The Great Sawzall Massacre of 2018

For a variety of reasons, most importantly to shorten my commute and get some free time back, I recently moved.  I have a nice new space designated for an industrial switching shelf style layout.  I'm still in the toying with ideas stage, serious planning will probably start in a month or so and, with luck, a bit of construction before the end of the year.  More on that in a coming post.

Selling the old house is of course a rather critical part of the proceedings, and having a train layout screwed to the basement walls is not a good way to try to sell a house.  So it had to go.  My weapon of choice was a sawzall type saw (porter cable tiger saw).  With that and a crowbar, pry bar. cordless screwdriver, and some coffee it took me most of a weekend to separate the layout from the house and reduce it to small enough pieces for a junk removal service to remove.

When I built the layout I had the attitude that it was going to be a lifetime layout, or at the very least not reusable.  So I built it from the walls in - I started by screwing the back frame member to the wall, then added the cross pieces, front frame, and braces.  Some sections were built during my massive overkill lag screw phase, some in my drywall screw phase, and some in my pocket screw phase.  Due to both the build in from the walls construction and the number of changes over time, there were screws that were buried under other framing pieces, fascia, etc.  In retrospect, that wasn't the best idea.  The sawzall and crowbar were required.

First step, remove the Palmer Industrial peninsula to free up floor space.  The trickiest part was excavating the head of one screw that held the frame to the door frame.  The fascia was vigorously glued over it, and I needed to leave the door frame in good shape.  I couldn't just pull it out, or try to cut the screw between the layout and the door frame because that would mess up the door frame.  A bit of prying and chiseling eventually revealed the screw.  Here's the Palmer Industrial after being separated from walls and floor.

I used the sawzall to cut it up into manageable pieces and stacked them in the corner.

By the time I got to this dismantling operation I had already started thinking about a new layout, so oddly enough one of the biggest moments of regret was seeing those nicely curved MDF fascia corners in the junk pile.  I had fun making those.

So, with the Palmer Industrial out of the way it was on to the O scale No-Name Industrial.  As I mentioned it was screwed to the walls.  The walls it was screwed to have a 10" or so ledge just under the layout height at the top of the foundation.  It would have been excruciating to try to unscrew the layout as is from the wall.  Cutting off everything except the back few inches seemed like the best approach, so I fired up the sawzall again.  In this photo the corner with the interchange has already been removed except for the back edge screwed to the wall, and I've sliced through the layout for the whole length a few inches from the wall.  All that's holding up in this photo is habit.

One tap on the front edge while standing out of the way in the corner, and the habit is broken.

The remaining bit attached to the wall.  What kind of idiot uses this many lag screws for a train layout!

A bit of backdrop removal, not too hard in spite of painted over screw heads.

Then it was relatively easy to remove the pieces from the wall and the lower end of the brace supports.  Chopping the remains into easily carry-able pieces and stacking them in the corners finished up the front wall portion of the layout.

The side wall portion of the layout was not quite as straightforward to remove.  The portion closest to the corner was built to allow scenery and track extending below the baseline elevation of the rest of the layout.  A sheet of plywood was screwed directly to the ledge in the wall, and then track/scenery was built up from there - in other words lots of buried screw heads.  The remainder of the wall was more normal construction.  My approach was to cut out the normally built portion and then nibble away at the remainder.

Hm, what's holding it up?

Maybe a couple more whacks?

That did it!

Next problem was the oddly built section.  I had built it up by screwing joists of the right height to the plywood underpinnings, then screwing the plywood roadbed to the joists, and then gluing homabed on top.  Lots of screws covered up by other layers.  I ended up just brute force crowbaring off the plywood subroadbed for the main and runaround behind Catania-Spagna - you can see some of the supports split across the middle.

Then I was able to cut it off just inside the ledge.

The weapon of choice.  That's the third or fourth blade - I kept bending the tips hitting things I couldn't see under the layout.

Eventually I managed to find all the screws and get the remaining plywood off the ledge.

The second pile of layout remains when it was all over.

And a few days later it's all gone.

That last bit of "backdrop" is where I "cleverly" painted the back drop right on the door for the bulkhead.

So, what did I learn from all this?

