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4 Responses to Soldering Wires To Track
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Kerry, A lot of people like the idea of soldiering straight to the rail. I use your second idea. I soldier the wire leads to the bottom of the rail joiners and I am doing very fine. If you decide to change your layout the connectors will allow for disassembly where you will be cutting wires and maybe re-soldering onto the rails. I run heavier wire ( 16 gauge trailer wire as my main buss wires under the track. I make my jumpers out of phone wire long enough to go from the track to your buss wires below. That short wire with plenty of slack works very well.with no power loss. But you need to connect every 4 to 8 feet along your track. (basically every other flex track connection to feed good power to all sections of track). Think of it as a club modular layout where the main feeds travel under the layout and have good plugs between the modules. on each module you connect up to your tracks. Back to the soldering…..If you heat up the rail to much to get your solder joints to hold you also tend to melt the plastic ties and also mess the gauge of your rail. You can get your connectors too hot too. It makes them brittle and they snap and will not hold well when putting them on the rail ends. Use flux on the bottom of the connector and the wire lead. put solder on the wire lead and on the the bottom of the connector. Then take the wire and lay lengthwise against the solder on the connector and then just touch the wire enough to melt the solder of both and and get off of it. It will work well. and you are not doing it on the rails You will see some soldier that 16 gauge or better to the rail but beware that the larger the wire the more heat to melt the solder. Sometimes I will have a rail connection of flex track in the curves. Not a problem….. Fit your track and cut to length for your curve. Straighten the curve at least in the rail connector area so the rail between the two is straight. Lightly soldier the outside of the connector to the rail You can use that connector with the wire drop attached but you have to be very light on the heat or you might melt the wire drop loose, or maybe clipping some heat sinks to each side of the rail joint to keep the heat from going farther down the rail. Then flex youir track back to the curve you want and that rail will no longercome together crooked …. it will now hold the rail as if it was one rail piece with no kinks. Hope this helps Newman
Soldering to the rail joiners is fine but has two potential problems:
1 – Difficult to modify track if needed
2 – Rail joiners do loosen and rail contact diminishes. When this happens there is intermittent power loss so I would suggest soldering to the rails to enable a constant power connection.
I agree with the rest of the above comment.
I have been told to solder droppers to every bit of track because I am running DCC, it is because the engine needs the constant information from the track. It works well for me.
Hi Rod, Yes your right in that you need connected more to your track. But don’t get too carried away. If you were still running Standard DC and you had one connection of power and it is some length in your run around the layout, Your power would drop on the far side and the engines would slow down Usually compensated by the engineer with more throttle. That means power drop through all the rail connections That also means you probably should have wired with buss wires underneath and wire drops to the track. As you heard it became evident getting into DCC that it needed to be done for that but we probably should have been doing it with DC too. Power connections need only be about 4 to 8 feet apart Basically power each module if you were doing modules in a club. Using the Buss wires underneath will take you a long way. You just don’t want much voltage drop. If the voltage drops too much information does not travel well to the engine and lack of power for the motor. Kind of like a microphone with batteries. The batteries may not be dead but below a certain voltage the circuits no longer could work. It happened last Sunday where the Pastor’s mic started to cut out Fresh batteries did the trick. It is the same thing on your engines. Your engine chips need a minimum voltage too. from Newman