New Tool
You know the old saying about necessity and what it can beget. Well, as good as the Rokuhan track is, yesterday's maiden run video highlighted a few very minor bumps and glitches here and there. Mostly these were track joints that rose up ever so slightly, most likely a result of the rail cutting procedure. I needed to find a way to bring these little humps down, but I just couldn't find a tool to do the job.
So, I made a tool. From the scrapboxes came some styrene and metal bits that I assembled into a little miniature sanding block (above). The metal strips hold pieces of sanding film in place, the same way it works on full-sized tools. A piece of sanding film doesn't last long, but I can cut dozens of them out of a single sheet with a scissors.
Here's a sample of what it does. The joint in the first image below looks to the eye to be just fine, but when one runs their fingertip along the railheads, one can feel a faint ridge. After some quality time with my new little tool, the ridge disappears. Indeed, the rail joints almost disappear as well.
The video also highlighted a bad bump on my handlaid 55mm switch. The bump looked awful, but the problem was simple: the end of the screw holding the frog to the roadbed stuck up just a little. A quick touch with a diamond disc in a Dremel tool did away with the bump. Slowly but surely the trackwork is being brought up to a high level of quality. Note that this doesn't happen all by itself, even with the best products made.