• Even if you don't want to build a layout that can be moved to a new home, at least build it so it's not too difficult to remove.  Even if you don't have to move, you may want fewer obstacles to re-arranging portions of the layout.
• Layouts do not need to be lag screwed to the wall!  The section just drywall screwed to the wall held up just as well with me crawling on it as the section lag screwed to the wall.
• Pocket screws are cool.  But they can be harder to find when you're taking something apart.
• Sawzall style saws are fun!

Northeast Container Mockup 2

This weekend I spent some time to finish the Northeast Container Mockup.  I decided my first pass at the mockup wasn't tall enough.  Phil (UP6903) on the Atlas O forum suggested that the building should have a foundation that was the same height as the loading dock, so I tried raising the whole building up by that much using some temporary blocks cut to the right height.

Up on blocks

I left it that way for a couple weeks to see if it still seemed like a good idea after I got used to it.  And it did.  So I made a less precarious foundation with some poplar ripped to the right size, with a little rabbit for the 1/4" ply building to sit in.  The foundation is screwed to the bench work - I wanted to keep the building accurately positioned but still removable.  I'm not sure that was the right choice, but I'm not sure it was the wrong choice either.  Perhaps time will tell.

The foundation

The above photo shows the rabbit on the foundation.  It's screwed down with Kreg pocket screws through slightly over-sized holes, which let me tweak the position slightly before the final turn or two on the screw.  The screw eyes in the top edge are to hook rubber bands on to hold the building in place.

High tech hold downs

The little metal thing the rubber band is looped through on the wall is for picture hanging, it's got two little spikes that you drive into the wood to hold it in place.  Here's the main building in place.  I gave it a quicky paint job with a spray can.

Main building

And the finished mockup with the loading dock in place, and some 1/16" paneling for a roof.

Finished mockup

The whole structure is slightly over 11 feet long - the main building is 64", the narrower pieces is 72".  I'm pretty happy with the overall footprint and size of the building.

An overview

You may be wondering why the backdrop doesn't go all the way down to the layout at the right end of the build.  At the time I put the backdrop up, the plans called for a solid series of smaller warehouse like buildings up against that wall.  I found I was short a sheet of full width masonite for the backdrop, but I did have a sheet that would go down below the roofline of the buildings.  And ever since the plan changed I've regretted that "clever" time and money "saving" move.  I'm toying with the idea of using photo backdrops for a tree line, which would cover up that problem and possibly solve the white window shade problem at the same time.

A closer view

As you can see from the hi-cube peeking out of the warehouse door, the height is about right now.  I think the color is somewhere in the general neighborhood of what I want, but it's definitely not right.  I'm also having second thoughts about the peak in the roof.  Putting it there tells you how wide the building is (twice the distance from the front to the peak), and that's clearly not as big as it should be.  And I think the pitch of the roof is a bit steeper than the effect I was going for.  For now it gets the idea across, gives guests a sense of what the purpose of the operation is, and lets me put off worrying about a building a better version of it for quite some time.

The building mockup with it's roof in place will also let me test another things over time - how to deal with uncoupling a cut that gets spotted in the building.  A couple experiments suggest that with the kadee 805 couplers, it's reasonably easy to uncouple a car placed just inside the building by angling the skewer in through the top of the door.  I don't have enough cars converted to kadees yet though to get an idea of how that will really work out in an op session.

Looking back at the photos it occurs to me that I should explain the yellow things on the track.  Those are yellow sticky note pieces in a new set of experiments with marking clearance points.  My first pass at the experiment used a number I got from a CSX document stating that the clearance point was the point at which the two nearest rails were 13 feet apart.  Using that number on my layout looked good, but ate up a little too much track length for a layout that already suffers a little from too short tracks.  The new number I'm trying is 8 feet between the two nearest rails.  That leaves a little over two scale feet between cars, and adds a car to the capacity of several tracks.  Once I'm sure where I want the clearance points to be I'll follow the prototype practice of marking the rail or tie with some yellow paint.

Kadees on Berwicks

After putting it off for years (literally) I've finally started making good progress converting the rest of my O scale rolling stock to Kadee couplers, specifically 805 metal couplers in the 817 plastic boxes - what would now be a #816.  Progress has been so good, in fact, that I've run out of the plastic boxes I had left.  I ordered more which should be at the local hobby shop this weekend, so in the meantime I'm writing this blog post about putting Kadees on Atlas O 60' Berwick high cube box cars.

