did was make a mark through the hole in the trackbed I had just made with a marker pen, then removed the ply and drawn around the point motor. Of couse the hole is much bigger than the motor so you can access it easier to fit the wiring!

So there we have it, much simpler and far less risky than faffing about with 1mm drill bits and drilling through fragile tiebars!

By the way, the point motors will be sitting on a 6mm bit of ply before being attached to the trackbed. This is so that:

A) The point motors are easy to add to the layout or remove should they need replacing

B) Because the connector blocks prevent the point motor from sitting flush with it