Bob, I like your idea of the plates. How about putting a twist in the plates so they match the angle of the track. Also, depending on how close together the plates are, you might need some thin nuts and some washers to get the vertical spacing correct.
Love the buildings. Was planning on putting some tall buildings on another part of my layout. Do you have a thread describing how you made yours ?Tks
Rick
some are scratch built, some are stacked mth building add on floors and some are made of layers mat board.
I'm working on the design of a helix as well. Mine will be oval with some straight sections on the sides and O42 curves at the ends. The inner track will be O31, it may end up being mostly used for coming down, depending on how well the trains do on it.
The ceiling track will have switching to allow me to enter and exit from either direction on either track. All of the helix and ceiling track will be tubular track.
I'm going to use 1/4" plywood overlapped in U shaped pieces to make a 1/2" laminate for the base. This eliminates the joint issue of using a single thickness. The helix will be supported from the edge on the inside and outside with vertical stringers. Each level will be 6" higher than the previous level.
Assuming a plate every 12 inches and a grade of 3 percent, the vertical spacing of the plates at the center rod is about 3/8 inch. This would indeed make it difficult to clamp each plate between two standard nuts.
But consider the long lever arm between the center and the track. Any vertical errors at the center will be attenuated by an order of magnitude at the track. So all that is really important at the center is to avoid any cumulative error. The deviations of a small fraction of an inch up and down needed to accommodate the thickness of nuts will have no practical effect out at the periphery, where the track is.
You could twist the plates, but I don't think it's necessary. A 3 percent twist across a 1-inch plate (which is rather wider than needed) is only a 1/32-inch height difference from side to side. I think a piece of pasteboard between the plate and the rails, needed anyway for electrical insulation, might have almost enough resilience to handle that slope that small. In any case, supporting the track on one edge of the plate shouldn't be a problem.
Bob Nelson
Just noticed this reply Bob, but I'm not sure what point you're getting at.
I was just responding to the comments above, about twisting the plates and using thin nuts. The twisting seemed to me to be so slight that it could be neglected. And ordinary nuts can be used on the center rod simply by leaving out a nut when the space for it is too small, without any significant effect out at the track.
OK, thanks.
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