Not all the Atlas couplers are the same length, so the first thing I did was to measure the distance from the end of the car to the outside face of the Atlas coupler knuckle, to make sure I got the Kadee mounted in the same general place.  It turns out the in the case of the Berwicks at least, the holes are in the right place so just re-using them puts the Kadee coupler knuckle face exactly the same distance from the end of the car.  But you can't tell that right off, the first problem is removing the Atlas coupler.

The Atlas couplers are held on with two screws that are inside the coupler box - you have to pop the lid off and remove the spring and coupler to get at them.  Popping the lid off an Atlas coupler box without breaking anything is a real challenge.  Someone once posted a picture of a tool they came up with that makes it easy, I wish I could remember who or find the post so I could give credit, but I can't.  However I was able to remember what the tool looked like, so I made one by cutting a few pieces of 1/16 thick brass, filing the end of one into shape, and soldering together the sandwich with a resistance rig.  Here's the tool in action.

Coupler box tool

Basically, you slip a knife blade in under the cover and exert a little pressure, pull the tab back with the tool, and once you get it pulled back far enough the lid will pop off.

Popping the cover off

Once you've got the Atlas coupler box off you'll notice that the screws are very different lengths.  This is important - the screw that goes in right at the end of the car has to be shorter, because it goes into the little spacer block right over the plastic end of the car.

The spacer block under the coupler box

This is the time to put the car back on the track and use the body height end of the Kadee coupler height gauge to see whether and spacers are needed.  I use Micro-Mark coupler shims.  In the case of the Berwicks, 1 shim is needed.

By comparing the length that stuck out of the Atlas box against different length screws sticking out of the Kadee box & 1 spacer combo, I decided an 8mm screw was about right for the end hole, and the other hole I wanted more bite so I used a 10mm screw. I bought my screws from NWSL - my packages say 31208-5 for the 2.0x 8mm panhead screws, and 31210-5 for the 2.0 x 10mm panheads.  The Atlas couplers are held on with 2.0 mm metric screws, spaced very slightly closer together than the Kadee holes.  By using the same screw size, and enlarging the holes in the Kadee box with a #43 drill I find I can re-use the same holes.

Next step is to prepare the coupler.  With a metal coupler in a plastic box most of the tedious filing and burnishing that's needed with an all metal installation is unnecessary.  All I do is burnish the outside of the knuckle with Kadee greasem, since it's the part that needs to slide by another coupler really easily to couple slowly.

Burnishing the knuckle

And more burnishing just to be sure

It's not that hard to burnish the knuckle faces on an installed coupler, but it's trivial before you put the coupler in it's box so I like to do a thorough job of it.

Then put the coupler together, get the coupler, spacer, and screws all sandwiched up, and mount it.

All the pieces

Putting in the center screw (that goes over the car end) first since it's the shorty makes sure it gets as much of a bite as it can, and of course you have to be careful not to over tighten it.  The other screw will be a little reluctant to find the hole (even after enlarging the holes the spacing isn't a perfect match), but by tipping it a little it will catch and you can then straighten it out.  No need to worry about over tightening the 10mm screw, at least not with a jewelers screw driver.

Installed Kadee

The end result sticks out the right amount, is the right height, and works great.  The Tighe warehouse at the back of my layout (track center line 26" from the layout edge) is the industry the Berwicks head to on my layout.  Uncoupling the Atlas couplers back there can be pretty annoying - visiting friends have sometimes been unable to do it at all.  The switch to Kadees has improved the experience immensely.

Now if those plastic boxes would just come in so I can finish off my Berwicks and get on to the coalveyors...

Uncoupling

I've planned to equip all my cars with Kadee couplers, because of the improved operation. Kadees will couple much more gently than Atlas couplers, which generally take a moderate slam. Kadees are also much easier to uncouple than Atlas couplers. I loath uncoupling magnets - they're never where you need to uncouple, except on rare occasions. If you do uncouple over one, you either leave the car with it's coupler sprung to the side so you can't couple to it, or you have to back and fill to shove the car back past the magnet. And of course they always seem to show up under spots where you stopped without intending to uncouple. I prefer to uncouple with a skewer like tool.

