Spline Roadbed: Furring Strips?

Anything thats a quarter inch or less thick and 1 to 1 1/2 inches deep will work Frank.

Its the dimensions and the wood specie (for curving / bending properties) that matter for solid wood strips. For example, you don't want oak or cherry to try to curve to an 18 inch radius (or 12 inch if you are in N scale) unless you have serious wood steaming equipment. Soft white pine or yellow pine, or maybe even Douglas fir, will curve easier. The label that the Home Depot or the local lumber yard uses are irrelevant.

I expect you'll pay a lot more for "furring strips" than you will for lath.

I saw lath in 4 foot lengths at a Home Depot here in Oregon for $ 8.97 for a bundle of forty eight 48 inch long pieces. Sides were rough, but my belt sander would handle that, if I chose to use solid wood.

I cut my own now from a 4 x 8 sheet of 1/8 inch Luan plywood that I had the yard hack down on their panel saw into four 2 foot by 4 foot pieces. Those smaller pieces work fine on my table saw.

-- Jim McLaughlin

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Too thick to bend around for the curves. Furring strips are 3/4". You'd need strips about 1/8 to 1/4".

-John

Is "lath" the same as "lattice"? I ask because in my area, very little plastering still uses lath - the plasterers have all adopted "blue board" in the midwest, and it may be hard to find for that reason...

Thanks! I'll have to see if I can find "lattice"...

That would work but you will be still fighting that grain on the curves. And good lattice would cost alot. People have had good results with masonite board, say 3/16". And the lumber yard will rip it into strips of 2-3" for about .10 cents a foot. By ALL means have THEM do it if you can.

-John

Heh Jim, Could you (or anyone ) tell me exactly what "Luan" plywood is? Is it just thin plywood. Is this what door skins are made from? Lynn

"Lynn Caron" wrote

Around here its just real thin plywood. Its 1/8 thick, looks like its four 1/32 skins laminated together. I guess it could be used as a skin on a hollow core interior door.

When I run the 2 foot by 4 foot pieces through the table saw I get nice

I somewhere obtained a 1 inch wide half inch thick 18 inch long piece of steel bar stock; I snug that up against the blade and run the rip fence up against the bar stock, then tighten the rip fence. Pull the bar stock out and I have a nice straight 1 inch wide strip cutter that gives me nice 1 inch x 4 foot strips.

I use a rip fence that has a wooden "outside" / sacrificial board on it and use two sets of finger boards holding down the strip as I push the plywood through.

I use the finest tooth 7 3/4 inch blade I can find. The wood chips too much with a coarse blade. Its so thin that no carbide blade is needed.

Why not just make your own splines? All you need is a table saw and a bunch of soft pine boards. A thin blade in the saw makes the loss of wood a bit less. The nice part about this is that if you have sharp curves, you can make thinner splines and they will bend easier. I tend to have 5 splines across the tie's width and this seems to work best for any gauge as smaller gauges end up having sharper curves. In addition, finding scrap wood from the various places, including pallets makes them a lot cheaper.

-- Bob May Losing weight is easy! If you ever want to lose weight, eat and drink less. Works evevery time it is tried!

Brain fart. Read "feather board" in the prior post where I wrote "finger board". I know better than that. "Finger boards" are the ones with the nice red sauce on them.

-- Jim McLaughlin

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Luan is a wood from Asia. Extremely cheap and used for door skins, etc. It comes to here by the boatload. Luan plywood can be had in very thin laminates and not expensive like North American higher quality plywood.

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 16:38:48 UTC, "Frank Eva" wrote: 2000

What I do is find 1xX white wood in the home store. Try to find wood with as few knots as possible. I rip it myself. For tangent track I rip to 1/2" width and 1/4 inch for curves. After gluing it up I use a planer to even it out. I lay the ties directly on the spline. If you use homasote roadbed you can use plywood. If you lay the ties on the spline you need something like pine or fir. You can't drive track spikes into the plywood. I handlay.

