I really love the look of MTH Scaletrax, enough so that I am willing to deal with all of the downsides including issues with turnouts, and just how fragile the stuff is. However I have been extremely frustrated by MTH's lack of any means to join Scaletrax flex track. What do they expect people to do? It makes no sense that they have absolutely no answer to this.
I am aware of Rich Batista method of simply soldering the ends together, but I'm not comfortable with the lack of a mechanical connection -- plus the solder blobs are ugly and melt nearby ties. And I'm aware of the Right-O-Way joiners but what a hassle having to grind every piece of rail to accept them.
I've got a pretty good solution that I wanted to share. I start with Atlas O #6091 rail joiners for the two outside rails. They are way oversize, so I use a tile nipper to clip off the top part of both sides of each joiner. Super easy. Then I slide the joiner onto a piece of track and use pliers to squash the joiner to fit tightly. Perfect!
For the center rail, the Atlas joiners are way too big, even when cut down. So I use Peco SL-710FB joiners, designed for code 143 track. These need no tweaking at all, they just slide right on.
With the joiners in place and the two pieces of flex connected, I flip over the track, and solder only on the bottom. I use paste flux because it really helps the solder stick to the rails and joiners. I set my iron to 750 degrees, and use normal lead-style solder.
You can see in the photo that, when viewed from the top, the joint looks fantastic and there is no solder visible. Because the center rail of flex track is not blackened on the bottom, you don't even need to do any grinding or filing at all!
Finally, you can slide an O scale tie under the joint. Although it's not shown in my photo (because this particular track won't be seen so I didn't worry about cosmetics,) normally I would clip off the last tie from each end (since they are special connecting ties) and slide the rest of the ties towards the joint. It's easy to set the spacing so that when you slide a single wood tie under the joint, the spacing is perfect. When the tie is stained, you really can't tell at all that it's not a snap-track joint.
This works so well for me, that I was excited to share it with everyone here.
Incidentally, this same technique is a great way to make custom-length straight or curved pieces -- using rigid sections and not flex track. For instance, if I need an 18" section of track to go between two turnouts, I take a piece of 30" RIGID track, cut 12" out of the middle, and connect the two ends back together using the technique shown above. This creates a piece of custom-length rigid track with a regular Scaletrax joiner at each end -- so I can simply snap the pieces together. The only caveat is that the center rail of rigid track is blackened on the bottom, so I have to hit it with my Moto-tool for about 3 seconds to knock off the black and create a great surface to solder to. But the sides can remain totally blackened.
I *also* use this technique to connect Flextrack to rigid track -- I just cut a piece of 10" straight (or whatever) in half and connect the raw end to the flex as above, and snap the fancy end to whatever I'm trying to connect to, such as a turnout.
These joints are also a perfect place to attach feed wires. For the ground wire, I've been stripping just a bit of insulation a couple of inches from the end and soldering that to the bottom of one outside joiner, then stripping the end of the wire and soldering that to the bottom of the other outside joiner. This way, I have my commons connected together with every feed, and the wire is still insulated where it jumps under the center rail. Also, solder the center rail jumper first, because if you do the common wire first and the insulation is touching the bottom of the center rail, then soldering the center rail could melt the insulation on the common and cause a short that might be very hard to track down later.
Finally! A really great and fairly easy system for including Flextrack and custom length rigid track into a Scaletrax-based layout. I hope this helps a few other Scaletrax fans!
Randy
