From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet
You have to do it very carefully and in several passes. You can't make the entire bend in one pass. Work through it once, go back, bend it a little more. Some people start in the middle of the curve and work it out to the end, some people start at the end and work in gradually.
Dave H.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
Picking up on the thought that your track is like the current, Micro Engineering product -- in MR's most recent Dream-Plan-Build DVD (Volume 13), Tony Koester describes a technique involving "battering" the ties to break them loose somewhat from the rail and developing a curve. I wouldn't try to describe it in words. Perhaps you can borrow (or purchase) a copy of the DVD to see how he does it.
Bending it with your hands tends to create small kinks which can be awful hard to correct. And the ends seem never to be the same curve as the rest of the piece, something you notice when a curve takes multiple pieces of flex track.
An outfit called Ribbonrail makes aluminum track gauges that fit between the rails and are milled to various radius curves. Working slowly you run the Ribbonrial gauge between the rails until the flex track takes on the curve of the template. It is not precise -- by which I mean running a 30" radius curve track gauge won't necessarily give you an exact 30" radius curve, it might be larger or smaller than that -- but gives you a smooth curve which you might have to force a bit to fit your roadbed to the curve you really want This illustration from the Walthers catalog
http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/170-5
is of one of their tangent track gauges (which are also useful) but you get the idea:
I was able to get an entire set of tangent and varied curves at a swap meet. It was money well spent.
Dave Nelson
Greg,
A few tips from my experiences with Micro Engineering which is essentially the same track:
1. Don't try to bend it to the full curvature in one pass. Start out by bending a little at a time over the complete length of the curvature. Go back and repeat as necessary to get the curve you want.
2. The key to bending ME well is in the ties. Keep the ties relatively perpendicular to the rails as you bend. Grasp the ties on both ends from underneath and gently nudge them back to perpendicular. Bend a little, straighten the ties. This will have the effect of evening out the curvature as well as preventing the "spread out ties" problem.
3. Keep sighting the track down the length of the curve to keep the degree of curvature even and to avoid kinks. Often I will get the curve radius I want and then fix the errant ties to make that near perfect look. Be careful not to put any downward pressure on the ties or they might pop off the rails (rare, but does happen) I usually have my center line board with various radii centerlines drawn on it to keep the radius correct. Bend some, check against the centerline. Repeat. Ribbon rail guides won't work until you have bent the piece pretty close to the correct radius.
Seeing this on paper makes this sound a lot harder than it actually is to do. Once you get the hang of it, things go pretty quick. Weathered is harder to bend than unweathered track. Patience and perserverence will pay off in great looking trackwork.
Solid copper Feeders can be soldered to the bottom of the rails laying on the bench and then fed into holes in the layout surface after the track is set. Easy to hide in the ballast and a lot easier than the "feeder soldering dance" (don't melt the ties) after the track is installed.
Your Mileage may vary,
Guy
see stuff at: the Willoughby Line Site
Or you could cheat like I did. I had several pieces of old Atlas code 100 NS Flex track on fiber ties, but it falls into the same category of hard-to-bend.
I used them like 3 foot straight sections.
TomDiehl wrote: Or you could cheat like I did. I had several pieces of old Atlas code 100 NS Flex track on fiber ties, but it falls into the same category of hard-to-bend.I used them like 3 foot straight sections.
Tom, I did not know they had the fiber tie track with NS rail. That must have been short lived. I have an entire roll of the fiber tie material intended for handlaid track. And I remember the fiber tie turnouts too, with the track held in place with a few staples that needed reinforcement from spikes once you installed the turnout. You had to be careful about what you used as ballast cement -- any water based product made the fiber expand in unpredictable ways. But interestingly, the smooth surface of the fiber tie actually looked more like a new wood tie than the exaggerated wood grain in Atlas plastic track.
dknelson wrote: TomDiehl wrote: Or you could cheat like I did. I had several pieces of old Atlas code 100 NS Flex track on fiber ties, but it falls into the same category of hard-to-bend.I used them like 3 foot straight sections. Tom, I did not know they had the fiber tie track with NS rail. That must have been short lived. I have an entire roll of the fiber tie material intended for handlaid track. And I remember the fiber tie turnouts too, with the track held in place with a few staples that needed reinforcement from spikes once you installed the turnout. You had to be careful about what you used as ballast cement -- any water based product made the fiber expand in unpredictable ways. But interestingly, the smooth surface of the fiber tie actually looked more like a new wood tie than the exaggerated wood grain in Atlas plastic track.Dave Nelson
I got it second hand back in the mid 70's. There's no brand name on it anywhere, so I'm assuming it was Atlas. I haven't done any ballasting on these sections yet, so thanks for the heads-up on the expansion problem.