I started, and almost completed, the second pole. I'm working myself up the learning curve. I'll have it all figured out by pole number 4 I figure. The first thing I did was add a mounting system for pole #1. Ashe Rawls admonished me to not permanently glue things to the layout, including telephone poles. Instead, he cements a sleeve onto the pole and glues a telescoping larger sleeve into the layout. The poles are inserted in the sleeves and can be removed whenever needed to be. I don't believe he strings wires on the poles and I don't think I am either.
The only complication to this scheme is the inch and half depth of the sleeve and the 1/2" depth to the building bases I'm using. This means that the external sleeve would penetrate below the building board into the sub-surface foam and beyond through the Masonite. Since I don't want to permanently fasten the buildings to the layout, I'm going to have to be careful to only glue the sleeve into the building board part and not to the substrate below. To keep the pole from falling all the way through the outer sleeve, I crimped the end of the brass tube slightly to act as a stop.
For pole number two I changed the following:
- Pre-coloring the poles with thinned Tamiya paint rubbed on with a paper towel and then wiped off. It's thinned with alcohol so it acts like a penetrating stain. Already looks better.
- I used all the smaller sized NBW castings.
- Used a fine-toothed razor saw to start the notches for the cross-arms and finished with a Xacto and then minor filing.
- The small Tichy NBWs are so small that you can't hold them to file their backs flat so you need to mount them using their attached spindles. This required drilling a .030" hole right through the junction of the diagonal braces into the wood below. Really delicate operation.
The results look even better (to me) than the first iteration. I'm going to make this pole without a transformer. Probably every other or third pole should receive one.
All I need to do to finish this one up is paint the metal parts a weathered aluminum/NATO black mixture and then add some weathering powders.
The diagonal braces are still a little to wide, but the narrower strip that I have is so fragile as to be unworkable for this application.
