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cheap mountains
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Guys, please don't suffer from math anxiety. (My wife's Ph.D. disertation was about math anxiety, because it's so common! Opposites do attract, because I flunked freshman high school algebra!) It's really EASY to figure grade percentages for your helixes, etc. You don't even have to know what you're doing. Trust me on this. Take your radius. For example, 24 inches. Simply double that radius and you get 48. In all cases, multiply that doubled figure by 3.14, and you will get the total inches around your circle. 3.14 X 48 is just a little more than 150 inches around. Now was that so hard? Nah! From there, 150 inches is easy to figure down to a little more than 12 feet. All you have to do is divide by 12, since you have 12 inches per foot. If you build a helix with a minumum radius of 18 inches, you'll get 36 (double the 18) times 3.14, or about 113 inches. Divide that by 12, and you'll have just under 9 and a half feet of track around the circle, so it will be a pretty steep grade in HO scale. A friend of mine's layout had such a grade one time, with lots of derailments of longer cars. Anyway, all of this is fun and easy to figure, as I hope you can see now. It's very easy to make it seem hard by simply using the word "math", especially since many of us haven't had to use math in our jobs. Relax, and you really can calculate this stuff. I should say "do" this stuff, since it's hardly even worthy of the word "calculate". [^] It makes armchair railroading a lot more fun.
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