Cutting Wood Ties

Cutting ties

In this Blog I talk about cutting my own ties and I glue them down to the cork. First I decided to cut my own ties for hand laying the rail because I had done it in the past with another layout and thought it would be fun to try again. I find this part of the hobby very relaxing and time sure flies by. So I set out to set up the table saw and start cutting. Well it was so long ago when I did it last I completely forgot how to go about it. Finally I came up with what I thought was an easy way to do them. I set up the table saw with a scrap piece of plywood over the table and slowly raised the blade to cut through the plywood. This way there was no way that the strips of wood could fall between the blade. I set a 1x3 on the plywood and screwed it down the width that I wanted away from the blade. I posted a video on you tube showing the set up of the saw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfgCv4TpsTk  I used 1x2 select pine cut into 2' lengths so they were easy to handle by one person. IN the photo below you see that after all the strips were cut I bundled them and taped them together to make it easy to handle when cutting them into 8'6 length's. To do this I used a small band saw. I cut the ties into 8'6 and then various sizes for the switch's.

Now all this was done last year. This year I have had absolutely no time to go outside and cut any ties. My 8 year old is very busy with sports and helping coach keeps me very busy. So this year I decided to try out ties from two different sources. Since I'm using Fast tracks switch jigs and their sweep sticks I thought about using ties from Mt Albert http://www.mtalbert.com/ This ties were purchased from fast tracks along with some of their twist ties. http://www.handlaidtrack.com/TwistTies-Wood-Ties-for-HO-Scale-Flexible-Crosstie-Strips-s/1989.htm The nice thing with these two products is the ties are the same thickness as micro engineering flex track which worked out great because there is no sanding the ties. My method of cutting required sanding once they were glued down.