At the recent Springfield, MA train show Kadee displayed their new O scale couplers for the first time. My first thought was "Aha! My procrastination has paid off!" So I bought a couple pairs of the #745 "prototype" head medium centerset shank metal couplers with plastic boxes. Previously I'd used only #805 metal couplers in the metal boxes. I was pleasantly impressed at how easy it was to prepare a metal coupler in a plastic box - none of the filing and burnishing I'd done on the metal in metal ones appears to be necessary. And the #745 couplers look nicer than the #805s.

The real test came when the couplers were on the cars and in operation. The #745 couplers coupled very easily - pushing a car along at under 1 scale mile per hour to couple up to a lone free standing car still resulted in the knuckles sliding past each other and coupling, instead of just pushing the free standing car down the track on the coupler face like the Atlas couplers do.

Uncoupling was a different story. Here's the two different couplers, coupled and under slight tension for comparison. Click on the photos to see a larger version.

Kadee #745 couplers coupled

Kadee #805 coupled

You can see that there is a lot more open space between the 805s. The 745s still have a little, but they're definitely tighter.

Here's my arsenal of uncoupling tools.

Uncoupling tools - best are center, and right.

On the left is the Micro-Mark tool. Some people seem to like it, but for me it just doesn't work for O scale couplers at all. Second is the Accumate Switchman, which doesn't seem to be nearly as useful as I'd hoped but it does work up to a point. Then we have a narrow skewer that works well for HO kadees, a slightly thicker skewer with a screwdriver like tip carved into the end opposite the point - my current go to tool for O scale since with the mixture of couplers I have I need both ends. The next tool is the same size skewer as the center favorite, but shoved into the carcass of a bic pen after pulling the ink cartridge out. The idea being that you can put it in your pocket without stabbing yourself (with the cap on), but still have enough point to uncouple. I have to admit it falls into the category of nice idea but doesn't work as well as I hoped. Second from the right is an extra large skewer, and finally on the left is the classic #2 uncoupling tool, which can also be used to take notes, mark up switch lists, etc.

The first technique I tried to uncouple the #745 Kadees was the classic - get slack, drop the skewer in the hole in the middle, and twist. That does not work, since the knuckle has a squarer corner which fits more perfectly into a squarer opening. The result is putting the skewer in the middle wedges the knuckles into the couplers, the knuckles can't open far enough to get by either the skewer or each other, and you're stuck.

745 knuckle wedgie

In order to uncouple the 745s you need to have just the right amount of slack - either tension or compression makes it nearly impossible. The screwdriver tip end on the medium skewer tool then works pretty well. But since the opening you're aiming for with it is pretty small, it's pretty hard to uncouple on a rear track (my rearmost track is about 26" from the aisle). Uncoupling on a curve is slightly harder, again because of the tighter fit.

Here's the same uncoupling tool (the center skewer from the above photo) in a pair of 805s.

805 knuckles not wedged

Notice how much bigger the hole between the knuckles is than the 745s - much easier to get the tool in there on a rear track. Also the knuckles don't get wedged, and you can twist to uncouple even if the couplers are under compression. The medium sized skewer will just sit in the knuckle once you twist it open, and you can leave it there while you pull away.

After the twist

The twist open technique doesn't work as well with a Kadee coupled to an Atlas, and it doesn't seem to work worth beans with two Atlas couplers. But in both those cases you can use an alternate technique that requires slightly more careful aim of sliding the skewer in at the knuckle tip as shown in the "after the twist" photo about, skipping the twist step. There is a certain middle aged vintage of Atlas couplers for which that technique doesn't work at all though, which is why I have the screwdriver tip carved in the other end of that skewer.

If you operate with switch lists you're familiar with the need to mark them up and scribble notes. Currently I'm using car cards, but I have done some sessions with hand written switch lists and I hope to eventually get computer generated switch lists working. The point is, you need a pencil anyway, and with Kadee 805 couplers a pencil is also an effective uncoupling tool, using the same drop in the hole and twist method as the skewer. The only difference is the pencil won't stand in the open coupler by itself like the skewer will.

#2 uncoupling tool in action

The bottom line is I like everything about the new Kadee O scale couplers except the way they uncouple. But that is important enough to me that I'm going to stick with the old 805 couplers. However I am sold on the metal coupler in the plastic box, so I've ordered enough of the #817 plastic box sets to cover the rest of the 805 packets I have on hand.