I don't want a table saw and don't want to spend the money for a tool just to cut spline. I use cheap lattice. Not hard to bend at all. Sure its rough but no one will see the sides once the scenery is done. The top surface will need sanding and smoothing but its not that much work. The stuff I got glues together great and appears to be treated. Its been very stable. I've got mine fixed to the risers with dowel pegs. My layout is in a shed that is subject to a wide range of temperature and when its humid here doors stick and there has got to be movement of the bench work. But the road bed and track have remained problem free. I believe because the spline is treated and because of the strength of the laminations the road bed may move but more as a single unit keeping it's overall shape fairly well while the bench work more or less swells and contracts around its shape. Bruce

It's "lauan" - see

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Treated? As in pressure treated? Treated how? Pressure treated wood really isn't for indoor use, especially the CCA (Arsenate) stuff. And especially sanding it indoors.

-John

Well, we 'Merkins can do that right here at home, at least if those tree huggers and government job loafers would get out of our way, but we charge so much more per hour to slash and burn.

Bruce -

I work in HOn30, so I use some "tight" radii curves -- 12 and 10 inch are common. I have always had problems with curving the lattice that tight.

I have some HO standard gauge for interchange, but even that is no more than 20 - 22 inch radii.

What are the dimensions on your lattice pieces -- i.e. thickness and depth of the "web", I guess you'd call it? What kind of wood (specie) is your lattice?

Thanks.

-- Jim McLaughlin

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I find that doing 5 strips to the width of the ties ends up being able to do about a 20" radius without too many problems with fir or pine. Since I rarely go any sharper for curves, the 5 strips are fine for me. For curves that sharp, I'd take and do the curves with 1/8" plywood and as many as needed for the width of the ties. Another thing to do if you don't need too much curvature is to steam the wood. This will make the wood a lot more flexible and allow for sharper curves. Steaming wood is fairly easy to do. Make up a box long enough to hold pieces the length that you need and a steam source at one end and tilt the box so that it will drain the water back out and into the steam source. You aren't interested in any pressure so anything will work fine. You just need to be able to get the whole piece hot in a wet atmosphere and a simple cap that is setting on the end of the box will do fine. Put some blocks inside so that the wood is off of the floor and free of the water that is returning to the steam source. The box can be built with a top to get the wood in and out of if so desired. To use, just put the wood in the box, fire up the steam and let it do its thing for a while. Remove the wood when it bends easily and quickly apply to the curve as needed. It is the wet heat that makes the wood flex and thicker sections need longer steaming times. In the woodworking industry, it is quite common to do 6" radius with 3/4" stuff. Look on the web and you will probably find a number of sites that describe steaming wood. The Woodwright Shop (PBS) has had several episodes on steaming in addition which shows how it is done.

-- Bob May Losing weight is easy! If you ever want to lose weight, eat and drink less. Works evevery time it is tried!

Jim, My layout is HO. My goal was to have no curves less than 26" but I have one that will go down to about 24". There is no problem using lattice on these curves and possibly a bit tighter but 10 or 12 inches might be to much. I just gave it try right now after seeing your message and the lattice snapped. Maybe it could be soaked for a while then bent this tight but there is probably a better material for your needs or at least on the curves that could be grafted to lattice spline on the rest of your roadbed. The lattice pieces I have are 1/8" x 1-7/16 " x 6'. What I have built so far is solid roadbed with no spacers that is 2-1/4" wide. The top side is sanded fairly smooth. I have foam and some cork road bed laid over this. I am going to try something new on the next section of roadbed I put in. I'm going to paint on this floor and wall waterproofing stuff called Laticrete 9235 that I had left over from a ceramic tile project.. Its like rubber when its dry and you can glue about anything to it. I painted some on a small area of spline that's installed with no track on it yet. It filled in the slight low spots, left a nice surface and seems to stick to the spline. Might help with sound reduction as well even though the spline installed so far is quiet. Bruce

Thanks for the response Bruce. I've had the same problem with "snapping " lattice like material. I know about the steaming box idea, and that technique, but the 1/8 ply and even the untempered 1/8 hardboard / masonite are working so far. The masonite makes such a huge mess with the dust when I saw it in the garage though. Almost, (but not quite) as bad as Homosote.

-- Jim McLaughlin

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