Soldering on
Now there’s a slightly more definite track plan, I’ve started work on point motors. I read up on some stuff, including this nice article on the N Gauge Society website. I pondered things a bit, and here’s the decision I came to.
Point motors
Going with Seep, as they can mostly hide under the baseboard, they’re very low profile, and they’re simple. Peco’s motors require hacking great big holes in the board, whilst the Seep motors need a tiny hole for the armature.
Wiring
Colour coded, naturally. I found some stuff in Maplin which looks like it’ll do the job.
Power
I’ve got an old controller in the loft (I think it’s a Gaugemaster, or something) which has an accessory supply, so I’ll bring that down and use that for now. Or at least, until I look into DCC. I’ve also got a Gaugemaster Capacitor Discharge Unit (CDU) which will help fire the motors. For the scissor crossings I’m planning on making up a couple of push-button diode matrices, with relays switching the electrofrogs, but I’ll do that after I’ve got the basic points working.
Connections
I pondered this for a while. The above article mentioned using terminal blocks, which is a nice idea, but I’m not a great fan of them. I pondered some more, then realised I already knew of a perfectly great connector. The Molex Hard Disk connector! They can take the amperage, and the wattage I need, so they’re quite suitable. Plus, pretty easy to fit (crimp on pins), and it all just pushes together. If I want to remove something, I just pull the connector out. For bigger connections I can use the motherboard connectors, or multiples of these.
I’ve made up eight point motors so far with the female Molex connector on (technically, it’s back to front to how it goes in a PC, but I’m not fussy), and they look pretty good.
The screws I bought to fix them on are just the right length – they’re a bit long actually, but with the thickness of the point motor’s PCB, it should almost fit without sticking out the stop. So what if it does though, it’ll all be hidden under scenery!
I might have a bash at screwing one of them in and testing it out. Once I’m happy with all the point motors I’ll move onto the other electrics.