Wheelset Widening

A while back I bought a couple MTH 50' high cubes, with the TTX FBOX reporting marks.  These come as 3 rail, but MTH also sells a 2 railing kit for them that has a set of decent 2 rail trucks.  The cars are already pre-drilled for mounting Kadee couplers.  The conversion went pretty quickly and the cars were on the railroad in short order.

The first move of the next operating session was pulling them out of the interchange track where I had put them on the rails.  The first sign of trouble was some serious bouncing and clunking going over turnouts.  It didn't take long to figure out that the trouble was all the wheels were too narrow in gauge.

A tad narrow

The most annoying part of this was that I had to take the trucks off again, which requires removing the floor of the car since the screw goes down through the floor into the truck bolster.  Anyway, I got the trucks off and dismantled and started working on the wheelsets.  I couldn't seem to shift or rotate the wheels on the axle by hand, and I didn't want to use a puller and mess up the pointed axle tip, which serves as a bearing.

The solution I came up with is a crude but effective wheel gauge widener:

Widener - 2 side pieces, 2 wedges, 1 hammer

I cut a slot in 2 squares of 1/2"plywood, and a longer slot into 2 tapered pieces of pine I cut on the table saw.

Widener in use

Using it is simple.  Stand up the two squares and drop in the wheelset, slide the wedges in from the top and bottom until everything snugs up about in the middle.  Then CAREFULLY tap with the hammer.  Two or three light taps is enough to get the gauge dead on 6 out of 8 times.  The other 2 times I gave it an extra tap, and had to press them back together just a tad, which is also easy by moving the 2 squares to the outside of the wheel and lightly tapping.

The cars now go through all my trackwork with no problems.

Northeast Container Mockup

I'm trying to get the No-Name Industrial Park to the point where I could invite some friends over to operate and not have to explain too much, or excuse too much.  I'm not worried about the lack of scenery at this point, I'm more interested in things that affect operation.  One major remaining problem is couplers - the three versions of the Atlas O couplers and Kadees mean you need to use one of thee different uncoupling pick strategies depending on what is coupled to what.  Converting everything to Kadees has to happen soon.  I didn't feel like working on couplers this weekend, so I decided to mock up Northeast Container.  I think leaving the building up to the imagination is a bit much when there are two separate spotting locations, one inside and one outside.

I spent some time with a couple long rulers and a square to figure out exactly what the footprint of the building ought to be.  I tried to scale off some photos to pick a reasonable height for the buildings.  And I choose a relatively wide loading dock - 14 scale feet.  To make it easier to get the building to sit flat I had to trim back the edge of the roadbed left over from the torn up second track.  I didn't rip it all out - the loading dock can sit on what's left without a problem.

The finished mockup

I made the mockup from a leftover piece of 1/4 plywood.  There are some corner blocks at the joints, which are glued and nailed together with brads.  The warehouse and main building are screwed together in place, so they can be easily separated to carry around.  The loading dock is a piece of 1/4 ply supported by some 3/4 stock made into a U channel to provide a wide flat bottom so the front overhanging a dip in the ballast between the siding and the roadbed from the torn up track doesn't matter.  The building is large - about 11 feet overall.  The building the track goes into is 64" long, and 6.5" high at the front tapering up to 7.5" at the peak.  The building with the loading dock is 72" long and 5.5" high.  The loading dock itself is 30" long. 

A view over the top of the N scale layout

The warehouse has an enclosed dock for unloading cardboard out of the weather.  With it all in place I think I might have made the building a little too short - I may try propping it up on blocks to see what it's like a bit taller.  Part of the purpose of making a mockup, I guess.

The warehouse

The outside dock is where scrap cardboard bundles are loaded into boxcars for recycling.  I've been waiting to have somewhere useful to put that forklift!

The dock

The overview shows the storage track with 2 boxcars sitting on it to the left, the interchange track going around the curve at the end, and the Northeast Container building to the right.  Cars that don't fit in the warehouse get stashed on the storage track.  Most of the empties from the warehouse just go back to the interchange, but some make a stop at the dock to get loaded with scrap.

Overview

 

I'm reasonably happy with the mockup.  If I still feel that way in a week, I'll probably paint it and find something to use for a roof.  If not, well, I have more scrap plywood.