Birthday Bonus

Today I turned 22. Hard to believe, but there we are.
Most people relax or go out for a nice meal on their birthdays, but not me!
I cracked on with the wiring/track laying today with the help of dad (who was homebound thanks to a bad back). But this didn't deter him from helping out with the soldering! We managed to complete the entire mainline loop which was fantastic.

So first up, here is what I did for the board joins. I layed the track roughly into position (as straight as possible using a steel rule), and marked out rough locations for screws. As you can see I used 4 screws per rail. This is to keep as little pressure as possible across the join so that when I cut it hopefully it will stay exactly where it is!

The screws were turned until level (again using a steel rule to check, and also visually checking for dips/kinks), and the rails soldered on. The next couple photos show the finished result:

Not exactly neat, but so far it looks like it will do the job. In any case, this will be mostly covered in clay so the majority of it will be hidden.

Unfortunately, some curves were tighter than expected, but this was necessary when using flexitrack over set-track as you need to keep the approaches straight. The 4-6-0 still makes it around so I'm not really concerned at all, especially when the mainstay of the line will be 0-4-0s.

So there we have it, as they say - all in a days work!