getting a ground throw to fit


H

hotwinger

HO Switchman
I'm trying to figuere out how I could get a caboose industries ground throw to fit inbetween these turnouts but no light bulbs above my head.
Anyone have any tricks up thier sleeve they could share??
Thanks

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I had this problem...

What I did was to make a piece of styrene that I glued under the attaching point of the switch and drilled a hole in the styrene to attach the ground throw... it works great.

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I took a whole bunch of old brass switches apart & used the arm off the switch & attached it to the slider for the new switch. I used superglue to glue the arms together & then used a tiny screw in the hole to hook them together. I have cork roadbed under all my tracks, so, it was easy to just trim the cork away under the arm. Leave the arms full length until you figure out the spacing for the ground throw.
I did this to about 30 switches.
If you need a picture let me know.
 
I used evergreen strips... it doesn't need to be very thick. It would really depend on what your putting under the track.
 
about how thick would you think the plastic bars are under the atlas switches?
 
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a simple fix would to run paino wire under the ties and then put a 90 deg bend to route the wire thru the holes. then you can place the ground throw on what ever side of the tracks that you want.


(red line represents the wire)



Trent
 
Thanks for the responces everyone, and some good ideas we have.

The piano wire method seems to be a good fit. I think I might give that a try instead of glueing anything to the throw bar. Where could you get just a single piece of piano wire from?
 
hotwinger said:
I'm trying to figuere out how I could get a caboose industries ground throw to fit inbetween these turnouts but no light bulbs above my head.
Anyone have any tricks up thier sleeve they could share??
Thanks
Click to expand...

This is an easy one. Atlas has now made this a very easy change to accomplish. The throwbar can be released from the points very easy and "flipped" to the other side. These throwbars are held in place to the points by a small nub that fits into the points.

Take a small screwdriver, and insert it just under the lip of the throwbar, between it and the point. Twist slightly, and then remove the point from the throwbar. Repeat for the other side, set the throwbar to come in from the opposite side and then pop it back into the nubs.

The red arrows in the picture show you the edge to raise with the screwdriver. There is no cutting, gluing, or painting involved. You will however haveto remove the turnout from its current position, so you can make the "reversal" easier to do.

atlasswitch.png


I can try to take some step by step pictures this weekend and show you how to do this if you would like.
 
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I flipped my throw bars around where needed and they work fine. I've also used the wire method mentioned... also worked fine.
 
Carey, Good point about the reversal of the arm. Didn't know that. See!! Learn something new everyday. A lot of my switches are the older Atlas & I wouldn't have been able to do that anyway, but, it's a shortcut for the newer ones.
Most of my track is already ballasted, so I had to do it the hard way.

Larry
 
hotwinger said:
Thanks for the responces everyone, and some good ideas we have.

The piano wire method seems to be a good fit. I think I might give that a try instead of glueing anything to the throw bar. Where could you get just a single piece of piano wire from?
Click to expand...

paino wire is sold at ACE hardware stores, larger hobby shops, arts and craft stores, alot of airplane guys use thick paino wire and threaded rods so chase some of them down if your having trouble finding it.

Trent
 
Piano wire...

Make sure the piano wire is routed through a plastic tube, or under tension it might short out by touching both tracks.:D
 
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