Railway/Tools

From ChapmanCentral

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Pictures and hints to follow. These are the tools I find useful, you don't necessarily need all of them but if you don't have them then some jobs will be time consuming or fiddly.

I buy most of my hand tools from Drew's the Ironmonger in Reading. I like to look and feel before I buy, and they have a very good tool counter including a selection of tiny drills and accessories for the small power tool. Power tools I usually buy from Screwfix because they are cheap and because my experience thus far has been good with their low-cost tools. My approach is to buy a low-cost tool, and if it wears out I replace it with a good one (because I can justify it knowing I use it), whereas if it doesn't I have saved money. I bought a 9" angle grinder for £15 and a router for a tenner, the former is still going, the latter finally gave up the ghost a month ago after it had built 1 3/4 railway layouts and a verandah among other things.

For the benchwork

• Drill, plus assorted wood and HSS bits and rose bit.
• Good, fine hardpoint saw.
• Lots of sharp pencils!
• Steel rules (12" and 24" plus a 36" steel straight edge, and of course tape measures).
• Spirit levels. Laser levels are also very cheap now and can make aligning long runs of benchwork vastly easier.
• Chisels, really sharp, if yours are blunt and you don't have the wherewithal to sharpen them then bin them and buy some new ones which are sharp - blunt chisels are both useless and dangerous.
• Screwdrivers.
• An angle drill is an expensive item but they can be a real timesaver (and they are useful round the house). See if Screwfix have any bargain deals, I got a good 12V battery powered one with a built-in light, two batteries and fast charger for £99.

For the track

• Drilling:
  • Very fine drills, down to 0.5mm if you use Peco track pins
  • Pin vice for the above (see pin vice and small drill)
  • A small power tool (I use Proxxon) is extremely useful
  • An Archimedean drill is also very useful.
• Razor saw, optional but very useful

• Pliers, in all shapes and sizes. The most common ones I use are:
  • Small sprung-handled needle-nose, very good quality and needs to be, avoid the cheap hobby shop ones and go to a tool merchant.
  • Large beefy square-nosed pliers form Bennett's one pound bin 20-odd years ago, bought five pairs and worth every penny. The value of these is that they get a very solid grip on track, they don't slip, so you can put subtle bends in, hold track while cutting with the razor saw, ease the curves on pointwork to better fit the layout and so on.
  • Medium weight long-nose, again good quality (cheap ones bend), also useful for setting track and adjusting point motor pins.
• Cutters, again several:
  • Track cutters are optional but a time saver on long runs
  • A pair of heavy duty lever wire cutters can do the same job but not quite as well
  • A small pair of standard wire cutters, make sure they are ground right up to the point and that the cutting edge is very close to the face; this is a sanity saver for pulling track pins out. Again, the hobby shops probably don't have such good ones as the tool merchants.
  • Fine side-cutters can be useful

* A set of Tracksettas is pretty much essential if you are going to use flex track

• The steel rules again, plus a scriber for marking track and perhaps a fine indelible pen for the same purpose.
• Files, fine ones, small ones, pointy ones, all types. A cheap set of warding files is a good start but you need some fine ones for the fine work, I got a set of about 50 from eBay for a tenner. Bargain.
• Pin punch.
• Small power tool. Essential? I would say so. Honestly, it makes the whole job massively easier, especially cutting track in awkward spaces and drilling holes for drop cables.

Electrics

• Multimeter. If not, then make a continuity tester from a buzzer, a battery and some wire. Continuity testing is essential when wiring up track and in order to check that you haven't laid down a permanent short somewhere, especially if you use electrofrog points.
• Assorted small screwdrivers for those tiresome chocolate bar connectors which are inevitable on any layout.
• A decent soldering iron, preferably temperature controlled. Mine's an Antex 50W, much less than 45W will struggle to make some joints especially onto track. I used a 25W iron for a while and ended up melting a lot of nearby plastic bits. Some people recommend 100W irons, and usually the more the merrier as long as it's temperature controlled. You need a good fine tip and a stand with a sponge holder, a wet sponge for cleaning the tip is a necessary adjunct to soldering.
• Good quality solder and flux. Fry's flux works well for me. Flux is alkaline, so a neutralising wash is also a good idea.
• Heat sinks - small blocks of steel or aluminium which you can use to prevent heat from conducting back up the metal to melt other components.
• Low temperature solder can come in really handy sometimes.